Japanese American Incarceration

About 275,000 Japanese immigrants came to Hawaii and the mainland between 1861 and 1940, most between 1898 and 1924, when immigration from Asia was ended. Barred from naturalizing, Japanese immigrants (issei) faced laws that kept them from owning land in California, but they built farms, fishing businesses, and shops; their American-born children (nisei) were citizens by birth. Long-standing anti-Asian racism and economic competition shaped how white neighbors saw them.

Pearl Harbor set off fear of sabotage and invasion on the West Coast. Lobbyists for competing economic interests and nativist groups pressed Congress and the president to remove all people of Japanese descent. Justice Department officials raised constitutional and ethical objections, so the Army carried out the program instead. Unlike German and Italian nationals, who were detained only after individual hearings, Japanese Americans were removed as a group, without individual review.

Executive Order 9066 let military commanders exclude civilians from designated military areas. Although it named no ethnic group, General John L. DeWitt applied curfews and exclusion orders only to Japanese Americans. In March 1942 Congress made violating the orders a crime, and DeWitt’s Public Proclamation No. 4 began forced removal on 48 hours’ notice.

Over the next six months, families were sent first to temporary “assembly centers,” then to ten isolated, fenced, and guarded War Relocation Centers: Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Topaz in Utah, Minidoka in Idaho, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Granada in Colorado, and Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas. Families had to sell homes, farms, and businesses at a loss. More than 30,000 Japanese Americans nevertheless served in the U.S. military, in segregated units.

Several Japanese Americans challenged the orders in court. In Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court upheld them as wartime military necessity. The camps closed after the war, but many families had lost everything. The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 provided only token payments for some property losses.

In the 1980s the congressionally created Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded in Personal Justice Denied that the incarceration had been caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In 1983 a federal court overturned Fred Korematsu’s conviction after lawyers showed that the government had suppressed evidence. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan, formally apologized and provided $20,000 to each surviving incarceree.