It has long been considered one of the darker pages of American history – a page that draws eerie and incredulous comparisons to recent events, but one which has a history of prejudice and racism in America.
It all began as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. The attack, which aimed at disabling the U.S. Naval fleet was part of a wave of assaults of invasions throughout the Pacific region, not only affecting American possessions, but also those of other allied nations who were already at war with Nazi Germany.
With the West Coast of America seemingly vulnerable and fear of an imminent invasion (and even alarming reports of scattered Japanese attacks from Washington State of California) a very plausible possibility – U.S. officials turned to the substantial Asian-America population of over 600,000 settled in the West Coast.
The Pearl Harbor attack led military and political leaders to suspect that Imperial Japan was preparing a full-scale invasion of the United States West Coast. Due to Japan’s rapid military conquest of a large portion of Asia and the Pacific including a small portion of the U.S. West Coast (i.e., Aleutian Islands Campaign) between 1937 and 1942, some American politicians feared that its military forces were unstoppable.
American public opinion initially stood by the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, with the Los Angeles Times characterizing them as “good Americans, born and educated as such.” Many Americans believed that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable. Though some in the administration (including Attorney General Francis Biddle and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) dismissed all rumors of Japanese American espionage on behalf of the Japanese war effort, pressure mounted upon the administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans.
A survey of the Office of Facts and Figures on February 4 (two weeks prior to the president’s order) reported that a majority of Americans expressed satisfaction with existing governmental controls on Japanese Americans. Moreover, in his autobiography in 1962, Biddle, who opposed incarceration, downplayed the influence of public opinion in prompting the president’s decision. He even considered it doubtful “whether, political and special group press aside, public opinion even on the West Coast supported evacuation.” Support for harsher measures toward Japanese Americans increased over time, however, in part since Roosevelt did little to use his office to calm attitudes. According to a March 1942 poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion, after incarceration was becoming inevitable, 93% of Americans supported the relocation of Japanese non-citizens from the Pacific Coast while only 1% opposed it. According to the same poll, 59% supported the relocation of Japanese people who were born in the country and were United States citizens, while 25% opposed it.
The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II led to severe economic consequences. Numerous Japanese Americans had to leave their homes, businesses, and possessions since they were relocated to the internment camps. This also led to the collapse of many family-owned businesses, real estate, and their savings since they had been escorted to the camps. “Camp residents lost some $400 million in property during their incarceration. Congress provided $38 million in reparations in 1948 and, forty years later, paid an additional $20,000 to each surviving individual who had been detained in the camps”. Additionally, Japanese American farmers suffered greatly due to their forced relocation. In 1942, the managing secretary of the Western Growers Protective Association reported that the removal of Japanese Americans led to significant profits for growers and shippers.
Eviction from the West Coast began on March 24, 1942, with Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1, which gave the 227 Japanese American residents of Bainbridge Island, Washington six days to prepare for their “evacuation” directly to Manzanar. Colorado governor Ralph Lawrence Carr was the only elected official to publicly denounce the incarceration of American citizens (an act that cost his reelection, but gained him the gratitude of the Japanese American community, such that a statue of him was erected in the Denver Japantown’s Sakura Square). A total of 108 exclusion orders issued by the Western Defense Command over the next five months completed the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast in August 1942.
In addition to imprisoning those of Japanese descent in the US, the US also interned people of Japanese (and German and Italian) descent deported from Latin America. Thirteen Latin American countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Peru—cooperated with the US by apprehending, detaining and deporting to the US 2,264 Japanese Latin American citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry.
Many detainees lost irreplaceable personal property due to restrictions that prohibited them from taking more than they could carry into the camps. These losses were compounded by theft and destruction of items placed in governmental storage. Leading up to their incarceration, Nikkei were prohibited from leaving the Military Zones or traveling more than 5 miles (8.0 km) from home, forcing those who had to travel for work, like truck farmers and residents of rural towns, to quit their jobs.[245] Many others were simply fired for their Japanese heritage.
Many Japanese Americans encountered continued housing injustice after the war. Alien land laws in California, Oregon, and Washington barred the Issei from owning their pre-war homes and farms. Many had cultivated land for decades as tenant farmers, but they lost their rights to farm those lands when they were forced to leave. Other Issei (and Nisei who were renting or had not completed payments on their property) had found families willing to occupy their homes or tend their farms during their incarceration. However, those unable to strike a deal with caretakers had to sell their property, often in a matter of days and at great financial loss to predatory land speculators, who made huge profits.
Japanese Americans also encountered hostility and even violence when they returned to the West Coast. Concentrated largely in rural areas of Central California, there were dozens of reports of gunshots, fires, and explosions aimed at Japanese American homes, businesses, and places of worship, in addition to non-violent crimes like vandalism and the defacing of Japanese graves. In one of the few cases that went to trial, four men were accused of attacking the Doi family of Placer County, California, setting off an explosion, and starting a fire on the family’s farm in January 1945. Despite a confession from one of the men that implicated the others, the jury accepted their defense attorney’s framing of the attack as a justifiable attempt to keep California “a white man’s country” and acquitted all four defendants.
To compensate former detainees for their property losses, Congress passed the Japanese-American Claims Act on July 2, 1948, allowing Japanese Americans to apply for compensation for property losses which occurred as “a reasonable and natural consequence of the evacuation or exclusion”. By the time the Act was passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the detainees’ 1939–42 tax records. Due to the time pressure and strict limits on how much they could take to the camps, few were able to preserve detailed tax and financial records during the evacuation process. Therefore, it was extremely difficult for claimants to establish that their claims were valid. Under the Act, Japanese American families filed 26,568 claims totaling $148 million in requests; about $37 million was approved and disbursed.
In 1956, Los Angeles radio station KNX, part of the CBS Radio Network, aired a series of documentaries focusing on life in Los Angeles and the West Coast after the war and into the 1950s. This documentary, The Exile’s Return, was broadcast on July 1, 1956. It gives some insights and a little history of prejudice, fear and hatred towards the Asian community in Southern California and how things were proceeding, some 11 years after the wars end.
Have a listen and draw comparisons – you might find them shocking.
