Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments my mother once told me that she placed a packed suitcase next to the living room sofa soon after December 7, 1941. My father believed that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation would eventually come to take him to jail, although he didn’t know when it would happen—thus, the suitcase parked in the living room. It was not until I was an undergraduate student that my mother told me of her preparations—I was an infant in 1941—and it seemed strange that she had never mentioned it before. By then, my father had died, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer further questions about why a suitcase was necessary or why my father, who had been a Buddhist priest, a community leader, and a law-abiding person, would worry about being arrested.As it turned out, the FBI did not then or later arrest my father or other Buddhist priests in the San Francisco–Oakland Bay area, where we lived. Even the presiding bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America (headquartered in San Francisco) was left untouched, although Japanese religious leaders in other regions who were also, by all accounts, law-abiding persons —Buddhists, Christians, and those of other Japanese religious orders—were quickly arrested and imprisoned. A few months into 1942, the U.S. Army ordered our entire family—my father, mother, brother, and myself—to leave Oakland and sent us to a place it called an “assembly center,” at the Tanforan racetrack in south San Francisco. After a few months there, we were again moved, this time to a civilian-controlled “relocation camp.” The name of our particular camp was Topaz, “A Jewel in the Desert”; it takes about three hours to get there now, traveling by car in a southwesterly direction from Salt Lake City. Here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sweet-smelling sagebrush and far-off mountains, the government incarcerated some 10,000 persons, thereby creating a new desert community from 1942 to 1945. Altogether, nearly 117,116 persons of Japanese descent—citizens and permanent resident nationals alike—were eventually incarcerated in ten so-called relocation centers in desolate places in the interior United States during those wartime years. Why my father should have expected his arrest was a question that bothered me for many years. If there is any one particular motive for my interest in the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, perhaps it was this question, to which I then had no answer. One caveat should be noted: although the U. S. government imprisoned more than just the Japanese and their citizen children, my focus here will be upon this particular group. The experiences of interned German and Italian nationals are discussed when relevant. That subject, however, deserves separate treatment and analysis, because although many Germans and Italians had experiences similar to those of the Japanese, significant differences are evident. I leave that discussion for another time. The first chapter introduces the thesis of the book and details the importance of the process whereby the U.S. government created a loosely structured imprisonment network during World War II. The second chapter examines the years before America’s formal entry into the war and the preparations for internment that took place prior to it; the third chapter describes the arrest, detention, and internment of Japanese nationals just after December 7, 1941. The fourth and fifth chapters discuss the imprisonment process used outside the contiguous United States—in Alaska, Hawaii, and Latin American countries. The sixth deals with the camps run by the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Army and what life was like for those internees. The seventh and eighth focus on lesser-known aspects of various types of camps operated by the War Relocation Authority. The ninth chapter examines the mistreatment of the prisoners—the abuses, beatings, and homicides—that occurred in various camps. The last chapter concludes with an analysis of the camp experience. Data for this study come from a number of sources. First were the governmental archives: the records of the War Relocation Authority, Old Military and Civil Records, and Modern Military Records at the National Archives; Justice Department records at the National Archives and in the Department of Justice History Section; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Archives. In addition, I perused materials at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Hawaii, Honolulu; the University of California, San...