Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

1. Before Pearl Harbor

1 Before Pearl Harbor On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked and crippled the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Ten weeks later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 under which the War Department excluded from the West Coast everyone of Japanese ancestry -both American citizens and their alien parents who, despite long residence in the United States, were barred by federal law from becoming American citizens. Driven from their homes and farms and businesses, very few had any choice but to go to "relocation centers"Spartan , barrack-like camps in the inhospitable deserts and mountains of the interior. * *There is a continuing controversy over the contention that the camps were "concentration camps" and that any other term is a euphemism. The government documents of the time frequently use the term "concentration camps," but after World War II, with fun realization ofthe atrocities committed by the Nazis in the death camps of Europe, that phrase came to have a very different meaning. The American relocation centers were bleak and bare, and life in them had many hardships, but they were not extermination camps, nor did the American government embrace a policy oftorture or liquidation of the ethnic Japanese. To use the phrase "concentration camps" summons up images and ideas which are inaccurate and unfair. The Commission has used "relocation centers" and "relocation camps," the usual term used during the war, not to gloss over the hardships of the camps, but in an effort to find an historically fair and accurate phrase. 27 28 PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED This was done out of fear-fear of sabotage, of espionage, of fifth column activity. There was no evidence that any individual American citizen was actively disloyal to his country. Nevertheless, the World War II history ofAmericans ofJapanese ancestry was far different from that of German Americans, Italian Americans or any other ethnic group. It is the bitter history ofan original mistake, a failure ofAmerica's faith in its citizens' devotion to their country's cause and their right to liberty, when there was no evidence or proof of wrongdoing. It is a history which deeply seared and scarred the lives ofJapanese Americans. How did it happen? War inflamed many passions in the country. On the West Coast it rekindled the fears and prejudices oflong years ofanti-Asian agitation carried on by organized interest groups. Decades of discrimination against immigrants from Japan and public hostility toward Americans of Japanese descent fueled outraged shock at the Pearl Harbor attack and impotent anger against the Japanese as they swept through the Philippines and down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore. Rep6rts of American battlefield deaths lit sparks in one community after another up and down the West Coast, where fear ofinvasion was very real. In significant measure, the evacuation decision was ignited by the fire of those emotions, especially in California. The hostile reception and treatment of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast are the historical prelude to the exclusion and eyacuation . Federal immigration and naturalization laws, frequently sponsored and backed by westerners, demonstrate this public hostility to Asians, particularly the Japanese. Laws which prohibited the ownership of land by Japanese resident aliens and imposed segregation in the schools tell the same story in the western states. Public perceptions and misconceptions about the Japanese in this country were affected by myths and stereotypes-the fear of "the yellow peril" and antagonistic misunderstanding of the cultural patterns of the Japanese in America. Resentment ofeffective economic competition also inflamed public feeling and, combined with differences oflanguage and culture, left the small minority ofJapanese Americans on the West Coast comparatively isolated-a ready target at a time of fear and anxiety. IMMIGRATION AND LEGALIZED DISCRIMINATION Discrimination in American immigration laws started with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which provided for naturalization of "any alien, BEFORE PEARL HARBOR 29 being a free white person."1 Following revision ofthe statute after the Civil War, the act was read to prohibit any Chinese immigrant from becoming an American citizen.2 It was generally assumed that the prohibition would extend to the Japanese as well and, in 1922, the Supreme Court interpreted the statute to prohibit the naturalization of any Oriental.3 Although immigrants from Asia could not become American citizens, their children born on American soil became citizens by birth.4 The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution assured to everyone born in the United States the rights and privileges...