Presidential Controversies: FDR and Japanese Internment
During the second world war, over 110,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States were removed for their homes and forced to relocate to internment camps for the duration of the war. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens. Their internment was authorize by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, in his Executive Order 9066. Nearly all of those who were interned lived on the West Coast. In Hawaii however, where over 150,000 Japanese Americans made up over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were interned.
People from Japan had began migrating to the United States since 1868. From 1869 to 1924 approximately 200,000 immigrated to the islands of Hawaii, many of whom came to work on the islands' sugar plantations. About 180,000 went to the U.S. mainland, with the majority settling on the West Coast and establishing farms or small businesses. Most arrived before 1908. As the Japanese American population continued to grow, the inevitable prejudice of the time began to occur, with European Americans on the West Coast fearing competition. Groups such as the Japanese Exclusion League, the California Joint Immigration Committee, and the Native Sons of the Golden West organized, fearing what they termed, in racist jargon, the "Yellow Peril". They lobbied successfully to restrict the property and citizenship rights of Japanese immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1924, following up on the example of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively banned all immigration from Japan and other Asian countries. All Japanese Americans born after 1924 were, by definition, born in the U.S. and automatically U.S. citizens.
Japanese Americans contributed to the agriculture of California and other Western states, by introducing irrigation methods that enabled the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, and flowers on land which had previously not grown much in the way of crops.
In the 1930s the Office of Naval Intelligence became concerned by Imperial Japan's rising military power in the East. They began conducting surveillance on Japanese American communities in Hawaii. From 1936, with the approval of President Roosevelt, the ONI began compiling a watch list of those who would be the first to be placed in camps in the event of a conflict between Japan and the United States. In 1939, again on Roosevelt's orders, the ONI, Military Intelligence Division, and FBI began working together to compile a larger Custodial Detention Index. Early in 1941, Roosevelt commissioned Charles Munson to conduct an investigation on Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Munson determined that the "Japanese problem" was nonexistent. His final report to the President, submitted November 7, 1941, claimed that there was "a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty among this generally suspect ethnic group." A subsequent report by Kenneth Ringle, delivered to the President in January 1942, also found little evidence to support claims of Japanese American disloyalty and argued against mass incarceration.
The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 led military and political leaders to worry that Imperial Japan would next mount a full-scale attack on the West Coast of the United States. Due to Japan's rapid military conquest of a large portion of Asia and the Pacific between 1936 and 1942, some Americans began to panic and fear the worst. But American public opinion initially supported the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The Los Angeles Times characterized them as "good Americans, born and educated as such" and said that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable.
However, six weeks after the attack, public opinion along the Pacific began to change as people began to turn against west coast Japanese Americans. Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage but pressure mounted upon the Administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans. Concern increased following the "Niihau Incident" in which a civilian Japanese national and two Hawaiian-born Japanese persons living on the island of Ni'ihau violently freed a downed and captured Japanese naval airman.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, was one of the leaders of the group that questioned Japanese-American loyalty. DeWitt, who was charged with administering the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers "A Jap's a Jap". He testified to Congress "I don't want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese."
On January 2, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California Legislature sent a message to California newspapers, attacking "the ethnic Japanese," calling them "totally unassimilable" and saying that all people of Japanese heritage were loyal subjects of the Emperor of Japan. This message was supported by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the California Department of the American Legion. These groups demanded that all Japanese with dual citizenship be placed in concentration camps. By February, Earl Warren, who was then the Attorney General of California (and would later become state governor, a candidate for Vice-President, and Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), asked the federal government to remove all people of Japanese ethnicity from the West Coast.
President Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation 2537 on January 14, 1942, requiring aliens to report any change of address, employment or name to the FBI. Enemy aliens were not allowed to enter restricted areas. Violators of these regulations were subject to "arrest, detention and internment for the duration of the war." Just over a month later, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded."
On March 2, 1942 Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 1, declaring that "such person or classes of persons as the situation may require" would be subject to exclusion orders from "Military Area No. 1". This area comprised almost all of the entire Pacific coast to about 100 miles inland. It called for anyone who had "enemy" ancestry to file a Change of Residence Notice if they planned to move. A second exclusion zone was designated several months later, which included the areas chosen by most of the Japanese Americans who had managed to leave the first zone. On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt's Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, and gave it authority over all alien property interests. Many assets were frozen, creating immediate financial difficulty for the affected aliens, preventing most from moving out of the exclusion zones. Then on March 24, 1942, Dewitt issued Public Proclamation No. 3 which declared an 8:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew for "all enemy aliens and all persons of Japanese ancestry" within the military areas.
On March 24, 1942 General DeWitt began to issue Civilian Exclusion Orders for specific areas within "Military Area No. 1." Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island, Washington were the first in the country to be subject to such an order, due to the island's proximity to naval bases. They were given until March 30 to prepare for removal from the island. Three days later on March 27, 1942: General DeWitt's Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving "Military Area No. 1" for "any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order would allow.
On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, who were still living in "Military Area No. 1" to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers."
These orders applied to anyone with at least one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent) Japanese ancestry. Korean-Americans and Taiwanese were classified as ethnically Japanese because both Korea and Taiwan were Japanese colonies.
The move was popular with many white Californians who competed with the Japanese-Americans. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942 "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either."
The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt's request, sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The bandwagon of fear and prejudice grew as state politicians demanded that all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in camps.
The plan was short-sighted. Incarceration of Japanese Americans, who provided critical agricultural labor on the West Coast, created a labor shortage, which was worsened by the induction of many American laborers into the Armed Forces. This vacuum precipitated a mass immigration of Mexican workers into the United States to fill these jobs. Many Japanese internees were temporarily released from their camps to harvest some crops to address this wartime labor shortage.
In Hawaii, the white businessmen of Hawaii had their own motives for opposing Japanese internment. They lobbied for freedom the nearly 150,000 Japanese Americans who would have been otherwise sent to internment camps within Hawaii and as a result, less than 1,800 Japanese Americans in Hawaii were interned. The powerful businessmen of Hawaii believed that imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the state.
The government operated several different types of camps holding Japanese Americans. The best known facilities were the military-run Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) Assembly Centers and the civilian-run War Relocation Authority (WRA) Relocation Centers. The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called Internment Camps, which were used to detain those suspected of crimes or of "enemy sympathies." The WCCA Assembly Centers were temporary facilities that were first set up in horse racing tracks, fairgrounds and other large public meeting places to assemble and organize internees before they were transported to WRA Relocation Centers by truck, bus or train. The WRA Relocation Centers were semi-permanent camps that housed persons removed from the exclusion zone after March 1942, or until they were able to relocate elsewhere in the United States outside the exclusion zone.
Eight U.S. Department of Justice Camps (in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana) held Japanese Americans, primarily non-citizens and their families. The camps were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and guarded by Border Patrol agents rather than military police. Immigrants and nationals of German and Italian ancestry were also held in these facilities, often in the same camps as Japanese Americans.
Executive Order 9066 authorized the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast; however, it was signed before there were any facilities completed to house the displaced Japanese Americans. After the voluntary evacuation program failed to result in many families leaving the exclusion zone, the military took charge of the evacuation. On April 9, 1942, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) was established by the Western Defense Command to coordinate the forced removal of Japanese Americans to inland concentration camps.The relocation centers faced opposition from inland communities near the proposed sites who disliked the idea of having these camps in their backyard.
The Army Corps of Engineers finished construction on these sites on April 21, 1942. All but four of the 15 confinement sites (12 in California, and one each in Washington, Oregon and Arizona) had previously been racetracks or fairgrounds. The stables and livestock areas were cleaned out and hastily converted to living quarters for families of up to six, while wood and tarpaper barracks were constructed for additional housing, as well as communal latrines, laundry facilities and mess halls. A total of 92,193 Japanese Americans were transferred to these temporary detention centers from March to August 1942. Another 18,026 were taken directly to two "reception centers" that were developed as the Manzanar and Poston camps.
Somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about two-thirds were U.S. citizens. The remaining one-third were non-citizens subject to internment under the Alien Enemies Act. Many of these people had lived in the United States for decades. Part of the West Coast removal were 101 children of Japanese descent taken from orphanages and foster homes within the exclusion zone. Internees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers" where most awaited transfer to more permanent relocation centers. Some of those who reported to the civilian assembly centers were not sent to relocation centers, but were released under the condition that they remain outside the prohibited zone until the military orders were modified or lifted. Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens were eventually removed from their homes in California, the western halves of Oregon and Washington and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Many of these camps were placed on Native American reservations
Students of college age were permitted to leave the camps to attend institutions willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. This eventually included 2,263 students by December 31, 1943.
Colorado governor Ralph Lawrence Carr was the only elected official to publicly denounce the internment of American citizens. His act of conscience and courage cost him his reelection, but it gained him the gratitude of the Japanese American community. A statue of him was erected in the Denver Japantown's Sakura Square.
According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in "tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." The spartan facilities met international laws, but in many camps, twenty-five people were forced to live in space built to contain four. Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers. The camps had a shortage of healthcare workers, limited access to medical equipment, and tension between white administrators and Japanese American staff. The extreme climates of the remote incarceration sites were hard on infants and elderly inmates, with increased cases of asthma other diseases. Almost 6,000 live deliveries were performed in these hospitals. The WRA recorded 1,862 deaths across the ten camps, with cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, and vascular disease accounting for the majority.
In late 1943, War Relocation Authority officials, working with the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence, circulated a question form in an attempt to determine the loyalty of incarcerated Nisei men they hoped to recruit into military service. Authorities soon required all adults in camp to complete the form. Most of the 28 questions were designed to assess the "Americanness" of the respondent. The form contained questions about whether the internee had been educated in Japan or the U.S., if they were Buddhist or Christian, did they practice judo or play on a baseball team. The final two questions on the form asked if an individual would be willing to serve in the armed forces and if they wuld forswear their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Most camp inmates simply answered "yes" to both questions. But many felt insulted at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them and their families. Some believed that renouncing their loyalty to Japan would suggest that they had at some point been loyal to Japan and disloyal to the United States.
When the government began seeking army volunteers from among the camps, only 6% of military-aged male inmates volunteered to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Eventually 20,000 Japanese-American men and many Japanese-American women served in the U.S. Army during World War II. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was composed primarily of Japanese Americans, served with distinction in the European Theatre of World War II. Many of the U.S. soldiers serving in the unit had families who were held in concentration camps in the United States while they fought abroad. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team liberated at least one of the satellite labor camps of the Nazis' original concentration camp at Dachau on April 29, 1945.
On December 18, 1944, the United States Supreme Court handed down two decisions on the legality of the incarceration under Executive Order 9066. Korematsu v. United States, a 6–3 decision upholding the Plaintiff's conviction for violating the military exclusion order, stated that, in general, the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast was constitutional. But in another ruling, Ex parte Endo, the court unanimously declared that loyal citizens of the United States, regardless of cultural descent, could not be detained without cause. In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of U.S. citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not.
The exclusion order was not rescinded until January 2, 1945. It was postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign. Those interred began to leave the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home. Former inmates were given $25 and a train ticket to their pre-war places of residence, but many had little or nothing to return to, having lost their homes and businesses. The camps remained open for residents who were not ready to return (mostly the elderly and families with young children), but the WRA pressured stragglers to leave by gradually eliminating services in camp. Those who had not left by each camp's close date were forcibly removed and sent back to the West Coast.
Nine of the ten WRA camps were shut down by the end of 1945. Tule Lake, which held those slated for deportation to Japan, was not closed until March 20, 1946. Many internees 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.
Alien land laws barred many 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. Some had found families willing to occupy their homes or tend their farms during their incarceration. Japanese Americans also encountered hostility and even violence when they returned to the West Coast. Convictions for racial violence were often difficult due to jury prejudice.
To compensate former internees for their property losses, the US Congress, on July 2, 1948, passed the "American Japanese Claims Act," allowing Japanese Americans to apply for compensation for property losses which occurred as "a reasonable and natural consequence of the evacuation or exclusion." But by the time the Act was passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the internees' 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 and 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 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which had been sponsored by Representative Norman Mineta and Senator Alan K. Simpson, who had met while Mineta was interned at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. It provided financial redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion. On September 27, 1992, the Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1992, appropriating an additional $400 million to ensure all remaining internees received their $20,000 redress payments, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. He issued another formal apology from the U.S. government on December 7, 1991, on the 50th-Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor Attack, saying:
"In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated."
People from Japan had began migrating to the United States since 1868. From 1869 to 1924 approximately 200,000 immigrated to the islands of Hawaii, many of whom came to work on the islands' sugar plantations. About 180,000 went to the U.S. mainland, with the majority settling on the West Coast and establishing farms or small businesses. Most arrived before 1908. As the Japanese American population continued to grow, the inevitable prejudice of the time began to occur, with European Americans on the West Coast fearing competition. Groups such as the Japanese Exclusion League, the California Joint Immigration Committee, and the Native Sons of the Golden West organized, fearing what they termed, in racist jargon, the "Yellow Peril". They lobbied successfully to restrict the property and citizenship rights of Japanese immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1924, following up on the example of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively banned all immigration from Japan and other Asian countries. All Japanese Americans born after 1924 were, by definition, born in the U.S. and automatically U.S. citizens.
Japanese Americans contributed to the agriculture of California and other Western states, by introducing irrigation methods that enabled the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, and flowers on land which had previously not grown much in the way of crops.
In the 1930s the Office of Naval Intelligence became concerned by Imperial Japan's rising military power in the East. They began conducting surveillance on Japanese American communities in Hawaii. From 1936, with the approval of President Roosevelt, the ONI began compiling a watch list of those who would be the first to be placed in camps in the event of a conflict between Japan and the United States. In 1939, again on Roosevelt's orders, the ONI, Military Intelligence Division, and FBI began working together to compile a larger Custodial Detention Index. Early in 1941, Roosevelt commissioned Charles Munson to conduct an investigation on Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Munson determined that the "Japanese problem" was nonexistent. His final report to the President, submitted November 7, 1941, claimed that there was "a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty among this generally suspect ethnic group." A subsequent report by Kenneth Ringle, delivered to the President in January 1942, also found little evidence to support claims of Japanese American disloyalty and argued against mass incarceration.
The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 led military and political leaders to worry that Imperial Japan would next mount a full-scale attack on the West Coast of the United States. Due to Japan's rapid military conquest of a large portion of Asia and the Pacific between 1936 and 1942, some Americans began to panic and fear the worst. But American public opinion initially supported the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The Los Angeles Times characterized them as "good Americans, born and educated as such" and said that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable.
However, six weeks after the attack, public opinion along the Pacific began to change as people began to turn against west coast Japanese Americans. Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage but pressure mounted upon the Administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans. Concern increased following the "Niihau Incident" in which a civilian Japanese national and two Hawaiian-born Japanese persons living on the island of Ni'ihau violently freed a downed and captured Japanese naval airman.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, was one of the leaders of the group that questioned Japanese-American loyalty. DeWitt, who was charged with administering the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers "A Jap's a Jap". He testified to Congress "I don't want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese."
On January 2, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California Legislature sent a message to California newspapers, attacking "the ethnic Japanese," calling them "totally unassimilable" and saying that all people of Japanese heritage were loyal subjects of the Emperor of Japan. This message was supported by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the California Department of the American Legion. These groups demanded that all Japanese with dual citizenship be placed in concentration camps. By February, Earl Warren, who was then the Attorney General of California (and would later become state governor, a candidate for Vice-President, and Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), asked the federal government to remove all people of Japanese ethnicity from the West Coast.
President Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation 2537 on January 14, 1942, requiring aliens to report any change of address, employment or name to the FBI. Enemy aliens were not allowed to enter restricted areas. Violators of these regulations were subject to "arrest, detention and internment for the duration of the war." Just over a month later, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded."
On March 2, 1942 Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 1, declaring that "such person or classes of persons as the situation may require" would be subject to exclusion orders from "Military Area No. 1". This area comprised almost all of the entire Pacific coast to about 100 miles inland. It called for anyone who had "enemy" ancestry to file a Change of Residence Notice if they planned to move. A second exclusion zone was designated several months later, which included the areas chosen by most of the Japanese Americans who had managed to leave the first zone. On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt's Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, and gave it authority over all alien property interests. Many assets were frozen, creating immediate financial difficulty for the affected aliens, preventing most from moving out of the exclusion zones. Then on March 24, 1942, Dewitt issued Public Proclamation No. 3 which declared an 8:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew for "all enemy aliens and all persons of Japanese ancestry" within the military areas.
On March 24, 1942 General DeWitt began to issue Civilian Exclusion Orders for specific areas within "Military Area No. 1." Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island, Washington were the first in the country to be subject to such an order, due to the island's proximity to naval bases. They were given until March 30 to prepare for removal from the island. Three days later on March 27, 1942: General DeWitt's Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving "Military Area No. 1" for "any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order would allow.
On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, who were still living in "Military Area No. 1" to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers."
These orders applied to anyone with at least one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent) Japanese ancestry. Korean-Americans and Taiwanese were classified as ethnically Japanese because both Korea and Taiwan were Japanese colonies.
The move was popular with many white Californians who competed with the Japanese-Americans. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942 "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either."
The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt's request, sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The bandwagon of fear and prejudice grew as state politicians demanded that all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in camps.
The plan was short-sighted. Incarceration of Japanese Americans, who provided critical agricultural labor on the West Coast, created a labor shortage, which was worsened by the induction of many American laborers into the Armed Forces. This vacuum precipitated a mass immigration of Mexican workers into the United States to fill these jobs. Many Japanese internees were temporarily released from their camps to harvest some crops to address this wartime labor shortage.
In Hawaii, the white businessmen of Hawaii had their own motives for opposing Japanese internment. They lobbied for freedom the nearly 150,000 Japanese Americans who would have been otherwise sent to internment camps within Hawaii and as a result, less than 1,800 Japanese Americans in Hawaii were interned. The powerful businessmen of Hawaii believed that imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the state.
The government operated several different types of camps holding Japanese Americans. The best known facilities were the military-run Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) Assembly Centers and the civilian-run War Relocation Authority (WRA) Relocation Centers. The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called Internment Camps, which were used to detain those suspected of crimes or of "enemy sympathies." The WCCA Assembly Centers were temporary facilities that were first set up in horse racing tracks, fairgrounds and other large public meeting places to assemble and organize internees before they were transported to WRA Relocation Centers by truck, bus or train. The WRA Relocation Centers were semi-permanent camps that housed persons removed from the exclusion zone after March 1942, or until they were able to relocate elsewhere in the United States outside the exclusion zone.
Eight U.S. Department of Justice Camps (in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana) held Japanese Americans, primarily non-citizens and their families. The camps were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and guarded by Border Patrol agents rather than military police. Immigrants and nationals of German and Italian ancestry were also held in these facilities, often in the same camps as Japanese Americans.
Executive Order 9066 authorized the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast; however, it was signed before there were any facilities completed to house the displaced Japanese Americans. After the voluntary evacuation program failed to result in many families leaving the exclusion zone, the military took charge of the evacuation. On April 9, 1942, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) was established by the Western Defense Command to coordinate the forced removal of Japanese Americans to inland concentration camps.The relocation centers faced opposition from inland communities near the proposed sites who disliked the idea of having these camps in their backyard.
The Army Corps of Engineers finished construction on these sites on April 21, 1942. All but four of the 15 confinement sites (12 in California, and one each in Washington, Oregon and Arizona) had previously been racetracks or fairgrounds. The stables and livestock areas were cleaned out and hastily converted to living quarters for families of up to six, while wood and tarpaper barracks were constructed for additional housing, as well as communal latrines, laundry facilities and mess halls. A total of 92,193 Japanese Americans were transferred to these temporary detention centers from March to August 1942. Another 18,026 were taken directly to two "reception centers" that were developed as the Manzanar and Poston camps.
Somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about two-thirds were U.S. citizens. The remaining one-third were non-citizens subject to internment under the Alien Enemies Act. Many of these people had lived in the United States for decades. Part of the West Coast removal were 101 children of Japanese descent taken from orphanages and foster homes within the exclusion zone. Internees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers" where most awaited transfer to more permanent relocation centers. Some of those who reported to the civilian assembly centers were not sent to relocation centers, but were released under the condition that they remain outside the prohibited zone until the military orders were modified or lifted. Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens were eventually removed from their homes in California, the western halves of Oregon and Washington and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Many of these camps were placed on Native American reservations
Students of college age were permitted to leave the camps to attend institutions willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. This eventually included 2,263 students by December 31, 1943.
Colorado governor Ralph Lawrence Carr was the only elected official to publicly denounce the internment of American citizens. His act of conscience and courage cost him his reelection, but it gained him the gratitude of the Japanese American community. A statue of him was erected in the Denver Japantown's Sakura Square.
According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in "tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." The spartan facilities met international laws, but in many camps, twenty-five people were forced to live in space built to contain four. Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers. The camps had a shortage of healthcare workers, limited access to medical equipment, and tension between white administrators and Japanese American staff. The extreme climates of the remote incarceration sites were hard on infants and elderly inmates, with increased cases of asthma other diseases. Almost 6,000 live deliveries were performed in these hospitals. The WRA recorded 1,862 deaths across the ten camps, with cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, and vascular disease accounting for the majority.
In late 1943, War Relocation Authority officials, working with the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence, circulated a question form in an attempt to determine the loyalty of incarcerated Nisei men they hoped to recruit into military service. Authorities soon required all adults in camp to complete the form. Most of the 28 questions were designed to assess the "Americanness" of the respondent. The form contained questions about whether the internee had been educated in Japan or the U.S., if they were Buddhist or Christian, did they practice judo or play on a baseball team. The final two questions on the form asked if an individual would be willing to serve in the armed forces and if they wuld forswear their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Most camp inmates simply answered "yes" to both questions. But many felt insulted at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them and their families. Some believed that renouncing their loyalty to Japan would suggest that they had at some point been loyal to Japan and disloyal to the United States.
When the government began seeking army volunteers from among the camps, only 6% of military-aged male inmates volunteered to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Eventually 20,000 Japanese-American men and many Japanese-American women served in the U.S. Army during World War II. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was composed primarily of Japanese Americans, served with distinction in the European Theatre of World War II. Many of the U.S. soldiers serving in the unit had families who were held in concentration camps in the United States while they fought abroad. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team liberated at least one of the satellite labor camps of the Nazis' original concentration camp at Dachau on April 29, 1945.
On December 18, 1944, the United States Supreme Court handed down two decisions on the legality of the incarceration under Executive Order 9066. Korematsu v. United States, a 6–3 decision upholding the Plaintiff's conviction for violating the military exclusion order, stated that, in general, the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast was constitutional. But in another ruling, Ex parte Endo, the court unanimously declared that loyal citizens of the United States, regardless of cultural descent, could not be detained without cause. In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of U.S. citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not.
The exclusion order was not rescinded until January 2, 1945. It was postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign. Those interred began to leave the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home. Former inmates were given $25 and a train ticket to their pre-war places of residence, but many had little or nothing to return to, having lost their homes and businesses. The camps remained open for residents who were not ready to return (mostly the elderly and families with young children), but the WRA pressured stragglers to leave by gradually eliminating services in camp. Those who had not left by each camp's close date were forcibly removed and sent back to the West Coast.
Nine of the ten WRA camps were shut down by the end of 1945. Tule Lake, which held those slated for deportation to Japan, was not closed until March 20, 1946. Many internees 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.
Alien land laws barred many 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. Some had found families willing to occupy their homes or tend their farms during their incarceration. Japanese Americans also encountered hostility and even violence when they returned to the West Coast. Convictions for racial violence were often difficult due to jury prejudice.
To compensate former internees for their property losses, the US Congress, on July 2, 1948, passed the "American Japanese Claims Act," allowing Japanese Americans to apply for compensation for property losses which occurred as "a reasonable and natural consequence of the evacuation or exclusion." But by the time the Act was passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the internees' 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 and 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 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which had been sponsored by Representative Norman Mineta and Senator Alan K. Simpson, who had met while Mineta was interned at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. It provided financial redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion. On September 27, 1992, the Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1992, appropriating an additional $400 million to ensure all remaining internees received their $20,000 redress payments, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. He issued another formal apology from the U.S. government on December 7, 1991, on the 50th-Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor Attack, saying:
"In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated."