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An analysis of the justifications behind the japanese internment camps and its impact on japanese american identity.

Elizabeth Yoshitake Follow

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© 2022 Elizabeth Yoshitake

In the first half of my paper, I will be reviewing the rationale from political leaders, citizen group organizers, and military officers on the issuing of Executive Order 9066. Additionally, I will be addressing the types of support and dissent that contributed to the eventual mandating of the Japanese internment camps during World War II. By looking into these aspects, I hope to find clarity behind why the internment camps were considered constitutional at the time and how it was received throughout society. The second half of my paper will address the dual identities amongst the Issei and Nisei Japanese generations, especially concentrating on the dynamics of being both Japanese and American after the War. To do this, I will be looking at memoirs of personal reflections from past internees. I am choosing to focus on memoirs as opposed to scholarly literature in order to find both political and emotional responses from their experiences in the camps. Through this, I hope to find a relationship between the internment camps and their impact on the prospective futures of Japanese Americans and how they choose to identify in this country.

Overall, most justifications for the issuing of Executive Order 9066 were based on racial prejudices which motivated the xenophobic attitudes of policymakers. The sentiment of white supremacy in the US also dictates many of the ways policymakers advertise internment to adhere to their own ulterior motives. Many of the justifications regarding internment were internalized by Japanese Americans as they experienced demoralization, worthlessness, and financial ruin. Ultimately, the ways Japanese Americans identify are contingent on their generation and the strength of the connection to their Japanese heritage.

Recommended Citation

Yoshitake, Elizabeth, "An Analysis of the Justifications Behind the Japanese Internment Camps and Its Impact on Japanese American Identity" (2023). CMC Senior Theses . 3127. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/3127

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Japanese Internment Camps

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 17, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066 . From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, would be incarcerated in isolated camps. Enacted in reaction to the Pearl Harbor attacks and the ensuing war, the incarceration of Japanese Americans is considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.

Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with the stated intention of preventing espionage on American shores.

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon—states with a large population of Japanese Americans. Then Roosevelt’s executive order forcibly removed Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 120,000 people—the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, forcibly removing 21,000 of its residents of Japanese descent from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

Anti-Japanese American Activity 

Weeks before the order, the Navy removed citizens of Japanese descent from Terminal Island near the Port of Los Angeles.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.

In January, the arrestees were transferred to prison camps in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota, many unable to inform their families and most remaining for the duration of the war.

Concurrently, the FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese American residents on the West Coast, seizing items considered contraband.

One-third of Hawaii’s population was of Japanese descent. In a panic, some politicians called for their mass incarceration. Japanese-owned fishing boats were impounded.

Some Japanese American residents were arrested and 1,500 people—one percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii—were sent to prison camps on the U.S. mainland.

Photos of Japanese American Relocation and Incarceration

John DeWitt

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, believed that the civilian population needed to be taken control of to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

To argue his case, DeWitt prepared a report filled with known falsehoods, such as examples of sabotage that were later revealed to be the result of cattle damaging power lines.

DeWitt suggested the creation of the military zones and Japanese detainment to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle. His original plan included Italians and Germans, though the idea of rounding-up Americans of European descent was not as popular.

At Congressional hearings in February 1942, a majority of the testimonies, including those from California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren , declared that all Japanese should be removed.

Biddle pleaded with the president that mass incarceration of citizens was not required, preferring smaller, more targeted security measures. Regardless, Roosevelt signed the order.

War Relocation Authority

After much organizational chaos, about 15,000 Japanese Americans willingly moved out of prohibited areas. Inland state citizens were not keen for new Japanese American residents, and they were met with racist resistance.

Ten state governors voiced opposition, fearing the Japanese Americans might never leave, and demanded they be locked up if the states were forced to accept them.

A civilian organization called the War Relocation Authority was set up in March 1942 to administer the plan, with Milton S. Eisenhower from the Department of Agriculture to lead it. Eisenhower only lasted until June 1942, resigning in protest over what he characterized as incarcerating innocent citizens.

Relocation to 'Assembly Centers'

Army-directed removals began on March 24. People had six days notice to dispose of their belongings other than what they could carry.

Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was evacuated, including 17,000 children under age 10, as well as several thousand elderly and disabled residents.

Japanese Americans reported to "Assembly Centers" near their homes. From there they were transported to a "Relocation Center" where they might live for months before transfer to a permanent "Wartime Residence."

Assembly Centers were located in remote areas, often reconfigured fairgrounds and racetracks featuring buildings not meant for human habitation, like horse stalls or cow sheds, that had been converted for that purpose. In Portland, Oregon , 3,000 people stayed in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Facilities.

The Santa Anita Assembly Center, just several miles northeast of Los Angeles, was a de-facto city with 18,000 incarcerated, 8,500 of whom lived in stables. Food shortages and substandard sanitation were prevalent in these facilities.

Life in 'Assembly Centers'

Assembly Centers offered work to prisoners with the policy that they should not be paid more than an Army private. Jobs ranged from doctors to teachers to laborers and mechanics. A couple were the sites of camouflage net factories, which provided work.

Over 1,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans were sent to other states to do seasonal farm work. Over 4,000 of the incarcerated population were allowed to leave to attend college.

These Photos Show the Harsh Reality of Life in WWII Japanese American Internment Camps

More than 100,000 Japanese Americans were sent to 'War Relocation Centers' between 1942 and 1946.

U.S. Propaganda Film Shows ‘Normal’ Life in WWII Japanese Internment Camps

The U.S. government, for its part, tried to assure the rest of the country that its policy was justified, and that those Japanese Americans forced to live in the prison camps were happy.

This Mexican American Teenager Spent Years in a Japanese Internment Camp—On Purpose

Ralph Lazo wasn’t of Japanese descent, but he spent spent two years at Manzanar in solidarity with his friends.

Conditions in 'Relocation Centers'

There were a total of 10 prison camps, called "Relocation Centers." Typically the camps included some form of barracks with communal eating areas. Several families were housed together. Residents who were labeled as dissidents were forced to a special prison camp in Tule Lake, California.

Two prison camps in Arizona were located on Native American reservations, despite the protests of tribal councils, who were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Each Relocation Center was its own "town," and included schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock. Each prison camp "town" was completely surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

Net factories offered work at several Relocation Centers. One housed a naval ship model factory. There were also factories in different Relocation Centers that manufactured items for use in other prison camps, including garments, mattresses and cabinets. Several housed agricultural processing plants.

Violence in Prison Camps

Violence occasionally occurred in the prison camps. In Lordsburg, New Mexico , prisoners were delivered by trains and forced to march two miles at night to the camp. On July 27, 1942, during a night march, two Japanese Americans, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura, were shot and killed by a sentry who claimed they were attempting to escape. Japanese Americans testified later that the two elderly men were disabled and had been struggling during the march to Lordsburg. The sentry was found not guilty by the army court martial board.

On August 4, 1942, a riot broke out in the Santa Anita Assembly Center, the result of anger about insufficient rations and overcrowding. At California's Manzanar War Relocation Center , tensions resulted in the beating of Fred Tayama, a Japanese American Citizen’s League (JACL) leader, by six men. JACL members were believed to be supporters of the prison camp's administration. 

Fearing a riot, police tear-gassed crowds that had gathered at the police station to demand the release of Harry Ueno. Ueno had been arrested for allegedly assaulting Tayama. James Ito was killed instantly and several others were wounded. Among those injured was Jim Kanegawa, 21, who died of complications five days later.

At the Topaz Relocation Center , 63-year-old prisoner James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed by military police after walking near the perimeter fence. Two months later, a couple was shot at for strolling near the fence.

In October 1943, the Army deployed tanks and soldiers to  Tule Lake Segregation Center  in northern California to crack down on protests. Japanese American prisoners at Tule Lake had been striking over food shortages and unsafe conditions that had led to an accidental death in October 1943. At the same camp, on May 24, 1943, James Okamoto, a 30-year-old prisoner who drove a construction truck, was shot and killed by a guard.  

Korematsu Ruling on Japanese Internment: Condemned But Not Overruled

Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a court decision that 'Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided,' but that didn’t overrule the 1944 decision endorsing Japanese internment.

How Two Japanese Americans Fought Nazis Abroad—and Prejudice at Home

Frank Wada and Don Seki fought in the 442nd all‑Nisei Regiment—remembered as the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US military.

How Japanese Americans Fought for—and Won—Redress for WWII Incarceration

It was a long road from the end of the war until President Reagan signed the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, 23-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to a Japanese prison camp. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued in Korematsu v. United States that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment . 

Korematsu lost the case, but he went on to become a civil rights activist and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. With the creation of California’s Fred Korematsu Day, the United States saw its first U.S. holiday named for an Asian American. But it took another Supreme Court decision to halt the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Mitsuye Endo

The prison camps ended in 1945 following the  Supreme Court decision,  Ex parte Mitsuye Endo . In this case, justices ruled unanimously that the War Relocation Authority “has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure.”

The case was brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants from Sacramento, California. After filing a habeas corpus petition, the government offered to free her, but Endo refused, wanting her case to address the entire issue of Japanese incarceration.

One year later, the Supreme Court made the decision, but gave President Truman the chance to begin camp closures before the announcement. One day after Truman made his announcement, the Supreme Court revealed its decision.

Reparations

The last Japanese internment camp closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066 in 1976, and in 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment.

Japanese Relocation During World War II . National Archives . Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord and R. Lord . Lordsburg Internment POW Camp. Historical Society of New Mexico . Smithsonian Institute .

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NPR Public Editor

Euphemisms, concentration camps and the japanese internment.

Edward Schumacher-Matos

Lori Grisham

A large sign placed in the window of a store in Oakland, Calif. in 1942. The store was closed following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress hide caption

A large sign placed in the window of a store in Oakland, Calif. in 1942. The store was closed following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas.

Updated 02/14 1:35 p.m. ( Click for the latest ): More from historian Roger Daniels.

Shortly following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 . In a climate of widespread fear bordering on panic, the order resulted in the incarceration of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. They were uprooted from their homes and isolated in 10 hastily constructed camps , some of them for as long as four years, in what is widely known as the Japanese-American Internment.

Talk of the Nation 's Neal Conan hosted a segment last week about Fred Korematsu, a civil rights leader who challenged the executive order at the time. Conan's interview with Korematsu's daughter, Karen, prompted some thoughtful and even evocative replies from listeners, several of whom shared their own personal family stories.

But one listener disliked Conan and Korematsu's use of the phrase "concentration camp" to refer to the sites where people were detained. William Medley from Gallipolis, OH, wrote:

There was a story on a gentleman named Korematsu and his fight against the Japanese internment camps. The story was interesting and I felt a large degree of empathy for the family. It was nice to hear that he was being recognized for his fight against the way the American Japanese were treated. But then the commentator referred to the Japanese internment camps as "concentration camps." I cannot imagine a more offensive way to portray the situation. To compare the Japanese internment camps to the Nazi or communist concentration camps is beyond offensive to the Jewish community and any reasonably intelligent American. While not Jewish myself, I found it to be terribly offensive. Words have meaning and to diminish the term "concentration camps" is reprehensible.

We asked Conan to explain his word choice. As seen in his reply and many of his on-air interviews, Conan appears to like history. He wrote:

"Concentration camp" is a term that predates both Hitler and Communism. The Nazi concentration camps are more usually, and more accurately described as Death Camps. Stalin's Gulags are slightly different, as they were prison camps, though the "crimes" and "trials" were often specious. But a concentration camp, such as those operated by the British during the Boer War, does not in and of itself suggest atrocity.

His explanation holds up with NPR's dictionary-of-choice, Webster's New World Fourth College Edition . It defines a concentration camp as, "A prison camp in which political dissidents, members of minority ethnic groups, etc. are confined." Somewhat surprisingly, "internment camp" is not listed in the dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary supports Conan's historical explanation as well. The OED defines a concentration camp as, "a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the Boer War (1899–1902); one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939–45."

Nazis put Jews, and millions of non-Jews, into about 20,000 camps during the war. According to the Holocaust Museum , these camps ranged from forced-labor camps where internees worked as slave labor, transit camps that served as holding pins before sending people off to Auschwitz and other places, and extermination camps, or death camps, built primarily for mass murder. Today, we often identify the phrase "concentration camp" with the latter, though the museum itself has a broader definition , and one that may be clearer than either of the dictionary ones. The museum says:

The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

But this debate goes beyond textbook definitions.

Roger Daniels, a historian and author, wrote an analysis for the University of Washington Press called " Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans ." He concludes that, although it's unlikely society will completely cease to use the phrase "Japanese internment," scholars should abandon the term and use "concentration camp." He considers internment a euphemism that minimizes a tragic time in American history.

President Franklin Roosevelt himself called the relocation sites concentration camps and Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, told the Washington Evening Star in 1946 :

As a member of President Roosevelt's administration, I saw the United States Army give way to mass hysteria over the Japanese...Crowded into cars like cattle, these hapless people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate concentration camps, with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard, in the great American desert. We gave the fancy name of 'relocation centers' to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless.

But Daniels recognizes that many scholars won't agree with him. He quotes Alice Yang Murray, a professor of history at the University of California and the author of several books on Asian American history:

The term "concentration camp" may once have been a euphemism for a Nazi "extermination camp," but I think that over time the two kinds of camps have become inextricably linked in the popular imagination. In other words, I believe the meaning of the term "concentration camp" has changed over time. During World War II, officials and commentators could say Japanese Americans were confined in concentration camps without evoking images of Nazi atrocities. I don't think that this is true today.

But while Murray be an Asian-American scholar, the Japanese American Citizens League , the oldest Asian-American civil rights group, doesn't agree with her and sides with Daniels. It calls the camps concentration camps, and has a map of them . On Conan's program, Korematsu spoke with this Japanese-American view.

So, where does all this leave us? Listener Medley, perhaps without realizing it, has re-opened a long debate. He also is right that words matter. They frame our view of the past and influence our destiny for the future. But it seems on balance that "concentration camp" is at the very least acceptable—and may be appropriate even today—in referring to the interning of Japanese Americans.

What we all really seem to be seeking is a phrase that doesn't diminish the cruelty of uprooting and isolating Japanese and Japanese-Americans against their will, but also doesn't diminish the true horror of Nazi extermination camps. You may have other words to suggest in striking the balance.

Updated 02/14 1:35 p.m.

A response from historian and author Roger Daniels:

I appreciate you folks citing my essay, "Words Do Matter," to help explicate a semantic problem, but you have left out an important part of the argument, to wit, that while "concentration camp" is the preferred term it is not mandatory. What is, in my view, mandatory, is not to use internment. The United States, and most other powers, did intern "enemy nationals" something recognized in American law, and kept them in generally well run camps run by the Department of Justice. To confuse those camps, which conformed to the Geneva Convention, and, in the United States were limited to what the American statutes referred to as "alien enemies" 14 years of age and older, with the camps set up under Executive Order 9066 which incarcerated primarily American citizens of all ages is to muddy the waters quite seriously. The government did not have to apologize for those selected individuals place in DoJ internment camps. It did apologize, and paid serious compensation for those confined in the camps run by the War Relocation Authority so well described in the quotation by Harold L. Ickes. Your use of "internment" shows that you don't yet fully understand the issue. - Roger Daniels Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History University of Cincinnati

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Japanese American Internment Camps: Resistance and Perseverance

This thesis examines the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II from the internees’ side, the side of the United States government and the general non-Japanese American population’s side. It examines three key aspects of internment from the Japanese American perspective: initial feelings of the camps and their conditions; the ways in which Japanese Americans maintained a traditional life during internment or, particularly in the case of Japanese American women, found new opportunities through internment to break with certain traditions; and how both age and gender played a role in their perception of events as well as their ability to resist internment. Oral history interviews with Japanese Americans who were interned provide the main primary source information. Military documents of camp examinations and newspaper articles show the racist climate of the United States during internment. Using these primary sources in conjunction with secondary scholarship from some of ...

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A final paper submitted for an international relations class that examines the circumstances and execution of Japanese internment policies during WWII in the United States. Specific focus is given to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States et al for contextual evidence.

Human Rights Quarterly

alison renteln

Olivia Kosakoff

During the period of World War II, the people of the free nations fought for the preservation of the very existence of the democratic government and its institutions, which warranted the most valuable civil rights: freedom, equality under the law and the pursuit of happiness. But while our men and women were in the battlegrounds abroad, fighting dictatorial powers that wanted to suppress those rights worldwide, our own government became a tyrannical authority, executing methods similar to those used by the enemy's governments, against tens of thousands of American citizens. The national battleground was throughout many of our towns, and the casualties were American citizens of Japanese descent. From 1942 until 1945, more than 120,000 Americans citizens and legal residents-aliens were forced to live behind the fences of Relocation Camps, accused of no other crime than their ancestors' origin. In this essay, I shall study this period's events and historical causes, and I'll survey the short and long term effects on Japanese men and women, and their families. I want also to examine the impact that years of internment had on the Japanese communities and the subject of redress. Finally, I shall make a special effort on scrutinizing the ideological and legal challenge this sad period of our recent past meant to our democracy. It is my intention to review how the Japanese Internment helped defining the nature of our democracy, what lessons can be learned from this historical experience, and how, in the aftermath, democracy reevaluates itself and evolves, to become stronger. Asian immigration came to and stayed mostly in the Pacific Coastal states, principally California. Since the very origin of its statehood, California attracted an enormous influx of immigrants due to the Gold Rush madness and the fast development of the economy that resulted from it. The White-Anglo supremacy (direct result of the Manifest Destiny ideology) crushed and discriminated all and any other types of ethnicities competing for jobs, business and/or political and

This article attempts to resituate the Japanese Internment as a significant episode in the development of the New Deal Order’s understandings of race. By analyzing the policy tensions, shifts, and ambivalences in the War Relocation Authority’s administration of the internment camps, I argue that many significant features of how race would subsequently be conceived for Japanese Americans in particular and for the Nation as a whole were dis-closed in the attempts of the WRA to reconcile older associations of racial stigma, assimilability, and captive labor with new imperatives around the plural integrationist basis of American democracy.

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In September 1971 Congress repealed the Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. This act had authorized the President to apprehend and detain any person suspected as a threat to internal security during a national emergency. This article analyzes the Title II repeal campaign between 1967 and 1971, revealing that the public historical memories of Japanese American internment greatly influenced support for repeal in Congress and among the American public. Civil rights and antiwar protesters both feared that such a law might be used against them, but Japanese Americans had been interned during World War II. Their presence in the repeal campaign made the question of detention starkly real and the need for repeal persuasive. Conversely, their work for repeal allowed them to address a painful part of their American experience and speak publicly as a community.

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Terminology and the mass incarceration of japanese americans during world war ii.

2021 Aleutian Islands WWII National Historic Area; Honouliuli National Historic Site; JACS Grant Program; Manzanar National Historic Site; Minidoka National Historic Site; Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park; Tule Lake National Monument

It is important to accurately describe the history of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II without perpetuating euphemistic terms that the US government and others employed at the time, or incorrect terms later substituted that do not adequately describe the injustice experienced by more than 120,000 people. The National Park Service (NPS) units preserving the Japanese American confinement sites should provide safe places for people to experience, learn about, and in some cases remember the historic events that occurred there. It is our responsibility to base our historical interpretation on a variety of reliable sources while taking into consideration the diverse viewpoints of visitors. Using accurate language can be one way of adding depth to the government’s approach to and level of understanding of Japanese American removal and confinement. Therefore, it is important that we strive for historical and academic accuracy in choosing our words, and that we educate visitors about the context, both past and present, in which particular words were used. The NPS has not published standard guidance on terminology related to Japanese American World War II experiences. NPS employees regularly engage with people who experienced removal and incarceration based on their ethnicity, as well as the general public. NPS employees are often mobile and may transfer to work at Japanese American confinement sites with limited or no background related to Japanese American removal and incarceration. These factors make a reference such as this paper an essential resource for the NPS. This paper attempts to define and contextualize some of the prevalent terms and offers guidance about usage.

On February 19, 1942, following Japan’s December 7, 1941 bombing of Hawai‘i as well as decades of discriminatory laws directed against Japanese immigrants and their children, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. The order directed the US Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Acting under that authority, General John DeWitt orchestrated the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans­—including those who were US citizens by birth and their Japanese immigrant parents—from their West Coast homes and communities. [1] They were rounded up, transported, and incarcerated in remote areas under harsh and overcrowded conditions in facilities run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). By war’s end, the United States had incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans in government camps and facilities. [2] Throughout World War II, the US government used newsreels and press coverage to portray the forced mass removal, confinement, and dispersal in a benign light. Spokespeople used carefully chosen words and images to communicate these processes, the places where people were being confined, and the people themselves. “Evacuation” and “relocation” and their derivatives, such as “evacuee” and “relocation center,” were the most prevalent words. The government also launched a subsequent massive campaign promoting a different kind of “relocation,” urging people who had been forcibly incarcerated to leave the confinement camps and resettle outside of the western states.

There is not universal consensus concerning terms used to describe the history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Highly charged debates over words and terminology continue to reflect intense feelings and diverse perspectives about what occurred during World War II and what those events mean today. Many different words have been and continue to be used to describe the US government’s wartime policies toward Japanese Americans. Words used to describe the forced removal of people from their homes and communities and their subsequent incarceration include detention, confinement, evacuation, exclusion, imprisonment, incarceration, internment, and relocation. The people themselves have been referred to as evacuees, detainees, incarcerees, inmates, internees, non-aliens, and prisoners. The people have also been described as Japanese, Japanese Americans, Japanese resident aliens, Nikkei (people of Japanese ancestry), and by their generation in the United States— Issei (first generation), Nisei (second generation), Kibei ( Nisei sent to Japan for education and returned to America), and Sansei (third generation). [3] Finally, the facilities used to implement the government’s policies have been called assembly centers, camps, concentration camps, detention facilities, incarceration centers, internment camps, prisons, and war relocation centers. Discussions about terminology have occurred for decades, beginning during World War II and gaining attention during the Redress Movement in the 1960s and 1970s – and long before formal NPS involvement . [4] Scholars and stakeholders including Roger Daniels, Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, Yoshinori H. T. Himel, James Hirabayashi, and Raymond Okamura have addressed terminology in published essays. The Japanese American Citizens League, as well as the non-profit organization Densho, also have published guidance on terminology. Specific terms have been debated and vetted, while some continue to be highly controversial. In particular, the term “concentration camp” has spurred discussions with survivors and descendants of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. In 1998, the American Jewish Committee and Japanese American National Museum held a large and formal discussion at Ellis Island about the use of “concentration camp” to describe the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Although that discussion resulted in a joint statement, beginning in 2018, the American Holocaust Memorial Museum published statements seemingly in opposition. In 2020, terminology continues to be one of the most relevant and often - discussed topics associated with the history of Japanese American incarceration.

Going Forward

Words that a person uses reflect what they have experienced, their depth of knowledge, and their worldviews. The selection of particular words by an individual or by consensus within an organization may also serve ideological or political purposes. In addition, the use of specific words and our understanding of them changes over time, and this is precisely the case that the NPS and public are grappling with at this time. It is for this reason that the NPS has taken an interpretive approach to addressing terminology, one in which the topic is used as an educational tool in appropriate contexts. The words we choose for interpretation and education have a profound influence on what the United States and international public understand about the incarceration experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. We need to ensure that we are transparent and open about terminology. NPS staff recognize and respect that those who were incarcerated may use whatever words they choose to describe their experiences. As representatives of the NPS, interpreters and other staff members strive to use accurate words that do not promote misinformation but rather allow all visitors the opportunity to learn. We will continue to have open discussions with people about the power of words. The following glossary is divided into terms used to describe the facilities where people were held, the movement of people, and the people themselves. It includes terms that the US government used during World War II and suggests more accurate alternatives.

Facilities and Types of Confinement

Assembly center:.

The US government used the term “assembly center” to refer to the racetracks, fairgrounds, and other existing facilities, as well as the newly built Manzanar facility, run by the US Army’s Wartime Civilian Control Agency for part of 1942 where Japanese Americans were confined under armed guard while awaiting more permanent facilities. Use it only when necessary in a historical context as part of a proper name, such as Tanforan Assembly Center. In most cases, one can use the site’s actual name before the US Army appropriated it, such as Tanforan Racetrack. Other suggested terms include detention center, confinement site, incarceration center.

Concentration Camp:

Scholars and stakeholders who have examined use of the term concentration camp to describe Japanese American incarceration sites broadly agree that the term is an accurate one. In 1998, the Japanese American National Museum and American Jewish Committee issued a joint statement in advance of an exhibit at Ellis Island addressing the usage of “concentration camp.” The joint statement defined a concentration camp as “a place where people are imprisoned not because of any crimes they have committed, but simply because of who they are.” After giving a short description of various historical concentration camps, the authors concluded: “Despite differences, all had one thing in common: the people in power removed a minority group from the general population and the rest of society let it happen.” [5] NPS staff are encouraged to understand the multiple contexts in which the term concentration camp has been used and its deeply affecting nature. The term may be included, with context, in exhibits or publications. NPS staff are encouraged to allow people who experienced Japanese American removal and confinement and other members of the public their own perspectives on the appropriateness of the term concentration camp in the Japanese American context.

Imprisonment vs. Incarceration:

Although these terms are quite close in meaning, there is a critical difference: A person is imprisoned due to being convicted of, or pleading guilty to, a crime, whereas a person is incarcerated for a variety of reasons. “Incarceration” does not include a value judgment of a person’s wrongdoing – it refers to someone being confined somewhere. The key to this difference is demonstrated in the term “false imprisonment” for an innocent person being incarcerated in a prison. [6] To incarcerate someone does not suggest that the person has been found guilty of a crime, as imprisonment does. It is not a heated term and is not inaccurate. The 10 facilities run by the War Relocation Authority can be referred to accurately as incarceration or confinement sites.

Internment Camp, Internment:

During World War II, the Department of Justice and US Army detained and interned targeted non-US citizens who were resident aliens from Japan, Germany, Italy, and a few other nations. As citizens of countries with which the United States was at war, those people generally were treated according to the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment to prisoners of war. Maps that show sites of Japanese American confinement during WWII differentiate between those Department of Justice or US Army internment camps and the 10 War Relocation Authority confinement sites that held US citizens of Japanese ancestry. The internment of residents who were not US citizens was in alignment with the Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, and 1929. For an excellent explanation of this, see “Americans’ Misuse of ‘Internment’,” by Yoshinori H. T. Himel. He states in the introduction: Many Americans have used the word “internment” to denote World War II’s civil liberties calamity of mass, race-based, nonselective forced removal and incarceration of well over 110,000 Japanese American civilians, most of them American citizens. But the word “internment,” a term of art in the international law of war, does not describe that community-wide incarceration. Instead, it invokes an internationally agreed legal scheme under which a warring country may incarcerate enemy soldiers and selected civilian subjects of an enemy power. [7] Although many people use the word “internment” when speaking about the US citizens and their immigrant parents confined in WRA camps, NPS’s educational mission would be advanced by distinguishing between internment camps and other types of confinement sites in NPS exhibits and conversations.

Isolation Center:

This refers to sites at Moab, Utah; Tulelake, California; and Leupp, Arizona; where WRA officials sent some Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents when they wanted them removed from the WRA centers. In particular, people from Manzanar War Relocation Center were sent there in late December 1942. Because many of the people were US citizens and had not been charged with a crime, they did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Army or Department of Justice. The Moab site and Tule Lake Citizen Isolation Center (also known as Camp Tulelake) were former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps; Leupp, on the Navajo Nation, had been a boarding school.

Not accurate, although sometimes it is used. (See Imprisonment vs. Incarceration above)

Reception Center:

In spring 1942, the facility that would become Manzanar War Relocation Center was referred to as Owen’s Valley Reception Center. It is a term that is rarely used but does appear in historical photos and documents.

Relocation Center:

The US government used the term relocation center to refer to the more permanent facilities run by the War Relocation Authority where Japanese Americans were confined from 1942 until as late as 1946. That term did not convey the overcrowded, harsh conditions, lack of privacy, and loss of family ties that became the reality. Use it only when necessary in a historical context as part of a proper name, such as Manzanar War Relocation Center. Suggested terms to use when referring to any of the 10 WRA sites: confinement centers, incarceration sites, sites of confinement.

Movement of People

Evacuation:.

During World War II, the US Army used the term “evacuation” to describe the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes in California or parts of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Arizona. Although in twenty-first century connotation, different US agencies “evacuate” people to get them out of harm’s way, a review of historic letters, memorandums, orders, and conversations reveals that General John DeWitt, Colonel Karl Bendetsen, and others used the term “evacuation” to describe logistics. Regardless of WWII-era motivations or connotations, because of today’s association of “evacuation” with avoiding the threat of harm, NPS should not refer to the forced removal of more than 110,000 people from their homes because of their ethnicity as “evacuation.” Suggested terms to describe the movement of Japanese Americans during WWII include “forced removal,” “expulsion,” and “mass removal.”

Relocation:

During World War II, government officials used “relocation” for two different mass movements of people. First, they used relocation to describe the forced removal of Japanese Americans to War Department assembly centers and War Relocation Authority facilities. Second, beginning in early 1943, the WRA pushed those same people to leave the government facilities and “relocate” to midwestern and eastern states. As with “evacuation,” today we should avoid referring to the forced removal of more than 110,000 people as “relocation,” or of the WRA facilities as “relocation centers,” despite the use of the word relocation in the agency’s name. Suggested terms to describe the movement of Japanese Americans during WWII include “forced removal,” “expulsion,” and “mass removal.”

Resettlement:

For clarity, one can describe the movement of Japanese Americans out of the WRA facilities to other parts of the United States as “resettlement.”

When Referring to People

Terms such as “evacuee,” “internee,” and “incarceree” derive from peoples’ particular experiences of “evacuation,” “internment,” or “incarceration.” When referring to people, try to respect their humanity by avoiding such labels. Rather than “former incarcerees,” consider saying, “formerly incarcerated people.” However, since the following terms are in common usage, here are the definitions:

During World War II, government employees referred to the Japanese Americans who were confined in the WRA camps as “evacuees.” Often the people confined also referred to themselves as evacuees. Do not refer to people who were forced from their homes and put into WRA camps as “evacuees” or even “formerly evacuated people.” The twenty-first century connotation of “evacuation” as moving people out of harm’s way does not convey the harsh, unjust reality that the Japanese Americans endured. Suggested terms include “people who were forcibly removed from their homes” or “unjustly removed.”

Incarceree:

A person, regardless of citizenship status, confined in one of the 10 War Relocation Authority facilities. Nearly all these people were either Japanese immigrants or Americans of Japanese ancestry. There were some non-Japanese American spouses and one teenage boy of Mexican and Irish ancestry also held in those facilities. Rather than “incarcerees,” say “formerly incarcerated people.”

A non-US citizen confined in a Department of Justice or US Army facility (known as an internment camp) during war against the person’s country. During World War II, the US government interned thousands of resident aliens from Japan, Germany, and Italy. The term remains accurate for those who were not US citizens and were placed in internment camps. However, it would be better to acknowledge the person’s humanity, as noted above. Rather than “internee” say a “formerly interned person,” or say the person’s name and say he or she had been interned by the US government.

Bibliography

Bartov, Omer, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke, et al. “An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.” The New York Review of Books , July 1, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/an-open-letter-to-the-director-of-the-holocaust-memorial-museum/?fbclid=IwAR1AoKWPKzbxZfxd8ia48BuBjDfbyerfRizy7SZziGGWqnCShfUQ8LFZjyY Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. “CLPEF Background.” Accessed September 16, 2019. http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied . University of Washington Press, 1997. Daniels, Roger. American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans , 1942–1945, nine volumes. Garland Publishing, New York and London, 1989. ____________. Prisoners Without Trial . New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. ____________. “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans.” Discover Nikkei , February 1, 2008. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/2/1/words-do-matter/ Densho. “Terminology.” https://densho.org/terminology/ Accessed September 15, 2019. Friedberg, Edna. “Why Holocaust Analogies are Dangerous.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. December 12, 2018. https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/why-holocaust-analogies-are-dangerous Grisham, Lori, and Edward Schumacher-Matos. “Euphemisms, Concentration Camps and The Japanese Internment.” NPR , February 10, 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/146691773/euphemisms-concentration-camps-and-the-japanese-internment Herzig-Yoshinaga, Aiko. “Words Can Lie or Clarify: Terminology of the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans.” Discover Nikkei , February 2, 2010. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/02/02/terminology-incarceration-japanese-americans/ Himel, Yoshinori H.T. “Americans’ Misuse of ‘Internment’.” Seattle Journal for Social Justice Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 2016): 797-837. https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1834&context=sjsj Hirabayashi, James A. “‘Concentration Camp’ or ‘Relocation Center’ - What’s in a Name?” Discover Nikkei: Enduring Communities , April 24, 2008. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/4/24/enduring-communities/ Japanese American Citizens League. A Lesson in American History: The Japanese American Experience . National Education Association, 2011. Japanese American National Museum. “American Jewish Committee, Japanese American National Museum Issue Joint Statement About Ellis Island Exhibit Set To Open April 3.” March 13, 1998. http://www.janm.org/press/release/52/ Accessed September 15, 2019. Knox, Liam. “Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education , July 3, 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-push-back-on-holocaust-museums-rejection-of-historical-analogy/ Kunitomi Embrey, Sue. “Concentration Camps, Not Relocation Centers.” Manzanar Committee, 1976. https://manzanarcommittee.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/embrey-terminology-1976.pdf National JACL Power of Words II Committee. “Power of Words Handbook: A Guide to Language about Japanese Americans in World War II.” Japanese American Citizens League, 2013. https://jacl.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Power-of-Words-Rev.-Term.-Handbook.pdf Accessed September 15, 2019. Robinson, Greg. A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies.” June 24, 2019. https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/statement-regarding-the-museums-position-on-holocaust-analogies

[1] The full text of Executive Order 9066 can be found at https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=74&page=transcript

[2] These numbers do not take into account non-US citizens interned by the Department of Justice or the US Army in camps, such as Honouliuli in Hawai‘i. See glossary for internment.

[3] The term “Jap” and “Jap Camp” also were used during World War II and in its aftermath. Then and now, these terms are racial slurs that are considered derogatory and hurtful.

[4] The Redress Movement was an effort, largely occurring in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, to obtain restitution of civil rights, an apology, and monetary compensation by the US government. Grassroots efforts prompted Congress and President Jimmy Carter to establish the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. The Commission’s 1983 report concluded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General John DeWitt had known that there was no military necessity for the mass incarceration. It attributed the cause to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: The Report of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Washington D.C.: Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, 1997) 459.

[5] Japanese American National Museum, “American Jewish Committee, Japanese American National Museum Issue Joint Statement About Ellis Island Exhibit Set To Open April 3,” March 13, 1998. http://www.janm.org/press/release/52/

[6] See, for example, Webster’s 1828, Cambridge, Collins, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

[7] Yoshinori H. T. Himel, “Americans’ Misuse of ‘Internment’,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice , Vol. 14, Issue 3, Spring 2016, pp. 797 – 837.

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Last updated: November 30, 2023

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Primary Source Set Japanese American Internment

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher’s Guide

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Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of Japanese Americans were, regardless of U.S. citizenship, required to evacuate their homes and businesses and move to remote war relocation and internment camps run by the U.S. Government. This proved to be an extremely trying experience for many of those who lived in the camps, and to this day remains a controversial topic.

Historical Background

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his address to a joint session of Congress.

The repercussions of this event in the U.S. were immediate. In cities and towns up and down the West Coast, prominent Japanese Americans were arrested, while friends and neighbors of Japanese Americans viewed them with distrust. Within a short time, Japanese Americans were forced out of their jobs and many experienced public abuse, even attacks.

When the president issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, he authorized the evacuation and relocation of “any and all persons” from “military areas.” Within months, all of California and much of Washington and Oregon had been declared military areas. The process of relocating thousands of Japanese Americans began.

The relocation process was confusing, frustrating, and frightening. Japanese Americans were required to register and received identification numbers. They had to be inoculated against communicable diseases. They were given just days to divest themselves of all that they owned, including businesses and family homes. Bringing only what they could carry, they were told to report to assembly centers: large facilities like racetracks and fairgrounds. These centers became temporary housing for thousands of men, women and children. Stables and livestock stalls often served as living and sleeping quarters.

There was no privacy for individuals – all their daily needs were accommodated in public facilities. Internees waited, for weeks that sometimes became months, to be moved from the assembly centers to their assigned war relocation centers.

Life in the Camps

These hardships continued when internees reached their internment camp. Located in remote, desolate, inhospitable areas, the camps were prison-like, with barbed wire borders and guards in watchtowers. Many people, not always family members, shared small living spaces and, again, public areas served internees’ personal needs. Eventually, life in the camps settled into routines. Adults did what they could to make living quarters more accommodating. Schools were established for the educational needs of the young. Residents performed the jobs necessary to run the camps. Self-governing bodies emerged, as did opportunities for gainful employment and for adult teaching and learning of new skills. Evidence of normal community living appeared as newspapers, churches, gardening, musical groups, sports teams, and enclaves of writers and artists emerged. The barbed wire and watchtowers, however remained in place.

Serving Their Country

Despite this treatment, Japanese Americans did their best to get through the internment experience and serve their country during a time of war. More than 30,000 Japanese American men enlisted in the armed forces. The all Japanese American 442nd Regiment became the most decorated unit of its size in U.S. history.

After the War

First generation Japanese immigrants were hardest hit by the internment. Many lost everything - homes, businesses, farms, respect, status and sense of achievement. Their children and grandchildren also experienced disruptions to their lives, but they emerged after the war with lives that, while changed, were not destroyed. These second- and third-generation Japanese American citizens began to shoulder responsibility for leadership in the Japanese American community.

Suggestions for Teachers

Select and analyze one image of life in a relocation center. What can be learned from the image? What questions does the image raise? Analyze additional images from the set to see what questions can be answered, and what new questions come up. Students might organize their thinking into categories such as living conditions, recreation, or work. If time permits, select one or two questions for further research using primary or secondary sources.

Ask students to study a selection of items related to life in a relocation center and form a hypothesis about how the people shown reacted to being interned, and then list details from one or more primary sources to support the hypothesis. Alternatively, give students a hypothesis, a selection of items from the set, and ask some students to find evidence to support the hypothesis, and others to find evidence that refutes it. Compare photographs by two or more photographers. Consider purpose, style, intended audience, and the impact of each image.

Watch the oral history clip from Norman Ikari. Ask students to write a brief retelling of the oral history in their own words, and then allow time for students to compare their writing with a partner’s. What aspect of the oral history did each student emphasize? What is the significance of this oral history? Ask students to think about how this oral history supports, contradicts, or adds to their understanding of the period or events. How does encountering this history firsthand change its emotional impact? (For more questions and ideas, consult the Teacher’s Guide: Analyzing Oral History.)

This primary source set also provides an opportunity to help students understand that different times shape different cultural values and mores. The set may also provide impetus for discussions that compare and contrast the unfair treatment of other segments of the U.S. population, in America’s past and today.

Additional Resources

Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar

Japanese Immigrants: Behind the Wire

American Memory Timeline: Great Depression and World War II - Japanese American Internment

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What was the internment of Japanese Americans?

Where were japanese american internment camps, why were japanese americans interned during world war ii, what was life like inside japanese american internment camps, what was the cost of japanese american internment.

Japanese American internment

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• HistoryNet - Japanese Internment Camps: America’s Great Mistake
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - The Japanese American Wartime Incarceration: Examining the Scope of Racial Trauma
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - Japanese American Relocation
• National Park Service - A brief history of Japanese American Relocation during World War II
• GlobalSecurity.org - World War II Japanese American Internment
• Academia - Landscapes of Japanese American Internment
• Japanese American internment - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Japanese American internment - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Japanese American internment was the forced relocation by the U.S. government of thousands of Japanese Americans to detention camps during World War II , beginning in 1942. The government’s action was the culmination of its long history of racist and discriminatory treatment of Asian immigrants and their descendants that boiled over after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor .

Japanese American internment camps were located mainly in western U.S. states. The first internment camp in operation was Manzanar , located in California. Between 1942 and 1945 a total of 10 camps were opened, holding approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans for varying periods of time in California , Arizona , Wyoming , Colorado , Utah , and Arkansas .

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor , the U.S. War Department suspected that Japanese Americans might act as espionage agents for Japan , despite a lack of evidence. John J. McCloy , the assistant secretary of war, who oversaw the internment program, prioritized national security over civil liberties expressed in the Constitution . He justified his actions by saying he considered the Constitution “just a scrap of paper.”

Conditions at Japanese American internment camps were spare, without many amenities. The camps were ringed with barbed-wire fences and patrolled by armed guards, and there were isolated cases of internees being killed. Generally, however, camps were run humanely. Residents established a sense of community, setting up schools, newspapers, and more, and children played sports. Learn more.

The cost of internment to Japanese Americans was great. Because they were given so little time to settle their affairs before being shipped to internment camps , many were forced to sell their houses, possessions, and businesses well below market value to opportunistic Euro-Americans. When released, many Japanese Americans had very little to return to except discrimination .

Japanese American internment , the forced relocation by the U.S. government of thousands of Japanese Americans to detention camps during World War II . That action was the culmination of the federal government’s long history of racist and discriminatory treatment of Asian immigrants and their descendants that had begun with restrictive immigration policies in the late 1800s.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese aircraft on December 7, 1941, the U.S. War Department suspected that Japanese Americans might act as saboteurs or espionage agents, despite a lack of hard evidence to support that view. Some political leaders recommended rounding up Japanese Americans, particularly those living along the West Coast, and placing them in detention centres inland. A power struggle erupted between the U.S. Department of Justice , which opposed moving innocent civilians, and the War Department , which favoured detention. John J. McCloy , the assistant secretary of war, remarked that if it came to a choice between national security and the guarantee of civil liberties expressed in the Constitution , he considered the Constitution “just a scrap of paper.” In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, more than 1,200 Japanese community leaders were arrested, and the assets of all accounts in the U.S. branches of Japanese banks were frozen.

At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans lived on the mainland in the United States . About 200,000 immigrated to Hawaii , then a U.S. territory. Some were first-generation Japanese Americans, known as Issei , who had emigrated from Japan and were not eligible for U.S. citizenship. About 80,000 of them were second-generation individuals born in the United States ( Nisei ), who were U.S. citizens. Whereas many Issei retained their Japanese character and culture , Nisei generally acted and thought of themselves as thoroughly American.

In early February 1942, the War Department created 12 restricted zones along the Pacific coast and established nighttime curfews for Japanese Americans within them. Individuals who broke curfew were subject to immediate arrest . The nation’s political leaders still debated the question of relocation, but the issue was soon decided. On February 19, 1942, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 , which gave the U.S. military authority to exclude any persons from designated areas. Although the word Japanese did not appear in the executive order , it was clear that only Japanese Americans were targeted, though some other immigrants, including Germans, Italians, and Aleuts , also faced detention during the war. On March 18, 1942, the federal War Relocation Authority (WRA) was established. Its mission was to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”

On March 31, 1942, Japanese Americans along the West Coast were ordered to report to control stations and register the names of all family members. They were then told when and where they should report for removal to an internment camp . (Some of those who survived the camps and other individuals concerned with the characterization of their history have taken issue with the use of the term internment , which they argue is used properly when referring to the wartime detention of enemy aliens but not of U.S. citizens, who constituted some two-thirds of those of Japanese extraction who were detained during the war. Many of those who are critical of the use of internment believe incarceration and detention to be more appropriate terms.) Japanese Americans were given from four days to about two weeks to settle their affairs and gather as many belongings as they could carry. In many cases, individuals and families were forced to sell some or all of their property, including businesses, within that period of time.

Some Euro-Americans took advantage of the situation, offering unreasonably low sums to buy possessions from those who were being forced to move. Many homes and businesses worth thousands of dollars were sold for substantially less than that. Nearly 2,000 Japanese Americans were told that their cars would be safely stored until they returned. However, the U.S. Army soon offered to buy the vehicles at cut-rate prices, and Japanese Americans who refused to sell were told that the vehicles were being requisitioned for the war.

After being forcibly removed from their homes, Japanese Americans were first taken to temporary assembly centres. From there they were transported inland to the internment camps (critics of the term internment argue that these facilities should be called prison camps ). The first internment camp in operation was Manzanar , located in east-central California . Between 1942 and 1945 a total of 10 camps were opened, holding approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans for varying periods of time in California, Arizona , Wyoming , Colorado , Utah , and Arkansas .

Educator Resources

Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II

In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy." The attack launched the United States fully into the two theaters of World War II – Europe and the Pacific. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had been involved in a non-combat role, through the Lend-Lease Program that supplied England, China, Russia, and other anti-fascist countries of Europe with munitions.

The attack on Pearl Harbor also launched a rash of fear about national security, especially on the West Coast. In February 1942, just two months later, President Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans. The order authorized the Secretary of War and military commanders to evacuate all persons deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps, that the government called "relocation centers," further inland.  Read more...

Primary Sources

Links go to DocsTeach , the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

Meeting Between Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt and Representatives of the Department of Justice and the Army at the Office of Commanding General, Headquarters, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, in San Francisco, 1/4/1942

Executive Order 9066 Issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 2/19/1942

Posting of Exclusion Order in San Francisco, Directing Removal of Persons of Japanese Ancestry from the First Section in San Francisco to be Affected by the Evacuation, 4/11/1942

Thank You Note at the Iseri Drugstore in "Little Tokyo" in Los Angeles, California, 4/11/1942

Merchandise Sale in San Francisco, California, Where Customers Buy Goods Prior to Evacuation and Internment, 4/4/1942

Children Pledge Allegiance to the Flag in San Francisco, California, at Raphael Weill Public School, 4/20/1942

The Shibuya Family at Their Home in Mountain View, California, Before Being Sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming Days Later, 4/18/1942

Ranch Superintendent Henry Futamachi (Left) Discusses Agriculture with Ranch Owner John MacKinley Before Evacuation and Internment, 4/10/1942

Dave Tatsuno Reading to His Son and Packing His Possessions Prior to Evacuation and Internment, 4/13/1942

Residents of Japanese Ancestry File Forms in San Francisco, Two Days Before Evacuation and Internment, 4/4/1942

Residents of Japanese Ancestry, With Baggage Stacked, Waiting for a Bus to be Evacuated at the Wartime Civil Control Administration in San Francisco, 4/6/1942

Japanese Family Heads and Persons Living Alone Line up for "Processing" in Response to Civilian Exclusion Order Number 20, 4/25/1942

Baggage Being Sorted and Trucked to Owners in Their Barracks at the Minidoka Internment Camp in Eden, Idaho, 8/17/1942

Registering and Assigning Barracks to the Newly Arrived at Minidoka Internment Camp in Eden, Idaho, 8/17/1942

The Hirano Family Posing with a Photograph of a United States Serviceman at the Colorado River Internment Camp in Poston, Arizona

High School Campus at Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming — Classes are Held in Tarpaper-covered, Barrack-style Buildings, 6/1943

The Poster Crew at Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming, Making Fire and Safety Posters, Announcements for Public Gatherings and Dances, and General Instructions, 9/14/1942

Court Session at Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming, Presiding Over Infractions of Camp Regulations and Civil Court Cases, 6/4/1943

Coal Crew at Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming, Providing Heat for Residents During Cold Winter Months, 9/15/1942

Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 – Written by General DeWitt, who Oversaw the Internment of Japanese-Americans, Providing a Favorable Overview of the "Evacuation Program"

This 10-minute film clip called "Japanese-Americans" (1945) comes from Army-Navy Screen Magazine , a biweekly film series for servicemen during World War II. It highlights the 100th Infantry Battalion, composed largely of Japanese-Americans.

This video clip shows President Ronald Reagan Giving Remarks and Signing the Japanese-American Internment Compensation Bill, 8/10/1988

Teaching Activity

In Japanese American Incarceration During World War II on DocsTeach  students analyze a variety of documents and photographs to learn how the government justified the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and how civil liberties were denied.

Additional Background Information

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified German, Italian, and Japanese aliens who were suspected of being potential enemy agents; and they were kept under surveillance. Following the attack at Pearl Harbor, government suspicion arose not only around aliens who came from enemy nations, but around all persons of Japanese descent, whether foreign born ( issei ) or American citizens ( nisei ). During congressional committee hearings, representatives of the Department of Justice raised logistical, constitutional, and ethical objections. Regardless, the task was turned over to the U.S. Army as a security matter.

The entire West Coast was deemed a military area and was divided into military zones. Executive Order 9066 authorized military commanders to exclude civilians from military areas. Although the language of the order did not specify any ethnic group, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command proceeded to announce curfews that included only Japanese Americans. Next, he encouraged voluntary evacuation by Japanese Americans from a limited number of areas; about seven percent of the total Japanese American population in these areas complied.

On March 29, 1942, under the authority of the executive order, DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 4, which began the forced evacuation and detention of Japanese-American West Coast residents on a 48-hour notice. Only a few days prior to the proclamation, on March 21, Congress had passed Public Law 503, which made violation of Executive Order 9066 a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Because of the perception of "public danger," all Japanese Americans within varied distances from the Pacific coast were targeted. Unless they were able to dispose of or make arrangements for care of their property within a few days, their homes, farms, businesses, and most of their private belongings were lost forever.

From the end of March to August, approximately 112,000 persons were sent to "assembly centers" – often racetracks or fairgrounds – where they waited and were tagged to indicate the location of a long-term "relocation center" that would be their home for the rest of the war. Nearly 70,000 of the evacuees were American citizens. There were no charges of disloyalty against any of these citizens, nor was there any vehicle by which they could appeal their loss of property and personal liberty.

"Relocation centers" were situated many miles inland, often in remote and desolate locales. Sites included Tule Lake and Manzanar in California; Gila River and Poston in Arizona; Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas, Minidoka in Idaho; Topaz in Utah; Heart Mountain in Wyoming; and Granada in Colorado. (Incarceration rates were significantly lower in the territory of Hawaii, where Japanese Americans made up over one-third of the population and their labor was needed to sustain the economy. However, martial law had been declared in Hawaii immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Army issued hundreds of military orders, some applicable only to persons of Japanese ancestry.)

In the "relocation centers" (also called "internment camps"), four or five families, with their sparse collections of clothing and possessions, shared tar-papered army-style barracks. Most lived in these conditions for nearly three years or more until the end of the war. Gradually some insulation was added to the barracks and lightweight partitions were added to make them a little more comfortable and somewhat private. Life took on some familiar routines of socializing and school. However, eating in common facilities, using shared restrooms, and having limited opportunities for work interrupted other social and cultural patterns. Persons who resisted were sent to a special camp at Tule Lake, CA, where dissidents were housed.

In 1943 and 1944, the government assembled a combat unit of Japanese Americans for the European theater. It became the 442d Regimental Combat Team and gained fame as the most highly decorated of World War II. Their military record bespoke their patriotism.

As the war drew to a close, "internment camps" were slowly evacuated. While some persons of Japanese ancestry returned to their hometowns, others sought new surroundings. For example, the Japanese-American community of Tacoma, WA, had been sent to three different centers; only 30 percent returned to Tacoma after the war. Japanese Americans from Fresno had gone to Manzanar; 80 percent returned to their hometown.

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II sparked constitutional and political debate. During this period, three Japanese-American citizens challenged the constitutionality of the forced relocation and curfew orders through legal actions: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo. Hirabayashi and Korematsu received negative judgments; but Mitsuye Endo, after a lengthy battle through lesser courts, was determined to be "loyal" and allowed to leave the Topaz, Utah, facility.

Justice Murphy of the Supreme Court expressed the following opinion in  Ex parte Mitsuye Endo :

I join in the opinion of the Court, but I am of the view that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by Congress or the Executive but is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program. As stated more fully in my dissenting opinion in Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States , 323 U.S. 214 , 65 S.Ct. 193, racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.

In 1988, Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, Public Law 100-383 – the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 – that acknowledged the injustice of "internment," apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was incarcerated.

One of the most stunning ironies in this episode of denied civil liberties was articulated by an internee who, when told that Japanese Americans were put in those camps for their own protection, countered "If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?"

A note on terminology: The historical primary source documents included on this page reflect the terminology that the government used at the time, such as alien , evacuation , relocation , relocation centers , internment , and Japanese (as opposed to Japanese American ).

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The Japanese American Wartime Incarceration: Examining the Scope of Racial Trauma

Donna k. nagata.

Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Jacqueline H. J. Kim

Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Ten weeks after the 1941 Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. government authorized the removal of more than 110,000 Japanese American men, women, and children from their homes in Western portions of the country to incarceration camps in desolate areas of the United States. The mass incarceration was portrayed as necessary to protect the country from potential acts of espionage or sabotage that might be committed by someone of Japanese ancestry. However, an extensive government review initiated in 1980 found no evidence of military necessity to support the removal decision and concluded that the incarceration was a grave injustice fueled by racism and war hysteria. The Japanese American wartime experience represents a powerful case example of race-based historical trauma. This article describes the consequences of the incarceration for Japanese Americans during and after their unjust imprisonment, their coping responses and healing strategies, as well as the impacts of receiving governmental redress more than four decades after the war’s end. Examination of this specific event provides a perspective for understanding the long-term, radiating effects of racial trauma and the process of healing, over a broad arc of time and across social contexts. Current relevance of the Japanese American incarceration and implications for the field of psychology are discussed.

History and racial trauma are inextricably linked. Given the complex multicultural and multiracial nature of contemporary society, an understanding of the history of racism and its impacts on communities of color is essential. Research on specific historical and race-based traumas can offer insights into these impacts and their long-range consequences. The present paper describes the World War II (WWII) Japanese American incarceration, a case example of racial trauma that occurred over 75 years ago, to provide a perspective on the scope of racial trauma and healing over a broad arc of time and across changing social contexts.

Historical Background

On February 19, 1942, 10 weeks after the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 and authorized the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the western United States. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were labeled as “potentially disloyal”; ordered to leave their homes, careers, and communities; and forced to live in isolated camps located in interior deserts and swamplands. They lived imprisoned behind barbed wire, watched by armed guards, for an average of two to four years. No charges were ever brought before the Japanese Americans, nor were they given the opportunity for a review. Included under the removal order were three generations: first-generation Japanese immigrants ( Issei ), U.S.-born second-generation Japanese Americans ( Nisei ), and their third-generation offspring ( Sansei ; see Figure 1 for generational terms).

Japanese American generations.

Neither citizenship nor age mattered: two thirds of those imprisoned were U.S. citizens by birth (U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians [USCWRIC], 1997 ), including infants and young children. Instead, Japanese heritage alone was the basis for imprisonment: Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the Commanding General for West Coast security, argued “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted … It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today” ( USCWRIC, 1997 , p. 6).

The injustice of framing the incarceration as a military necessity is striking given that, prior to Roosevelt’s issuance of E.O. 9066, the FBI, members of the Naval Intelligence, and Army General Staff did not see the need for mass removal and incarceration as there was no evidence of espionage or sabotage committed by a Japanese American citizen or resident Japanese alien on the West Coast ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). In addition, although proximity to Japan was presented as the reason for removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast, no mass incarceration was implemented in Hawaii, which was significantly closer to Japan, and neither German nor Italian Americans were subjected to mass incarceration even though the United States was also at war with Germany and Italy. Racially charged post-Pearl Harbor fears and the economic self-interests of agricultural groups who would profit by taking over lands farmed by Japanese Americans played important roles in the calls for removal ( Okihiro & Drummond, 1991 ). Later investigations would conclude that the incarceration decision was not a justified military necessity but was instead shaped by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” ( USCWRIC, 1997 , p. xi)

The Incarceration as Trauma

Japanese Americans carried psychological burdens and an undeserved stigma from the unjust imprisonment long after the war’s end. The incarceration remained “the mournful reference point from which these Americans describe changes in their communities, their personal lives, their aspirations” ( USCWRIC, 1997 , p. 301). Its powerful impacts reflect four important forms of trauma: individual, race-based, historical, and cultural. Individual and race-based traumas occurred at the time of incarceration, while the historical and cultural traumas emerged after the war ended at an intergenerational level. At the individual level, the suspicions of disloyalty from non-Japanese and their own government, sudden uprooting and imprisonment without wrongdoing, and uncertainty about their future shattered Japanese Americans’ assumptive world, sense of self, and well-being ( Janoff-Bulman, 1992 ). It is important that the incarceration also represented a powerful race-based trauma ( Bryant-Davis, 2007 ). Japanese Americans were deliberately targeted for discriminatory treatment motivated by racial stereotypes, while German and Italian Americans were not. Decades of anti-Asian racism driven by perceptions of Japanese as untrustworthy and unassimilable foreigners preceded the war and resulted in laws restricting immigration, miscegenation, rights to citizenship, and land ownership ( Daniels, 1988 ). This exclusion of Japanese Americans from mainstream society paved the way for a swift response following Pearl Harbor, with little objection from others. Poll data from the spring of 1942 showed that a majority of Americans favored removal ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). Chinese Americans, who supported the incarceration given the history of conflict between China and Japan, helped spread the belief that Japanese Americans were untrustworthy and wore “I am Chinese” buttons ( Wong, 2005 ). At the same time, nearly all Black and Jewish community organizations and civil liberties groups remained silent ( Greenberg, 1995 ).

Two additional forms of trauma, historical and cultural, surfaced after the incarceration ended and are associated with long-term intergenerational impacts. Historical trauma has been defined as a trauma that is shared by a group of people and has impacts that span across multiple generations ( Mohatt, Thompson, Thai, & Tebes, 2014 ). Consistent with this, evidence points to extended incarceration impacts that affected subsequent generations of Japanese Americans ( Nagata, Kim, & Nguyen, 2015 ). Cultural trauma can be seen as a more specific manifestation of historical trauma. While historical trauma concerns intergenerational impacts broadly, cultural trauma focuses on the way in which a shared traumatic event impacts group consciousness and identity. It is defined as occurring “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a traumatic event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking memories forever and changing their future identity” ( Alexander, 2004 , p. 1). This article highlights both the immediate individual and race-based incarceration traumas experienced by the unjustly imprisoned Issei and Nisei Japanese Americans, as well as the long-term historical and cultural traumas experienced by their Sansei children and Yonsei grandchildren born after the war.

Incarceration Stressors and Coping

To comprehend the extent of incarceration-related traumas, it is important to understand the range of stressors that were involved. The psychological stress of helplessness and uncertainty began within 24 hours of the Pearl Harbor attack. Approximately 1,500 Issei immigrant community leaders, deemed “high risk”, were abruptly taken from their homes by the FBI and sent to alien internment camps without any explanation for their arrests or information about their destination ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). Anxiety grew quickly throughout the Japanese American community about who would be taken next and only increased as the government froze families’ assets and swept through homes confiscating radios, cameras, and items they believed might be used to aid the enemy. Panicked community members burned or buried anything that might link them to Japan, including family heirlooms. Fear, a gap in leadership after Issei leaders were arrested, and a cultural value of obedience and respect for authority resulted in broad compliance with the government’s incarceration orders ( USCWRIC, 1997 ; Weglyn, 1976 ). Three Nisei—Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui—bravely challenged the government’s orders at the time but were unsuccessful in their effortsand convicted of violating the government’s curfew and removal orders. 1

With less than two weeks’ notice of their removal and restricted to taking only what they could carry, Japanese Americans were suddenly forced to sell life’s possessions at a fraction of their worth and leave behind homes, businesses, unharvested crops, and family pets. The stress of grief and loss was exacerbated by the fact that they had no information about where they were being sent or for how long. For some, the indignity of the removal and anticipated confinement proved overwhelming. One Issei man committed suicide because he suffered from uncontrollable trembling and did not want to bring shame to his daughter if seen together in camp ( Jensen, 1997 ). Another, who shot himself, was found holding an Honorary Citizenship Certificate that expressed gratitude for his prior military service to the United States ( Weglyn, 1976 ).

Most Japanese Americans endured two separate dislocations. First, they were moved from their homes to temporary “assembly centers,” where they lived in hastily converted horse stalls at racetracks and in livestock pavilion halls as the government worked to finish the more permanent camps. After an average of three months, Japanese Americans were moved once again to the incarceration camps in trains with drawn shades and armed guards. Uncertainty sparked fears among many that they were being taken somewhere to be shot and killed.

Once incarcerated, the severe conditions of the barrack-style camps created additional physical and psychosocial stressors. Entire families were forced to live in a single room furnished only with cots, a coal-burning stove, a single ceiling light bulb, and no running water. Toileting, bathing, and meals all took place in communal facilities that required waiting in lines for activities that had previously taken place in private homes. Incarcerees endured harsh camp climates (including extreme temperatures and dust storms), substandard medical care and education ( USCWRIC, 1997 ), as well as instances of food poisoning and malnutrition ( Dusselier, 2002 ). Camp conditions also affected important aspects of traditional Japanese family relations ( Morishima, 1973 ). Without a home base, children spent more time socializing with peers than with family. Gender roles were disrupted as fathers lost their breadwinner role and mothers worked in the same low-wage camp jobs as men. At the same time, the camp governance structure required English for transactions and allowed only citizens to participate on community councils. This created intergenerational tensions as young adult bilingual Nisei held more powerful positions than their Japanese-speaking Issei elders ( USCWRIC, 1997 ).

Additional stressors related to camp governance emerged around a mandatory “loyalty oath” questionnaire for all camp inmates 17 years and older. One question asked about willingness to serve in the armed forces of the United States. A second question asked each respondent to “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States …” and to “forswear allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization” ( USCWRIC, 1997 , p. 192). Although the majority of incarcerees viewed this as an opportunity to express their loyalty and answered “yes” to the two questions, serious concerns arose. Some were outraged at being asked to declare allegiance to a country that unjustly imprisoned them. Others worried that forswearing allegiance to Japan could (a) be misused as evidence that one had prior fealty to the emperor, or (b) leave the Issei stateless because they were barred from becoming U.S. citizens. Some young Nisei men felt the best way to show loyalty was to answer “yes-yes” and fight for the United States. This led to almost 33,000 Japanese Americans, including “yes-yes” volunteers and draftees, serving in segregated military units during WWII while their families were held behind barbed wire. The 442nd all-Nisei regimental combat team went on to become among the most-decorated units of the war ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). Other Nisei men, however, believed that American loyalty meant resisting their draft orders until Japanese Americans were constitutionally released from incarceration. Convicted of draft evasion, they spent close to three years in federal prison ( Muller, 2001 ). Incarcerees who responded “no-no” to express their anger and distrust were segregated into a more restrictive camp. Disillusioned by their treatment in America, 20,000 of these “no-no” individuals applied to go to Japan ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). Families and friends became divided around what determined a “loyal” American, and tensions developed into riots and revolts in several camps ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). The bitter differences between those advocating compliance, draft resisters, veterans, and “no-no’s” continued for decades after the war ( Murray, 2008 ).

Outside the strain of the loyalty questions, camp life evolved as time progressed. Guided by core cultural values, incarcerees developed positive ways of coping with camp stressors individually and as a group ( Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ). Japanese collectivistic values of interdependence and social harmony encouraged adaptation and flexibility ( Fugita & O’Brien, 1991 ), while an emphasis on gaman (perseverance through hardship) and shikata ga nai (fatalistic acceptance) encouraged remaining focused on each day, rather than looking to the past or worrying about the future. They actively engaged in individual artwork, hobbies, and connected with one another through social activities (e.g., camp sports teams, clubs, dances). Issei and Nisei also found ways to be resourceful with what was available to them ( Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ). Some, for example, transformed barren camp soil into areas for raising vegetables and fruits ( Dusselier, 2002 ). However, the psychological stress proved too much to bear for others. Camp records indicate that 190 incarcerees were institutionalized for psychiatric problems and the number of reported on-site suicides were estimated to be four times higher than the pre-incarceration rates for Japanese Americans ( Jensen, 1997 ).

Eventually, Nisei who answered “yes-yes” to the loyalty questions but were not assigned to the military were eligible to leave camp before the war’s end—if they located employment away from the West Coast. Anxious to leave the confines of incarceration, many took low-status jobs as domestics and farmhands in states including Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, while their siblings and parents remained imprisoned until the war ended. These Nisei were given only a one-way bus or train ticket and $25 as they ventured into new areas of the country with uncertain levels of anti-Japanese sentiments. Adding to the stress of this daunting transition, the government inhibited their ability to seek support from each other by instructing that they not live next to or congregate in public with other Japanese Americans ( USCWRIC, 1997 ). Guided by their strong cultural commitment to a sense of family, most relocated Nisei later returned to the West coast to join parents and siblings who moved there after being released from the camps.

Postwar Impacts on Incarcerees

Japanese Americans returning to the West Coast were met with verbal abuse, rejection, and discrimination ( Loo, 1993 ). In California, signs reading “No Japs Wanted” were frequent and communities held mass meetings to argue against their return. Seventy instances of terrorism and 19 shootings were identified ( Girdner & Loftis, 1969 ). The actual numbers, however, likely were higher given the hesitancy of Japanese Americans to call attention to their situation.

Immigrant Issei faced particular hardships as the war ended. Although the exclusion orders were rescinded on December 14, 1944, the Issei were afraid to leave the isolated camps for potentially hostile communities. Half were 50 years or older just before the war and among those, 17% were older than 60 ( Thomas & Nishimoto, 1969 ). Being older adults who had lost homes and businesses, most were unable to regain their livelihoods and became dependent on their children. Many also carried a strong sense of shame from being imprisoned and some committed suicide; this occurred especially among those who were elderly bachelors ( USCWRIC, 1997 ).

The Nisei offspring, in their late teens and twenties, still had their lives before them. Despite significant barriers of racism and severe economic setbacks from the incarceration, they focused on building their future and assisting their Issei parents ( Daniels, 1993 ). Many went on to establish successful livelihoods, leading some to portray them as a model minority who overcame the wartime hardships ( Nakanishi, 1993 ). Such a portrayal, however, failed to recognize that Japanese Americans—Issei and Nisei alike—did not talk about the incarceration experience with outsiders or each other for decades. They displayed symptoms of avoidance and detachment associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Loo, 1993 ), mirroring the “conspiracy of silence” observed in trauma survivor groups across the world ( Danieli, 1998 ). Results from a survey of over 400 Nisei indicated that more than 12% never spoke with their Issei parents about the camps, 50% spoke less than four times, and 70% of those who had any discussions conversed less than 15 minutes ( Nagata, 1995 ). Adding to this, the topic of incarceration remained absent from public discourse and textbooks. The resultant silence among Japanese Americans was more than an individual response and instead represented a form of “social amnesia” by the entire group to suppress the experience ( Kashima, 1980 ).

Silence frequently serves as a means for individuals or communities to cope with trauma ( Danieli, 1998 ) but it does not signify that the trauma has healed. In fact, silence can influence identity constriction, attitude formation, decision-making, and action at both the individual and collective levels ( Stone, Coman, Brown, Koppel, & Hirst, 2012 ) and the incarceration silence had critical postwar consequences for the identity of Japanese Americans ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ; Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ). Avoidance of their connection with Japan served as one way to cope with the wartime experience and racist realities of the larger society. Some Nisei shunned all products manufactured in Japan; for example, buying only American car brands ( Inouye, 2016 ; Nagata, 1993 ). Others avoided associating with fellow Japanese Americans to blend in. These efforts, as well as an accentuated drive to succeed, were in hopes of being accepted and proving they were more than 110 percent American ( Mass, 1991 ).

Traumas stemming from deliberate, human-designed action can have especially insidious impacts. For Nisei Japanese Americans, the unjust imprisonment by one’s own government has been described as a betrayal by a trusted source ( Mass, 1991 ). One Nisei interviewee recalled that “Being labeled as an enemy alien and incarcerated in a concentration camp was the most traumatic experience of my life. My thoughts at the time were, this country which I loved and trusted had betrayed me” ( Nagata et al., 2015 , p. 360). Another recalled, “I felt like a second-class citizen, but it really confirmed, it really emphasized that I didn’t belong in this country, that my face, my yellow face made the difference and I will never belong” ( Nagata et al., 2015 , p. 360). The rejection, in turn, created “a psychic damage” described as “‘castration’ and “a deep consciousness of personal inferiority” ( Weglyn, 1976 , p. 273). Rather than directing blame outward toward the government, many Japanese Americans tended toward self-blame: that they somehow should have been “more American” ( Miyamoto, 1986 ). This sense of humiliation and shame has been seen as paralleling the feelings reported by rape victims ( Hansen & Mitson, 1974 ).

The biopsychosocial model suggests that racist environmental events can lead to heightened psychological and physiological stress responses that, when chronic, result in disease risk and adverse negative medical outcomes ( Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999 ). Avoiding discussion of one’s traumatic experiences is also associated with worse physical health ( Pennebaker, Barger, & Tiebout, 1989 ). Mass (1976) attributed the high Nisei postwar rates of psychosomatic disorders and peptic ulcers to the incarceration. Former incarcerees’ vital statistics support this notion: they had near twice the risk of cardiovascular disease, mortality, and premature deaths than their nonincarcerated counterparts ( Jensen, 1997 ).

Detrimental health stemming from adverse effects of incarceration trauma and silence affected some more than others, depending on their demographics. Experiences of trauma leave a stronger imprint at certain developmental stages ( Maercker, 1999 ; Ogle, Rubin, & Siegler, 2013 ). The average age of Nisei at the beginning of their incarceration was approximately 18 years ( Fugita & O’Brien, 1991 ). Given that a majority were incarcerated in adolescence, a critical period of identity and worldview formation ( Erikson, 1968 ), the long-term impacts on older Nisei are not surprising. Those who were in their late teens to early twenties and most likely to have had their education and career plans derailed, reported a stronger sense of injustice and stress around their incarceration ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ; Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ). Older Nisei from Fugita and Fernandez’s (2004) sample of over 150 Nisei from King County, Washington, also reported no positive memories when recollecting their incarceration 50 years later. Postwar national heart mortality data suggests that the toll placed on older Nisei extended beyond the war: the most vulnerable group were 22–26 years of age while in camp, followed by those 17–21 years, and the least vulnerable were 7–11 years ( Jensen, 1997 ). In contrast, Nisei who were younger while in camp were more likely to recall a sense of adventure or anticipation ( Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ), and positive memories of their experience such as friendships and social activities ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ).

Additional research highlights gender differences in post-incarceration impacts. Men, particularly those who were college-aged while in camp, held more negative feelings overall about their past incarceration, especially about prejudice and discrimination, and reported more difficulty with being confined than women ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ). Nagata’s (1993) survey of nearly 500 third generation (Sansei) Japanese American adults also suggests serious health consequences for Nisei men. While Sansei adult children reported equivalent rates of early death (before the age of 60 years) for mothers regardless of whether their mother had been in an incarceration camp, twice as many previously incarcerated fathers had died early when compared with nonincarcerated fathers.

Across demographic groups, individual differences also influenced long-term incarceration coping. Nisei who reported higher coping had higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of negative emotions about their incarceration-related experiences ( Nagata & Tsuru, 2007 ). Better coping was associated with greater attributions of control to external powerful others and lower attributions to chance or fate suggesting that, over time, less emphasis on fatalism and an acknowledgment of governmental power may have been adaptive. Qualitative data also provides examples of adaptive approach-oriented coping across individuals. Many Nisei positively reframed the incarceration as a time of skill development and the forced resettlement as expanding personal horizons beyond their ethnic community ( Nagata & Takeshita, 1998 ).

Intergenerational Impacts

Massive traumas result in radiating and long-term effects that are transferred as a “family legacy” to children born after the trauma ( Danieli, 1998 ). For the third-generation Sansei born after the WWII, these legacy effects were multifold. The severe economic losses following the forced removal and years of confinement meant an absence of “nest eggs” for the Sansei to inherit ( Nagata, 1993 ). For some, the lost acres of prime agricultural lands would have been worth millions of dollars. Other impacts that cannot be easily quantified included experiencing the compromised physical and mental health or premature death of a parent. More generally, the postwar Sansei generation grew up wondering how their lives might be different if their parents had not been incarcerated ( Nagata, 1993 ).

Many critical intergenerational trauma effects are transmitted through parenting interactions ( Danieli, 1982 ). One primary impact of trauma on Nisei parenting manifested in family silence about the incarceration. The vast majority of Nisei did not discuss the camp experience with their Sansei offspring, not only to avoid their own traumatic memories but also to protect their children from the burden of knowing what happened. One Nisei interviewee noted, “I want them to grow up straight and tall and beautiful as they can, without all the sadness, sort of branding them that they are different” ( Nagata et al., 2015 , p. 362). Sansei described conversations with parents as “cryptic,” “oblique,” and “evasive” or limited to only brief, humorous, “before” and “after camp” anecdotes. Data gathered from 491 adult Sansei born after the war, indicated they had approximately 10 conversations about “camp” lasting an average of 15 to 30 minutes in their entire lifetime. When the topic was raised, mothers were reported as having been more likely than fathers to initiate the conversation. This may reflect a gendered tendency for mothers to communicate with their children in the home or the socialization of fathers, as men, to avoid appearing vulnerable or too verbally expressive. The overall absence of discussion created an acute Sansei awareness of an ominous gap in their family history. They noticed shadows of the incarceration when a Nisei parent displayed an unexpected harsh and curt reaction toward a particular food that reactivated negative memories of camp meals (e.g., apple butter or mutton). Yet, with stories untold, these unexplained interactions left the Sansei feeling upset by their parent’s sudden sad or angry response ( Nagata, 1993 ).

While the Nisei had hoped the silence would protect their children from the burden of knowing what happened, parental silence about trauma can have negative consequences for the next generation ( Wiseman et al., 2002 ). Sansei survey data found partial support for this relationship. Lower levels of Nisei parents’ incarceration-related communication were associated with Sansei perceiving greater familial distance and lower positive impacts from their parent’s incarceration. However, higher levels of parental incarceration-related communication were also associated with greater Sansei anger and sadness, suggesting that while more communication may have helped Sansei feel closer to their parents, greater emotional distress accompanied the knowledge they gained. Regardless of level of parental communication, most Sansei reported anger about the incarceration injustice and sadness from recognizing the ways their parents were thwarted from achieving their full potential ( Nagata, 1993 ).

A second important trauma impact on post-incarceration parenting was the Niseis’ efforts to blend into mainstream society by de-emphasizing Japanese culture and language. This resulted in an accelerated loss of Japanese language and cultural practices for the Sansei. “I think it (the internment) affected them (my parents) a lot … the way they raised us very much as non-Japanese,” shared one Sansei interviewee, “they encouraged us to do everything so-called ‘American’ (Ivy League, football). We didn’t do any judo. We didn’t do any kendo. We didn’t do anything Japanese” ( Nagata, 1993 , pp. 137–138). This diminishment of ethnic heritage had important psychological consequences for the Sansei who described themselves as having “inherited” the need to become “super” American and prove their worth to society. Though a majority of Sansei succeeded in meeting their parents’ expectations, some Japanese Americans attributed increased drug abuse, suicides, and gang activities among a subset of Sansei in the 1960s and 1970s to parental wartime incarceration ( Mass, 1976 ). Survey data indicates additional reverberations of the incarceration on the Sansei generation. Compared with those whose parents were not incarcerated, adult Sansei who had a parent in the camps were significantly less confident that their rights as an American citizen would not be violated. Forty-four percent of Sansei who had both parents in camps also agreed that a future incarceration of Japanese Americans could happen ( Nagata, 1993 ).

Although sadness and anger about incarceration trauma sequelae are predominant, the Sansei also point to positive consequences. Most prevalently, they mention the pride they take in their parents’ and relatives’ resilience in the face of the wartime experiences. Some Sansei also report satisfaction in completing a specific educational or career goal that their parent was unable to complete because of the incarceration. A third positive is a heightened sensitivity to injustice and the finding that Sansei survey respondents strongly agreed they would actively resist a future governmental incarceration ( Nagata, 1993 ).

Research conducted with the fourth ( Yonsei ) generation Japanese Americans suggests continued incarceration trauma impacts. Though the Yonsei have been eager to learn about the incarceration from their Sansei parents and Nisei grandparents, they still encounter aspects of silence ( Mayeda, 1995 ; Yamano, 1994 ). One might expect the Yonsei to be less connected with their ethnic history than previous generations. However, influenced by an increasingly multicultural environment, Yonsei are reviving their knowledge of Japanese heritage, cultural practices, language, and Asian American history ( Tsuda, 2015 ). Yet, the specifics about the camps remain “cryptic or nonexistent”, a gap they attribute to their Sansei parents being raised by the Nisei to assimilate ( Mayeda, 1995 , p. 135). As a result, most Yonsei have relied on books to learn what happened. Yonsei also attribute their loss of Japanese culture and language to their family’s incarceration and express a lack of trust in the government similar to the Sansei ( Mayeda, 1995 ). However, Yonsei and Sansei generations differ in their coping strategies. Mayeda (1995) found that while Sansei used a range of avoidant and confrontational coping strategies, Yonsei mostly reported implementing confrontational coping strategies. This, in combination with their increased ethnic identification and desire to educate the next generation, suggests the Yonsei will remain engaged with issues surrounding the wartime incarceration. More research will be needed to explore whether a similar trend continues into the fifth generation ( Gosei ).

Redress for Incarceration Trauma

The Japanese Americans’ trauma remained largely unaddressed for decades. In 1980, however, Congress formed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to assess the circumstances surrounding the incarceration. In addition to reviewing extensive documents and records, the commission gathered testimonies from over 750 witnesses in 20 cities across the country. Many of those who testified were former incarcerees who, for the first time since the war, spoke of the suffering they endured. The commission concluded that the incarceration was a “grave injustice” and recommended that Congress issue a public written apology along with a one-time payment of $20,000 to each surviving incarceree ( USCWRIC, 1997 , pp. 462– 463). More than 40 years after the war, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed into law and followed the commission recommendations.

Historical traumas are rarely formally acknowledged at a governmental level. While the U.S. government has acknowledged a small number of the injustices against ethnic minority groups, its effort to redress the incarceration trauma was unusual because of the large number of eligible recipients and the formal apology being accompanied by Congress-approved monetary reparation ( Nagata et al., 2015 ). The commission was critical in achieving redress success. However, the movement to address the injustice was part of a much longer trajectory shaped by other social forces. Collective silence can mute the past but suppressed traumatic experiences still result in experiences of “haunting,” a term Inouye (2016) used to describe the lingering feelings of disturbance that can persist across generations and eventually propel collective actions, as with the redress movement. Those who drive the processing of cultural trauma often come from the next generation, a “carrier group” that brings to public attention the significance of the trauma as situated in the larger social structure ( Alexander, 2004 ). For Japanese Americans, the Sansei became the carrier group that encouraged former incarcerees to verbalize their traumas and seek governmental redress ( Nagata et al., 2015 ). The Sansei were acculturated to the mainstream American society and more comfortable speaking out. Furthermore, the mid-1960s Black Power movement allowed for a reshaping of ethnic identity: Sansei began taking ethnic studies classes and were able to see the incarceration as a form of racial oppression much like that of other racial minority groups ( Maki, Kitano, & Berthold, 1999 ). This redefinition of group identity motivated Sansei to take part in various incarceration-related activities ( Nakanishi, 1993 ).

The move to seek redress also converged with the Civil Rights movement as African American leaders voiced their concerns regarding Title II of the 1950 Internal Security Act which referenced the Japanese American incarceration and allowed the attorney general to “apprehend and … detain … each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage [in the event of] war, invasion, or insurrection in aid of a foreign enemy” (Internal Security Act of 1950, Title II). Title II generated public attention in the late 1960s. African Americans and activists raised concerns that it could justify confinement of those involved in ghetto riots and antiwar demonstrations and campaigned to have it repealed ( Nagata et al., 2015 ). This broader attention to the injustice of the wartime incarceration within and outside of the Japanese American community, and the successful repeal of Title II, served as crucial precursors to redress. The importance of legal strategies in postwar incarceration coping was also reflected in the 1980s campaigns led by Sansei activist lawyers to overturn the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui, the three Nisei men who had refused to comply with the government during the war. The lawyers’ success in invalidating the men’s original wartime convictions drew increased attention to the incarceration injustice and exemplified both the importance of these Niseis’ commitment to see justice four decades later and the inspired efforts of the Sansei who advocated on their behalf ( Parham & Clauss-Ehlers, 2017 ).

The majority of Japanese Americans supported seeking redress. However, some in the community were concerned that “making waves” would re-raise negative sentiments toward the group. Others worried that accepting monetary compensation would trivialize the pain and suffering Japanese Americans had endured. Important differences also emerged on the best redress approach, many of which reflected the continued tensions between the Japanese American Citizens League (which urged cooperation with the government during the war and praised Nisei military heroism), no-no’s, and draft resisters ( Murray, 2008 ). Nonetheless, the redress process and its ultimate success were critical for Japanese American healing by publicly acknowledging the incarceration trauma, replacing self-blame with public system-blame, and promoting recovery from longstanding silence ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ; Loo, 1993 ). The break in silence, in turn, facilitated an additional form of coping that focused on educating the public in hopes of preventing similar injustices in the future. These educational efforts have included the establishment of the Japanese American National Museum which includes an entire section on the incarceration and the Densho website ( http://densho.org ), a nonprofit organization that provides extensive information about the incarceration as well as oral histories from former incarcerees.

Respondents from a national survey of more than 500 Nisei former incarcerees ( Nagata & Takeshita, 2002 ) reported moderately positive reactions to receiving redress and tended to agree that, overall, redress brought some sense of relief. Interviews conducted with 30 of the respondents further suggest that the government’s apology and acknowledgment of wrongdoing was most important. While the monetary award was appreciated, interviewees noted that it could never address the losses they had sustained. There also was particular sadness that their Issei parents did not live to receive redress ( Daniels, 1993 ). It is important to note that survey respondent attitudes toward different aspects of redress impact varied, with the strongest perceived positive impact reported for “increasing faith in government” and the lowest impact on “reducing negative feelings about the incarceration” and “relieving physical suffering from the incarceration.” In addition, qualitative analyses of the Nisei interviews indicated that 40% of interviewees mentioned “angry/bitter” emotions when describing their post-incarceration views ( Nagata, Cheng, & Nguyen, 2012 ). These findings suggest the enduring impact of trauma and the limits of redress.

Demographic variations and differences in individual beliefs also occurred with regard to reactions toward redress impacts. Older Nisei respondents, those with lower income, and those with a preference for associating with other Japanese Americans reported greater overall personal redress benefits ( Nagata & Takeshita, 2002 ). It is possible that these groups suffered more hardships from the incarceration and in turn, experienced more positive benefits from redress. Women reported experiencing more redress relief than men, perhaps reflecting a tendency for women to approach justice from a more relational and caring perspective than men ( Gilligan, 1982 ). Religious affiliation may also impact Nisei response to redress. Buddhist former incarcerees reported greater emotional, physical, and economic redress benefits than Christians ( Wu, Kim, & Nagata, 2018 ) possibly because they endured greater difficulties before, during, and after the war ( Fugita & Fernandez, 2004 ). Individual differences in belief systems also appear to be related. Nisei who subscribed more strongly to the belief in a just world were found to report greater benefits from redress ( Kim, Nagata, & Akiyama, 2015 ). This suggests that redress may be especially effective as a means of restoring a sense of justice if one believes justice can be restored in the first place.

Strategies for Healing and Intervention

The redress movement significantly empowered Japanese Americans by addressing the social injustice of the incarceration. It facilitated healing by directly addressing the suppressed trauma and bringing the community together around a demand for government acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Public and community discourse became a significant source of healing, providing a forum to express previously hidden pain and anger. “It became obvious that a forty-year silence did not mean that bitter memories had dissipated; they had only been buried in a shallow grave” (USCWRIC, 1991, p. 297).

Similarly, group pilgrimages to former camp locations and annual ceremonies to remember the incarceration have also promoted healing. Pilgrimages allow children of survivors to vicariously witness their parents’ traumatic past and allow survivors to revisit traumatic memories amid positive support and respect ( Loo, 1993 ). Initially undertaken by a few individual Nisei in the 1960s, pilgrimages have evolved into larger, organized and multigenerational events. Day of Remembrance ceremonies, which began in the 1970s with the redress movement ( Maki et al., 1999 ) and are now held yearly on February 19th (the date of the removal order), also provide healing. Both pilgrimages and Day of Remembrance gatherings provide camp survivors, their children, grandchildren, and the community an opportunity to remember to the past, a process that fosters group resilience and survival in traumatized groups ( Lee & Clarke, 2013 ).

Japanese American community groups, such as the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, along with Buddhist and Christian organizations also have further promoted healing. By offering opportunities to join with other Japanese Americans in cultural, social, and educational events, they help generate ethnic pride and support for all generations of Japanese Americans. These connections, in turn, have provided ways to alleviate post-incarceration impacts in a non-stigmatized way that does not require professional mental health services. This is particularly important given the stigma that many Japanese Americans attach to utilizing such services ( Henkin, 1985 ).

Some Japanese Americans, however, have sought psychotherapy. True (1990) describes a Nisei woman who became aware during therapy that the anger she felt toward her husband stemmed from her childhood camp experiences. Similarly, Nagata’s (1991) case illustrations reveal how Sanseis’ initial presentations of seemingly generic concerns of self-esteem, confidence and relationship problems were linked to their parents’ incarceration experiences. Ethnic identity is especially important given the powerful consequences of the incarceration related to Japanese heritage. Because such themes may not appear clearly linked to presenting problems, it is important for therapists to provide a supportive context in which a family history of incarceration trauma is assessed and the possibility of incarceration-related themes can be explored over time. Providing a safe place to explore, recognize, and affirm these impacts is consistent with adopting a race-informed clinical model of trauma treatment ( Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2006 ; Comas-Díaz, 2016 ). More specifically for Japanese Americans, narrative therapy, using guided imagery related to the incarceration, and having clients view videotaped interviews of former incarcerees have been suggested as potentially useful therapeutic techniques ( Nagata, 1991 ). When the therapist does not share the same background of racial trauma, taking an interpersonal stance of cultural humility (other-oriented, respectful, lack of superiority) is especially critical ( Hook, Davis, Owen, Worthington, & Utsey, 2013 ). Therapists might also prioritize facilitating a client’s process of empowerment that continues after the therapeutic encounter ( Cattaneo & Chapman, 2010 ). This empowered understanding of the trauma in conjunction with community support can help facilitate future resilience.

Small group approaches have also been used to facilitate healing. In one group, Sansei participated in intergenerational dialogues with Nisei to explore their family camp legacies ( Miyoshi, 1980 ). Another group therapy approach focused on uncovering the unique traumatic experiences of Sansei who were interned as young children ( Ina, 1997 ). Yet another small group approach to healing took place in 1994, when Sansei joined a group of Nisei former internees to dismantle original barracks from the Heart Mountain, Wyoming campsite and move them to Los Angeles, California, to be resurrected as a museum exhibit ( Yamato & Honda, 1998 ).

Community healing also has occurred through the arts and humanities. Early Asian American jazz musicians of the 70s and 80s were activists whose compositions were inspired by the incarceration and redress testimonies ( Hung, 2012 ). In addition, postwar Asian American writers and poets (e.g., Lawson Inada, John Okada, Julie Otsuka, Jeanne Wakatsuki-Houston), plays (e.g., “Miss Minidoka, 1943,” “Hold These Truths,” and the musical “Allegiance”), and numerous films have promoted engagement with the incarceration trauma.

Continuing Relevance of the Incarceration

By the end of WWII, 117,000 innocent Japanese Americans had been affected by the government’s order for removal and incarceration ( U.S. National Archives and Research Administration, 2017 ). Their imprisonment, based solely on country of ancestry, represents one of the greatest constitutional injustices in American history. The impacts of this race-based trauma resulted in a culture of silence that had far-reaching consequences extending across multiple generations of Japanese Americans. Healing has occurred at individual, group, and community levels, drawing upon psychotherapeutic, artistic, and legal efforts, including a successful demand for a governmental acknowledgment of wrongdoing and redress. While it is tempting to view redress success as signaling the “end” of the incarceration trauma, Japanese Americans have continued to experience race-based stressors. A chapter building of the Japanese American Citizens League was spray-painted with a swastika and the words White Supreme as redress efforts were underway ( Arizona JACL, 1990 ) and anti-Japanese sentiments increased significantly during the economic downturn in the 70s and 80s when angry U.S. autoworkers bashed Japanese-made cars. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who had been called “Jap” and accused of causing American unemployment, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers ( U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1992 ). Contemporary social media and the Internet can also facilitate the spread of offensive racial stereotypes, such as the video of a major league baseball player pulling the corners of his eyes into “slant eyes” after hitting a homerun from a Japanese pitcher.

Despite the passage of 75 years, the Japanese American incarceration remains highly relevant. Terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 elicited calls to round up and confine individuals who might be a security threat, as was done with Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor ( Groves & Hayasaki, 2001 ). Even before the attacks, Saito (2001) had cautioned, “Just as Asians were ‘raced’ as foreign, and “presumptively disloyal”, Arab Americans and Muslims have been ‘raced’ as ‘terrorists’” (p. 12). Reference to the incarceration has also re-emerged amidst more recent national security tensions. It is important to note in this context that although judicial decisions in the1980s vacated the wartime convictions of the three Nisei who challenged the exclusion orders, they did not overturn the Supreme Court’s original 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision supporting the government’s actions.

In June, 2018, the Supreme Court decided to uphold President Trump’s executive order on national security banning or severely restricting travel from specific countries to the U.S. The original Korematsu case was noted in the case opinions. Justices on both sides agreed that the Korematsu decision, justified at the time as necessary for national security during World War II, had been gravely wrong. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, writing for the majority opinion, stated that “the forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority.” However, there was marked disagreement regarding the relevance of the Korematsu case to the travel ban. Chief Justice Roberts noted, “… it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order [Executive Order 9066] to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission”. In contrast, the opinion of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor saw the decision to uphold the travel ban as “redeploying the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.” Response to the decision by the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) also voiced concern, pointing out that the original World War II exclusion order was also “facially neutral … and did not specify Japanese or Japanese Americans … However, in its application, it was entirely discriminatory in its effect, and that is what the court has failed to recognize in its ruling today” ( Japanese American Citizens League, 2018 , p. 5).

Obvious differences exist between the context and nature of the travel ban and the incarceration. Japanese Americans already living in the United States were rounded up and imprisoned solely because of their ethnic ancestry, without regard to citizenship. Nonetheless, national security arguments underlay both the incarceration and the travel ban policies. Clearly, critical problems often lie between written intent and actual implementation, and the traumatic sequelae experienced by Japanese Americans demonstrate the serious consequences of governmental policies that are enacted in unjust, discriminatory ways.

The incarceration also has continued relevance to psychology’s long history of addressing social justice ( Leong, Pickren, & Vasquez, 2017 ). Japanese Americans’ incarceration-based experiences encourage psychologists to consider the broad scope of racial trauma impacts, coping, and resilience in relation to individual differences, family and multigenerational processes, and community responses. It also points to the value of a psychology that “is fully grounded in history and culture” and attends to the silence surrounding memories that accompany major social and political disruption ( Apfelbaum, 2000 , p. 1008). At the same time, the incarceration trauma underscores the importance of psychological research on the processes that underlie racism and discrimination. The long history of racial prejudice that fueled the exclusion and imprisonment of Japanese Americans characterizes the experiences of ethnoracial minority groups. Contemporary studies indicate that most people unknowingly sort others into “us” versus “them” with minimal effort, systematically reinforcing inequalities ( Richeson & Sommers, 2016 ) and that subtle and unintentional mechanisms such as in-group favoritism contribute to racism and discrimination ( Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014 ). Continued efforts to understand these processes and identify conditions for reducing prejudice can assist in tackling these challenges. Finally, the incarceration highlights the importance of studying cross-group alliances and community activism in response to racial trauma. Japanese Americans collaborated with African American activists to address 1960s civil rights at the infancy of the incarceration redress effort. Today, spurred by a sense of responsibility to draw attention to the dangers and consequences of wrongful incarceration, they focus on supporting Muslim and Arab American communities facing ongoing hostilities and suspicion ( Japanese American Citizens League, 2016 ; Rahim, 2017 ).

Psychology often looks inward for explanations of behavior by examining cognitions, unconscious processes, and brain functioning. These are important approaches. However, the Japanese American WWII incarceration reminds us of the need also to look at aggregate sociocultural phenomena that shape lives. Individual differences in response to traumas vary depending on the circumstances but shared group experiences of historical and contemporary events can powerfully frame subsequent reactions and sense of well-being across time and generations. Psychologists are urged to attend to this broader level sociohistorical context when addressing racial trauma and injustice.

Acknowledgments

Jacqueline H. J. Kim was supported in part by a training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (5 T32 MH015750; Christine Dunkel Schetter).

This is a post-print version of the article that has been accepted for a 2019 special issue of the American Psychologist titled, “Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing.” Lillian Comas-Díaz, Gordon Nagayama Hall, Helen Neville, and Anne E. Kazak served as editors of the special issue.

1 Evidence was later found indicating that tainted records were deliberately presented to the Supreme Court during their original trials. The cases were re-raised in the 1980s and the convictions were eventually vacated ( Irons, 1983 ).

Contributor Information

Donna K. Nagata, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Jacqueline H. J. Kim, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Kaidi Wu, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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‘A Continuum of Love’: Telling the Story of WWII Japanese-American Internment Camps

Emma atkinson, university of denver professor of anthropology esteban gomez and recent alumna whitney peterson’s new film, “snapshots of confinement,” premieres this month on pbs..

Photo courtesy of Esteban Gomez.

If you search online for the history of World War II Japanese American internment camps in the United States, you’ll find a wealth of photos, some taken by famed photographers like Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. But a new documentary film, produced by a University of Denver professor and his former student, digs deeper.

“ Snapshots of Confinement ,” produced by anthropology professor Esteban Gomez and DU graduate Whitney Peterson (MA ’18), tells the stories of survivors by examining their personal photo albums from time spent in Japanese American internment camps across the country—including Colorado’s Camp Amache, now a national historic site.

The film follows both survivors of the camps and their families and descendants, focusing mainly on the stories of those who were held at Amache.

“There's been a lot of focus on professional and government photography of the time, but really, little attention has been paid to the photographs and albums that the people who were incarcerated were able to take and curate through that experience,” says Peterson.

A journey to filmmaking

Peterson says the project is a long time in the making. More than a decade ago, she worked at Manzanar National Historic Site, a former Japanese American internment camp in Inyo County, California, that is now a museum. There, Peterson participated in the site’s oral history program and worked to curate photographs that people had donated to the museum.

“I had an opportunity to meet so many people who experienced this firsthand—and their family members—and I was just so moved by their stories,” Peterson remembers. “And I was able to continue that work when I came to DU as a grad student.”

Gomez says that Peterson’s work at Manzanar was what really made her grad school application stand out from the rest. When he reviewed her application materials with fellow anthropology professor Bonnie Clark, he says he knew immediately that she was the right fit.

“That’s rare, given the number of applications we review every year, but it just seemed like it made sense,” Gomez says.

And Peterson’s place within the anthropology program at DU did make sense—so much sense, in fact, that her time with Gomez and Clark led to the creation of the film, which is funded by a grant from the National Park Service.

The stories that moved them

One of the interviewees, Rosie Kakuuchi, was incarcerated at Manzanar as a high school student. Her photo album tells the stories of her siblings—a brother who loved to play baseball and a sister who tragically died giving birth to twin girls.

“There are questions about [her death], if that would that have happened if this whole incarceration didn't happen,” Peterson says. “I think it just really shed light on the significant impact that this had on individuals and people's families.”

Another interviewee, Diana Tsuchida, shared photos of her grandfather and father from when they were incarcerated. Tsuchida does her own oral history work about the internment of Japanese Americans during the war.

“I think the photos have been really instrumental in her exploring her own family history and the complex history involved in incarceration,” Peterson says. “I think those photographs are really a touchstone for exploring the complexities of that experience and the identity related to that time.”

Gomez says Tsuchida’s participation in the film was particularly moving.

“The reason why she does this work, this oral history work, is because it's part of this ‘continuum of love,’ this idea that she is renewing this love and attention for this topic, but also reaffirming her identity.”

The film also touches on the singling out of those who came to be known as the “No-No Boys,” boys and men who answered “no” to two questions on a survey given to every Japanese American who was forced into the camps.

The questions were , “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” and “Will you swear unqualified allegiances to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or other foreign government, power or organization?”

Those who answered “no” to both questions were prosecuted.

“One of the things that we really focused on during the second half of the film is this question of what it means to be American,” Gomez says. “Diana Tsuchida’s grandfather was one of the No-No Boys. It created a lot of tension between different communities of Japanese Americans [in the camps]. And so, in the film, we explore that tension and how this had a long-standing impact on the Japanese American community long after the war.”

Making history accessible to everyone

Gomez says he hopes the film and its story of discrimination against Japanese Americans will attract young audiences who are interested in the history of social justice.

“I think there are so many different movements across the country right now to limit the number of voices that highlight the critical nature of our history, with more and more conservative school boards, trying to limit what type of history we understand,” he says. “So, I think, in that sense, we wanted to make sure that we created a film that can continue this narrative and make sure that a younger generation can relate to it.”

Hearing from those who experienced discrimination firsthand, Peterson adds, is part of what makes the film so powerful.

“I think we're at this really critical moment where the generations of people who experienced World War II are almost gone; they're reaching 100 years old at this point,” she says. “I think it is this transition—for folks who are now tasked with carrying out carrying on that legacy—I think that's why the photo albums are interesting, because they're this tangible connection to this past, that people physically pass on to younger folks in their family and to new generations.”

Gomez and Peterson say they hope the film inspires viewers to dig into their own family histories—to open the shoeboxes of old photos we all have in our closets or under our beds—because photos can tell a powerful story.

“It's this thing that we often take for granted, these everyday mementos,” Peterson reflects. “I think everyone can relate to having family heirlooms or things in their homes that might tell a story about their own legacy, and maybe their own history as well, and I think these photo albums do tell the story of resilience and community in a way that's really important to reflect on.”

Where to watch

“Snapshots of Confinement” will premiere on PBS SoCal Plus on May 1 at 8 p.m. PST. The film will also be available to stream for free on the PBS website . 

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The U.S. forced them into internment camps. Here’s how Japanese Americans started over.

The hardships didn’t end with their incarceration. Japanese Americans lost their homes and livelihoods during the war. Here’s how they fought for—and won—reparations for those losses.

When the Tomihiro family left Minidoka War Relocation Center in south-central Idaho in 1945, they didn’t head home to Portland, Oregon, where they’d lived for decades. “Home” didn’t exist anymore—they had lost everything during the internment of people of Japanese ancestry in World War II. Before the war, the family had owned a half-block of houses and stores and a hotel. Now, they had nothing.

Their new apartment in Chicago was “really miserable, dark and dank, and roach- and rodent-infested,” Chiye Tomihiro recalled during a public hearing in Chicago about the harsh toll of internment in 1981. “We did not even have a sink.” Her mother, who got work as a seamstress, washed the family’s dishes in a hand basin in the hall; her father, once a powerful businessman, was never able to find steady employment again. Chiye eventually became her family’s sole breadwinner, an excruciating reversal of roles that pained her proud family.

The Tomihiros were just one family among the tens of thousands who were detained for years by their own government. Beginning in 1942, the U.S. forced Japanese Americans into internment camps in far-flung parts of the country, depriving them of their freedom and livelihoods. After the war, they were forced to start over—and began to demand compensation for their suffering.

'Enemy aliens'

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt paved the way for internment with Executive Order 9066 , which gave military leaders the authority to create wide-reaching military zones and exclude “any or all persons” from them. Fearing a land invasion by Japan, the government put the entire West Coast and Hawaii under military authority, paving the way for the “evacuation” of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of them U.S. citizens, who were now dubbed “enemy aliens.” They could bring along only what they could carry, and lived in isolated, bare-bones internment camps monitored by military guards.

By 1943, it had become clear that a Japanese invasion was unlikely, and the War Department in Washington found it increasingly difficult to justify detaining thousands of people indefinitely, even as anti-Japanese sentiment raged throughout the country. The War Department began offering some detainees leave opportunities to pursue higher education or work in seasonal agricultural jobs. Then, officials dangled the possibility of indefinite leave to those willing to declare their loyalty to the United States. Almost 35,000 Japanese Americans left the camps in 1944, but tens of thousands remained.

Finally, amid growing pressure and legal challenges to shut down the camps, Roosevelt suspended Executive Order 9066—after he won re-election in November 1944. In a cabinet meeting on December 17, the administration announced it would end exclusion as of January 1, 1945. The next day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in the Ex Parte Mitsuye Endo   case, ruling that the government could not detain loyal U.S. citizens. Though it took nearly a year to close down all the camps, Japanese Americans were now free to return home.

We don’t want them, and since they know that, they shouldn’t want to come back. If they do, there will be trouble. Leonard Goldsmith , Seattle janitor

In the years after internment, the word “home” had a very different meaning for the former detainees. Many didn’t have a home to return to at all—many had been forced to sell their property, belongings, and businesses at steep discounts in the rushed days before their incarceration; some lost them during the war. Others returned to find their homes had been vandalized, destroyed, or foreclosed upon.

Alien land laws that forbade Asian Americans from owning certain land and redlining, a practice that prevented minority groups from getting loans to buy homes in certain neighborhoods, made economic recovery difficult. Internees instead settled in cities that had been reshaped dramatically by the war, making housing and good jobs scarce. People found themselves living in trailers, cheap hostels, and even repurposed military barracks.

“When the Japanese arrived in the United States they were at the bottom of the economic ladder,” the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians wrote in its 1983 report on Japanese internment. “The impact of evacuation is made more poignant by the fact that it cut short the life and strength of the immigrants, frequently destroying the fruit of years of effort.”

Economic hardship wasn’t the only peril the released internees faced. Stoked by decades of intolerance and Japan’s enemy status during the war, anti-Japanese sentiment was further fanned by the announcement internment would end. White citizens formed anti-Japanese clubs—and joined existing organizations like the Japanese Exclusion League—to lobby against Japanese Americans’ return to their communities.

“Somebody should be arrested for even thinking of bringing the J--- back,” Seattle janitor Leonard Goldsmith told the Seattle Daily Times , employing a common slur used to describe Japanese Americans. “We don’t want them, and since they know that, they shouldn’t want to come back. If they do, there will be trouble.”

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Some returning detainees were met with threats. In Hood River, Oregon, white farmers falsely claimed Japanese Americans had engaged in a conspiracy to corner the orchard business before the war, and returning internees were met with boycotts, racial slurs, and physical attacks. Hood River’s American Legion post even removed the names of 16 Japanese American servicemen from its honor roll.

Many Japanese Americans who once held white-collar jobs or owned businesses could only get post-war jobs doing menial labor or domestic service—a blow not only to pride, but to a traditional patriarchal structure of most Japanese American families, which prized fathers as breadwinners and valued financial status and community leadership. For many, it was too painful to revisit what had been taken away during internment.

Recovery and redress

Though the Japanese American community inched toward economic recovery, “this appearance of normalcy was achieved by ‘forgetting’ the evacuation experience,” sociologist Tetsuden Kashima, who was incarcerated at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah as a child, wrote in 1980. As families struggled to regain footing, they prioritized assimilation over pride and maintained a code of silence about their experiences. A generation gap developed between the older Issei, or Japanese-born immigrants; the Nisei, or second generation, who grew up in the United States; and the Sansei, a third generation who were interned as small children or born “after camp.”

Only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s did the tide turn as Japanese Americans began demanding answers about their families’ mass detention. Though the U.S. government had paid out about $38 million to Japanese Americans who claimed losses from the “evacuation” after the war starting in 1948, the payments represented only a fraction of the actual losses from internment. The successes of the Civil Rights Movement energized the Sansei, who began to pressure Congress to pay former internees and apologize for their incarceration.

In 1980, Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a bipartisan commission that conducted intensive historical research and public hearings across the country with more than 750 witnesses. Three years later, the commission issued a landmark report calling out internment as “a grave injustice” and recommended internees be individually compensated.

After years of public controversy and Congressional foot dragging, the U.S. adopted the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 , which granted $20,000 in financial redress and a presidential apology to every surviving U.S. citizen or legal resident who had been incarcerated. By then, though, many of the older generation had already died, making it a bitter victory for Japanese Americans.

The anti-Asian sentiment that enabled internment still lives on: Between March 2020 and February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit organization that tracks incidents of discrimination and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, received almost 3,800 reports of hate incidents. Nearly 80 years after internment, Japanese Americans still must fend off threats to their civil rights, and even their lives.

Today, there are about 1.5 million people of Japanese ancestry in the United States, and the generations that came after internment watched their elders both survive and rebuild.

“The journey from silence to redress has shown that some forms of resilience evolve over decades,” psychologists Donna K. Nagata and Yuzuru J. Takeshita wrote in 1998. Japanese Americans are still affected by internment and its legacies—but resilience and strength are also part of their heritage.  

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Thesis explores cultural identity at WWII Japanese internment camp

Camp Amache, the WW II Japanese internment camp, circa 1942. Photo courtesy of Denver Public Library Western History Collection.

To Stephanie Skiles, shards of porcelain scattered in the southern Colorado soil tell a story — one of ethnic heritage, identity and cultural revitalization.

The anthropology master’s degree candidate has spent the last two years studying the expression of cultural identity in the historic archaeology of Camp Amache, a World War II Japanese internment camp.

Amache — located near Granada, Colo. — was one of 10 relocation camps built to house Japanese Americans following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Amache was the smallest of the camps, housing more than 7,000 people at its height. 

The facility was closed in the autumn of 1945, and the buildings were dismantled and sold. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

“Many of the people at Amache came from southern California and were used to great ethnic diversity,” Skiles says. “For some, this was the first time that they had seen so many people who looked like them and who had the same cultural heritage.

“They thought they were Americans,” she says. “Yet suddenly they were told that they weren’t Americans — that the government didn’t trust them and that they were different. Many of them arrived at the camp in an identity crisis.”

Skiles hypothesized that because they had been interned for their heritage, Amache residents would be fearful of expressing that heritage through their belongings and customs. She examined food-related items sprinkled throughout the site, specifically the government-issued white U.S. Quartermaster ceramics, traditional Japanese porcelain, and tin cans modified with a mysterious perforation pattern on the bottoms.

Last June, Skiles led a volunteer crew of archaeology students in a weeklong surface survey. She marked out four 50 x 50-meter grids at the site, and the team then walked the grids inch by inch, counting and photographing the artifacts found on the surface. Her crew sifted through soda, medicine and sake bottles, shoes, toys and car parts to locate remnants of ceramics and modified cans. She then examined the artifact distribution and analyzed the ratios of U.S.-issue ceramics to Japanese ceramics, and modified to unmodified cans.

“The internees were only allowed to bring two suitcases with them to Amache, and yet we found numerous examples of Japanese ceramics,” said Skiles. “They must have either thought it was important enough to bring with them, or they had it shipped to them somehow.”

Skiles will showcase some of her research in “Confined Cuisine: Archaeology of Culinary Culture at Camp Amache,” an exhibit in DU’s Museum of Anthropology. The exhibit will feature text, site photos and objects Skiles has borrowed from the Amache Preservation Society.

“Food is an important part of daily life, ritual and family tradition. By looking at food items, Stephanie was really examining the idea of heritage,” says DU anthropology Assistant Professor Bonnie Clark, who is working to set up a community-based field-school at Camp Amache in addition to advising Skiles on her research.

Ultimately, Skiles’ archeological survey contradicted her original hypothesis.

“The huge presence of Japanese ceramics at the site showed me that the internees weren’t covering up their heritage,” Skiles says. “They were in a way rebelling against their confinement — telling the U.S. government that they weren’t going to hide their culture or their identity.

“This was a time of cultural revitalization. They were showing the government that they were part of the United States and that they were good people.”

“Confined Cuisine: Archaeology of Culinary Culture at Camp Amache” Through June 8  Museum of Anthropology Sturm Hall, Room 102 Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.

For information call 303-871-2543.

This article originally appeared in The Source,  May 2007.

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51e. Japanese-American Internment

Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land. Anti-Japanese paranoia increased because of a large Japanese presence on the West Coast. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American mainland, Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk.

Succumbing to bad advice and popular opinion, President Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 ordering the relocation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the interior of the United States.

Evacuation orders were posted in Japanese-American communities giving instructions on how to comply with the executive order. Many families sold their homes, their stores, and most of their assets. They could not be certain their homes and livelihoods would still be there upon their return. Because of the mad rush to sell, properties and inventories were often sold at a fraction of their true value.

Until the camps were completed, many of the evacuees were held in temporary centers, such as stables at local racetracks. Almost two-thirds of the interns were Nisei , or Japanese Americans born in the United States. It made no difference that many had never even been to Japan. Even Japanese-American veterans of World War I were forced to leave their homes.

Ten camps were finally completed in remote areas of seven western states. Housing was spartan, consisting mainly of tarpaper barracks. Families dined together at communal mess halls, and children were expected to attend school. Adults had the option of working for a salary of $5 per day. The United States government hoped that the interns could make the camps self-sufficient by farming to produce food. But cultivation on arid soil was quite a challenge.

Evacuees elected representatives to meet with government officials to air grievances, often to little avail. Recreational activities were organized to pass the time. Some of the interns actually volunteered to fight in one of two all-Nisei army regiments and went on to distinguish themselves in battle.

On the whole, however, life in the relocation centers was not easy. The camps were often too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. The food was mass produced army-style grub. And the interns knew that if they tried to flee, armed sentries who stood watch around the clock, would shoot them.

Fred Korematsu decided to test the government relocation action in the courts. He found little sympathy there. In Korematsu vs. the United States , the Supreme Court justified the executive order as a wartime necessity. When the order was repealed, many found they could not return to their hometowns. Hostility against Japanese Americans remained high across the West Coast into the postwar years as many villages displayed signs demanding that the evacuees never return. As a result, the interns scattered across the country.

In 1988, Congress attempted to apologize for the action by awarding each surviving intern $20,000. While the American concentration camps never reached the levels of Nazi death camps as far as atrocities are concerned, they remain a dark mark on the nation's record of respecting civil liberties and cultural differences.

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Communication across the Curriculum

Uncovering the hidden history of Louisiana’s Japanese internment camps during WWII

Photo credit: Camp Livingston - 4; Construction Completion Reports, 1917–1944; Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, 1789—1999, Record Group 77; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 

Listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to LSU Experimental on iTunes , Google Play ,  Stitcher , Spotify , TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Additional resources

• Sarah and Hayley’s research, Through an Extended Lens: Louisiana, Internment and the Geography of Chance
• Watch Muslim kids read letters from Japanese internment camp survivors , Los Angeles Times , May 20, 2016
• Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942
• Civil Liberties Act of 1988
• A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America by Greg Robinson
• By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese American by Greg Robinson
• The Train to Crystal City, Texas by Jan Jarboe Russell
• WWII Japanese American Internment Museum
• Allegiance: A New Musical Inspired by a True Story

LSU Experimental is a podcast series that shares the research and the “behind the scenes” stories of LSU faculty, student, and alumni investigators across the disciplines. Listen and learn about the exciting topics of study and the individuals posing the questions. Each episode is recorded and produced in CxC Studio 151 on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication across the Curriculum and LSU College of Science. LSU Experimental is hosted by Dr. Becky Carmichael and edited by Kyle Sirovy.

This is LSU Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I’m Becky Carmichael.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to internment camps across the United States. One internment camp, Camp Livingston, was located here in Louisiana. Who were the men incarcerated in the camp? What were their stories?

LSU librarians Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms have work to uncover historical documents and personal narratives of these forgotten but important stories. Kyle Sirovy and I met with Hayley and Sarah prior to their TEDxLSU talk to learn how their collective research has shed light on what occurred here in Louisiana to Japanese Americans and why we should reflect on the past to prevent similar events in the future.

HAYLEY JOHNSON

[1:07] Did you know that over 1,000 Japanese men were interned in Louisiana during World War II? Through our research we have been able to tell the story of Camp Livingston, located outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, as an internment camp for enemy alien Japanese men during World War II. This is not a well-known history by any means so we are having to use primary documents and oral histories to piece this together.

SARAH SIMMS

Through natural curiosity and a passion to do what's right, Hayley and I have been compiling the stories of these Japanese men who were falsely assumed to be enemies of the United States because they were Japanese. Because of anti-Asian immigration laws that were actually on the books until the 1950s, Japanese-born people were not allowed to become US citizens. That is why these men are referred to as enemy aliens.

There has been rhetoric in the past few years that has mimicked and mirrored the same language that was used in the 1930s and 1940s to cast judgment on Japanese and other Asian immigrants. By finding journals, photographs, and oral histories, we've been able to tell the stories of these men in a way that shows that they were just men, many with families, that had to endure imprisonment because of their ethnicity.  

[2:14] In order to do this type of research, we had to dig deep into what we call Hidden Histories: oral histories, journals, and other primary documents that either exist in personal collections, like your grandfather's closet, or at archives across the United States. It's taken a lot of tenacity to find these documents and people, including writing letters and lots of Googling.

Through our research, we have found that many people believe that this just happened on the West Coast with large family camps like Manzanar but we hope that through our discoveries around Camp Livingston we will enlighten people to other internment and incarceration programs that happened in their own backyard.

In the past year we have seen internment-type camps spring up across the United States as an anti-immigration policy. Inflammatory rhetoric was used during the 2016 presidential election, threatening to put people of the Muslim faith in camps. History has shown us as a nation that this type of fear-fueled singling out of a group of people is atrocious and unwarranted, and by telling the story of Camp Livingston as a place where this happened, right in our backyard in Louisiana no less, is to remind the public that we must be aware of our past mistakes we must fight against this from happening again.

Haley and I are not historians by training. We are however librarians who have been trained to do research and help people with their own research. By using our skills we are hoping to tell this story as part of a larger social justice movement that fights against the quote “othering” of those that are different. We hope that by sharing the story of the men interned in Camp Livingston, as well as our story about how we have found and compiled this information, we will inspire others to do the same.

[3:50] Hayley and Sarah, I am so excited that you found some time to sit down with myself and Kyle Sirovy today. We're really excited to hear a little bit more about the research that you’ve been doing. To get us started, would you tell us a little bit about who you are and what drew you into this particular issue of our recent history?

I’ll go first. This is Sarah. Our voices sound very similar so we will have to say that throughout. I am the undergraduate and student success librarian here at LSU. Hayley and I have actually been working together for about five years so we have a tendency to have our regular day jobs. I'm very invested in student success; I teach, I liaise across campus. And then in our free time we do a lot of research into social justice issues.

And this is Hayley. I’m the head of government documents here at LSU Libraries. As Sarah said, we’ve worked together for quite a while now. This research came about kind of by chance. By reading a newspaper article, it spurred us to get started and so ever since then it's been a couple years.

We’ve been working on this for about three years.

So what was the article?

It was an article in the Los Angeles Times. They had Muslim children reading aloud the letters written by Japanese-American children in internment camps. They were drawing those parallels of rhetoric that might have been said back in the ‘40s and today. I just found it very impactful. It got us to ask the question.

We knew they had POW camps here in Louisiana, kind of everyone knows about that history for the most part, but we were curious: were there internment camps here as well? So we just decided to ask the question. We reached out to some museums and archives in Alexandria where the camp was, to find out, and no one knew about this history. We were kind of taken aback by that, I would say.

And Hayley’s pretty tenacious with asking. So she asked, she knocked on doors, she sent a lot of emails, and she was actually given the name of a Japanese family who had lived in Alexandria during World War II. They were the Kohara Family and we were lucky enough to find and interview Ms. Marion Couvillion Kohara, who would have been a teenager during World War II in the town of Alexandria. Through her, we got her experiences. She told us about Camp Livingston and how her family reacted to WWII and the internment camps that were close. And then told us about her cousin, who was from Hawaii, who had been interned in Camp Livingston as an enemy alien.

We couldn't believe that that connection existed. That they had one sole Japanese family living in Alexandria during that time and they were not put into camps, but then to have her cousin who was all the way in Hawaii end up 12 miles away from them interned in Camp Livingston seemed to be something that we just couldn't ignore. From then on, we decided to pursue grant funding to do the research, because we had to travel to archives, and the project has steadily grown since then.

KYLE SIROVY

[7:13] It sounds like a very unique process to look into Japanese internment camps specifically. Would you mind walking the listeners a little bit through the process of how you actually go about conducting this research? What does that really look like?

This particular type of internment, I feel like we should clarify. This information existed at the National Archives in DC. What we were looking for were records produced by the Department of Justice and the Army because that's where these camps were located. These are not your usual WRA camps that you see photographed with the families being made to move because of Executive Order 9066. These were men who could not be American citizens because that was the law on the books, so they were just picked up. They were leaders in their communities.

So having to go to the Archives to then go through these very huge files and huge collections to try to find names, to try to find evidence of this. It took us about a week to go through everything and it wasn't until we found a book that was the fourth book in a series about the building of an alien enemy internment camp at Camp Livingston that we were actually able to find the first photograph of the men. So, it's a lot of happenstance and a lot of tenacity and just digging through this kind of information because the files are not how you would think. You’d think it would say, ‘oh here’s the Department of Justice and here’s all of our information on internment camps.’ It was filed...

It was all under, basically, Camp Livingston itself and the completion report that we found was for the whole entire camp. We had all of these buildings that really have nothing to do with internment camp and volume four was the volume that... at first we didn't think was going to be that useful to us because it was basically schematics of a mess hall and different things and then eventually like one random page in there had a photograph of the men planting around the buildings. So, it was a lot of chance involved in some way, shape, or form.

And the way we've gone about this is we started with the name of one man, the cousin, and following his story and then through that, we've been able to broaden that search because while we're in those files, we're getting these camp rosters. So, lists of men that were being held in this camp and there's four that we found so far that have listed just names of men. Then Hayley's gone back through…

[10:10] What we’ve done is almost like a mini genealogy-type search on these guys. We have a name, we have a date of birth that is often times not exactly accurate, so I go in through processes like straight up Google and just Googling these guys or through like familysearch.org, putting in their name, finding Census records that match these men, finding out where they were living at the time, what their occupation was, so we can create a clearer picture of what type of man was put into Camp Livingston. So, location, age, occupation, so that we can see that the general makeup of the camp was a lot of older men, a lot of religious figures, placed in the camp. And the only way we would know that is through isolating them individually through these rosters. It’s really time consuming but it’s also extremely important to get that clearer picture of who was placed in this camp. And then we can go forward and make our own assumptions as to why based on other documentation that exists.

Searching other archives for these men, searching collections with these men's names in it. That’s why you pull in a government documents librarian to go through Census records to help you find this kind of information.

The information that you've been collecting has been very personal, very sensitive data that you’ve been finding, and then buried deep within these government documents. How do you handle collecting and uncovering these stories from people and their families that have had this first-hand experience of being interned in these places?

I think we've been extremely lucky with the families that we have built relationships with. They've all been extremely willing to share the information that they have, sharing personal journals from great-grandfathers with us that gave us an accounting of daily life within the camp. I don’t think we’ve ever come across anyone who’s been unwilling to share their information.

How do you keep in check or accommodate for your own cultural lens on this event?

[12:36] Interestingly, I don’t know that we had a lens because we started not knowing anything about this.

We didn't even know what enemy alien internment was until we interviewed Ms. Marion and she told us ‘he is not a citizen, he's someone who wasn't allowed to become a citizen.’ We thought it was all WRA family camps.

So a blank slate on on that level. And just having to learn. We're learning as we go through the primary documentation, but then having to go to secondary sources to understand what the actual history and story is that was going on that we just didn't know.

Why were these camps instituted in the first place? What led to these being used?

Starting in the ‘20s…

...yeah, there was something called the Office of Naval Intelligence, or the ONI. There was a rising sense of nationalism within Japan and that made America very nervous so we decided to start doing surveillance on various individuals. That surveillance led to custodial detention lists, or ABC lists, where they had an account of all of the Japanese individuals living in Hawaii and the United States and they classified them according to ABC. So you had ‘if war were to break out, this individual should automatically be picked up and interned for the duration of the war,’ and you had another level of ‘this individual should be monitored throughout the war’ and then the third level was least dangerous, ‘they should be allowed to live freely and go uninterned.’

...until 9066 comes into play. But Hawaii is not necessarily affected too much by that.

Hawaii’s not...

What is 9066?

Executive Order 9066 was FDR's executive order that...

...evacuated all Japanese Americans from the West Coast inland. They had an exclusionary zone set up and so they all had to be evacuated inside that zone...

...from Washington down to California and they brought them inland. So these camps went as far in as Arkansas. Washington down. There were two in Arkansas, Rohwer and Jerome. A lot of them were, kind of, westerly.

Yeah, most of them were westerly but the enemy alien camps, interestingly enough we had one in Louisiana. There was one in Tennessee. Montana. So those were spread around. Sante Fe, New Mexico had one as well.

Crystal City, Seagoville, yeah. So they were in Texas as well.

KYLE [15:32] How many individuals are we talking about here?

They estimate that the total enemy alien—and this is not solely Japanese; there were Italian and German aliens as well. About 31,000 is the estimate.

Just to clarify, it seems like there’s two types of camps we’re talking about, right? So were they divided just based on citizenship of the individuals, and then having a particular heritage?

Yes. 9066 was that all Japanese Americans living in that zone on the West Coast had to be evacuated into the WRA, or War Relocation Authority, family camps. The camps that we’re talking about, the Department of Justice Army-run camps, were mostly all men who were aliens who could not become naturalized citizens. They did have one female-only camp in Texas, as well as the family camp for the the wives and children of those men in Texas. So it's basically distinguished by citizenship.

And how they were treated as well. The men that were picked up that we're looking at, these enemy aliens, they were actually put through a trial. They would go before a board and it would be decided whether they should go into the camp or not.

The issue with 9066 is a gross misuse of fear to take American citizens and put them into incarceration camps and that is another large... it’s that due process that happened or did not happen.

So they’re taking these people and just putting them into these camps. What were the conditions that they were experiencing when they got to these camps?

[17:33] Actually, according to people that we’ve spoken to, the men in the enemy alien camps were governed by the Geneva Convention. So their treatment was monitored by various organizations. And according to people that we’ve spoken to who were in the family camps, those men were treated better.

Whereas with the family camps you were put into these paper-thin shacks and the food wasn't great and they're putting them in the middle of a desert with desert conditions and, you know, there’s young children, there’s older people; it’s just, it’s a mess. And then because again…

There’s no International Red Cross coming and doing visits and checking on the status of those people in those camps.

And incarceration across-the-board, terrible, but as far as food, freedom, movement,  there are some differences that we've been able to see. Or hear about.

So you mentioned some of these different organizations that would oversee. I imagine that they are were also guards that were within these camps. Did you find any evidence or any information about what the guards’ frame of mind at these camps were?

Honestly no. We have focused so much on just these men in this experience. We have actually reached out to the Alexandria Town Talk, which is the the newspaper, and have gotten no interest. Because we would like to know that but we have not had a chance yet to get that perspective. And we have, there, I feel like, we read a newspaper article that talks about them bringing the Japanese enemy aliens in, and that was... People were hyped about it, a little afraid, but that's as far as we've gotten as far as how people in the community felt.

And I think it's a whole other issue of having to make another trip basically to the archives and hoping that the Army has kept some of those records of who these men would have been who had internment camp duty. That's not something we had enough time to go through on our first visit because we were so hyper-focused on the camp and the men that that would be a whole other facet that we could explore.

We didn’t know this project was going to be as big as it was.

And we didn’t realize what we were getting into the first time we went to the Archives and how time-intensive and difficult it would be to locate some of that information.

So do you think that the reaction or the response from say Alexandria, I know I’m putting that on the spot, but do you think that that speaks towards the type of information you may be able to find about the community’s response to these camps and perceptions of the residents of these camps?

[20:40] Possibly. We are going to, one of us is taking, me, Sarah, is taking a trip, hopefully, in the near future to go up to the NYPL, that’s the New York Public Library. They have a collection of the Army's newspaper from that time and from Camp Livingston itself. And we're hoping that we could find some information possibly in those records to get an idea of the camp feeling itself. I'm wondering also, there doesn't seem, no one seems to know that this happened. This might be something that the community may not have been that aware of, might have heard it in whisperings…

There was one newspaper article in the Town Talk, as you mentioned, saying that they were coming, but it wasn't something that was going to be widely advertised to the community of Alexandria. Now they would have maybe noticed that the Kohara Family was getting a lot of visitors who were Japanese American because the Kohara Family did kind of act as a USO stop for those people who were going into Camp Livingston to visit their relatives, so that might have piqued the interest of the community. But I think finding their reaction to that would be very, very difficult.

That’s interesting. So there was no country-wide propaganda that was very obvious that most of the citizens in the US were being fed to believe certain things about the conditions in the camps, or why we were doing this?

Not these camps.

These are… What we’re finding, and we might find exactly what you're saying. Maybe we will find that. But these camps just don't seem to be that well known. But the rhetoric that was surrounding the WRA camps, those family camps, the rhetoric there would have been, you know maybe, ‘don't trust your neighbor’ or ‘these communities, they attacked us.’

Also, ‘they attacked us.’ And it was in some instances saying that it was for the safety of the Japanese-American citizens that they were being put into the camp. Because feelings are heightened, there might be anger, so in order to protect everyone we're going to move them into this camp. So it's not just about protecting the United States’ interests, it’s about protecting the citizen as well.

So we’ve kind of talked about he people around this, we’ve talked about these citizens. I can only imagine the effects, the traumatic effects that the residents would have experienced. Did you find any information or any record about lasting psychological issues for the individuals that were interned?

That’s actually something we're starting to look into now. We do have a little bit of information on that. But for the most part the men of that generation who were in camps, the mentality was that it was a little shameful so they would not speak about it with anyone.

I have an article, I don’t have the citation in front of me, but we’ve been looking into this and the article says that this can be likened to the shame that happens with rape so it is something that you just don't speak of.

Were any of the individuals compensated for their time when they served in this camps?

[24:11] Yes, there were reparations made in the 1980s, I believe. It was President Reagan who signed the bill, or the law, to give money. I don't remember how much each person received.

It wasn’t enough.

I’ll just state that. I don’t think it was enough.

But what we did notice through speaking with people is a lot of the children who were in the camps received the money. A lot of the parents by that time had passed away so unfortunately they weren’t there to have that formal apology and reparations. But yes, they were given some monetary reparation and an apology.

On the social side of things, how do they find themselves when they were finally released from these camps, were they allowed to integrate back into our society fairly seamlessly or was it one that they experienced a lot of hardship just to get maybe jobs that they had worked for or anything like that?

One of the men that we have studied, he was a Buddhist priest and a Japanese language school teacher in Hawaii and he was held in Camp Livingston. While he was in Camp Livingston, his family went into dire straits. They elected to be put into Crystal City, Texas, which was the family camp, waiting, hopefully, that they would get reunited. He eventually meets them in Crystal City, Texas but is held there until 1944, 45…

'45. And so, when they get back to Hawaii they basically have to start from scratch because the mission where he was the priest had been used by the Army.

The Army took it over as a base for them.

So they have to rebuild from that.

And I think that’s a common story. A lot of people when they went into the camps, the banks took their home, or the neighbors would take up the mortgage and take the house, so a lot of people lost businesses, homes, all of that and had to rebuild. You have places like Chicago where you get a large resettlement of Japanese Americans after the war. But then you also hear stories of neighbors saving the homes of people who went into camps. So you have both ends of that.

[26:44] That’s just something I can’t even begin to imagine. That one, you’re being moved from Hawaii, so many miles back to continental United States, away from your family members, and then when you’re released, you can’t just start back up with where you were. You’re at the mercy of either a good samaritan or a good neighbor that has been trying to help out. But then, how often was that really the case?

The interesting thing about Hawaii too that we’ve been starting to discover is where you have, I’ll bring it up again, 9066 evacuating that West Coast, Hawaii remains untouched with their Japanese and Japanese-American populations because they had sugar cane and they needed a workforce and that was their historic workforce. You see this cherry picking of community leaders from that community itself. Which has been something that’s blowing our minds and has a weird tie to Louisiana with our sugar cane. It’s odd, and we’re still diving deep into this. This is something that’s just…

The idea that it could be economically motivated as well.

A lot of weird motives going on.

This has to be quite an emotional rollercoaster that the two of you are experiencing as you’re uncovering some of this.

Yeah, it’s not been fun. It’s not been a fun project in that way. It’s been emotionally draining and heartbreaking and sad. It’s made us angry. But what we’ve been able to pull from this is become very close to… like the Kohara Family we’ve become very close to. Building these personal relationships from something as horrible as this has been a gift for us. To just become friends when we would have never known them to begin with.

And now we also have this feeling of doing the story justice to make them proud that we’re telling it appropriately and really shining a light that needs to be put on this whole topic.

I can only imagine how frustrating or how upsetting is must be when you’re seeing some of this. And I can only imagine in some of the recent events that have been going on. Maybe you can touch on some of the connections that you’re seeing between what happened back then and some of the events that we’re seeing now.

Well, I think all you have to do is look at the headlines, the news headlines, from the past couple of years and the headlines themselves are making the correlation between internment and current events.

Recently, this is something that has really been sitting with me is this idea of citizenship and what makes you a citizen. And then, the idea of an Executive Order being able to be intrusive, in a way. This talk of maybe taking away birthright citizenship that I’ve been hearing about just really has made me think about this project in those terms.

We’ve seen this before where there’s anti-ethnicity based laws on the books that don’t allow people to become citizens, and then you turn into this community, the United States, that would put people into these camps based solely on that is just... the fact that we're starting to talk about this again. It's been 77 years since Pearl Harbor? This is not that far away that we should still remember this, and it seems that people are not remembering.

I find it terrifying and sad and we are trying our hardest to speak about this because at a certain point, sometimes you can feel very helpless and you don't know what to do. So if you just keep fighting the good fight maybe something awesome will come of this. Just to have people turning their neighbor and talk to them instead of just looking at them.

It sounds like this particular project speaks volumes toward that because of the stories that were locked within a family, were locked within these journals, were locked within these government documents that really uncover and show that what we're seeing today is not so far removed from what was experienced and the trauma and the hardships that were bestowed on a particular group of individuals. I feel like this is one of the wake-up calls for us as a society, as a country, to pay attention to the past so we don't repeat this.

KYLE This topic in general feels, at least for my generation, very covered up in some ways. It's glossed over within our history textbooks. Coming from a historian side of things, do you feel that you uncovered some things that were really hidden underneath, in the same sense maybe shine the spotlight on some even darker aspects of this than we realized or is it just about as dark as it seems?

One thing that we’ve had to learn going through this... again, I need to state we are not historians by nature, we are librarians so we are coming at this with a different lens. We are so wonderful at finding research and doing research so now we are putting it together. We are weaving this tapestry, if you will.

One thing we’ve had to learn about was repatriation requests. So what would happen is these men would go through their trial, they would be scuttled around the United States. They didn’t just go straight to Camp Livingston. They would go to maybe three camps beforehand before they ended up in Livingston.

About every year or so, they were moved. They were not static in one camp. And that was true for a majority of the men. They were constantly moved and cycled throughout these camps.

When we were in DC, we kept seeing these things called repatriation requests and we had no idea what it was. Through so many years now of reading journal entries and memories and secondary sources, these repatriation requests were given to the men. They could ask to be repatriated back to Japan. And sometimes they would absolutely say yes and it would be used as a prisoner exchange.

Many, many men wanted to be repatriated because they saw that as their only way out of the camp. Rather than stay here indefinitely because I don't know what my future is because no one is giving me any information, I'm going to ask to be repatriated so at least I can go and be free. So the families of these men would often go to Crystal City because they would be repatriated with them and that way they can all be reunited in Japan. That was something that we had to learn because we had no idea that was something that was happening, much less prisoner exchange of these men.

And then the other thing that we have found out that we have not been able to explore in much depth is a program that was happening where it wasn't just Japanese men from Hawaii, the United States was also pulling Japanese from South America en masse. They were pulling groups of Japanese men, again, for this idea of a prisoner exchange.

They went into Latin America and basically kidnapped these guys…

That’s the word I was going to use: kidnapped.

That’s basically what they did. And they would bring them to Algiers; they had an immigration station. They would drop them off at Algiers and then when they hit the dock, they were automatically arrested as illegal aliens and then put into that enemy alien internment camp system. A lot of these guys weren’t even allowed to go back after the war because their country said ‘no, you can't come back.’ So there was that whole other element going on as well. And we do know that in Camp Livingston the camp was divided into different areas. They had an area for a Panamanian Japanese so they were sectioned out that way as well. So we do know that a bunch of them went to Camp Livingston.

And there are scholars currently, right now, looking into this in much more depth than we are able to. There is a woman at Tulane and a gentleman in Canada who looks into this. So we want to be very clear. This is something we came across in the rosters and didn’t understand and through speaking with some of these scholars who are working on this right now, we’ve been able to understand that better because it was a real mind bender.

It’s layer after layer of these secret programs going on that we had no idea about, and I think most people would not know about today because you just know about those WRA family camps.

[36:52] As a layman, since I can’t necessarily hop on a plane and go look at the Archives in Los Angeles, is there a book or something that you would refer to people that they can learn more about this? Something you think is pretty respectable?

One of the authors to look for would be Greg Robinson. He’s written extensively on this topic. And Jan Jarboe Russell wrote a book called The Train to Crystal City, Texas that I found unbelievably enlightening. I would start there. There are a lot of resources, not necessarily on Camp Livingston, per se… Wait for that one, it’s coming.

Shameless plug.

There is a bibliography still. We have a bibliography that we’ve actually created at extendedlens.org. We’ve put together a bunch of resources, both websites and books and government documents, if you’re interested in this.

BECKY You’ve got this bibliography, this has got a wealth of information for someone who’s listening to go back and really explore even further in depth.

Through your research, I know we've talked a little bit about your travels to different conferences and different places to go and gather the documents but also you’ve been able to meet many surviving residents. Is it true that the actor George Takei was a resident in one of the camps here in Louisiana and have you been able to capture any of his thoughts on the topic?

He was not a resident of the camp in Louisiana. He was actually a resident…

He was in a family camp in Arkansas so he was a child at that time and his family was interned in Arkansas.

[39:04] Have you been able to talk to him? Did he ever share any of his thoughts or give his perspective as a child in one of these camps?

We have not been able to speak to him personally. We did have the opportunity to sit next to him once at the annual reunion that is held at Rohwer every year. Well, it's the Japanese American internment Museum in Arkansas run by woman named Susan Gallion, who is amazing.

He came this past year in April to their fifth reunion and spoke. But I do know that he wrote a musical, I believe called Allegiance, that's about this experience. I think that he's very much an advocate for the idea of ‘don't do it again,’ you know, ‘this is my experience, I was a child this was not wonderful, this was not great,’ so he's very much a loud voice.

He’s very outspoken on the topic.

I think that leads well into this aspect of the connections we’re seeing from these past events to what we’re seeing right now in 2018 regarding the “othering” of particular groups. I know we’ve touched on a little bit of the connections between this part of our dark history of the United States and potentially some of the elements we’re seeing now in the present. I want to basically ask about if we’ve learned the lessons or are we still seeing some of the same things in regard to immigration camps and then the children that are being detained now?

I think the difference that we’re seeing… I mean, yes, the similarities are uncanny and horrifying. But what we are seeing is a rising voice from the Japanese American community that is basically screaming their memories towards this, their history. You see this, for example, the LA Times article with the Muslim children reading the letters of Japanese-American children who had been interned in the ‘40s. There are people who are aware so it’s just getting that voice out there, and hopefully that’s happening. But the similarities are not…

I think we haven't fully learned from those past mistakes, given that you know some of these camps now today even existed in the first place but there is now at least a voice speaking out, pointing out that this is wrong and you know you're repeating those past mistakes.

SARAH Hope springs eternal. We’re hoping, hoping, hoping that their voices are heard, that people wake up, that there's just more understanding and instead of this turning into yourself and this fear. It's as simple as turning to the person sitting next to you and just you know making that connection.

[42:20] Are any of these camps still in existence? Are they still being used today? And when I say used, have they been used for any of the current detention camps we’re seeing, or are these pretty much even out of use as a military base?

I honestly don't know. What I will say is Camp Livingston does not exist anymore so that is an interesting thing to have to research this historical place that literally went back to forest after the war. There are camps that have been, more the WRA camps, that are something that you can tour. They've become historic sites of memory.

Hayley and Sarah, not only have you identified this particular topic, and as we've learned was just by this one moment, this one reading, you’ve been receiving some funding some really prestigious sources such as the American Library Association’s Carnegie Whitney Grant. Can you tell us how has the spending helped you on your research trajectory?

This funding has been the reason that this project exists. We did as much as we could on our own prior to the funding but we would have never been able to get to the National Archives without it, we would have never been able to travel to California without it, so it's been the thing that has propelled this research forward.

It has been amazing.

What’s the ultimate hope for you for the impact of your research? What do you hope this does?

I just want people to think and to understand like we are starting to understand. I have never, and I don’t want to speak for both of us but I've never felt so wool over my eyes almost until we started to learn about this and it was like, oh, this is so interesting that this is not a history that is talked about in the way that we're hoping to talk about it. And also highlight these individuals who are unbelievably strong and persevered through a persecution with such grace and, they have become personal heroes, I feel, of ours, so I’m hoping that people will feel the same way that we have.

[45:04] I like to ask my guests a couple of fun questions.

SARAH AND HAYLEY

Thank you. [laughs]

We’re going to make a little switch. So prepare yourselves.

Do you both know who MacGyver is?

Yes! I have to ask this now because some people don’t know who MacGyver is.

As an ecologist, there’s always things I’ve had to do impromptu in the field to collect my data. A make it work situation. Have you ever had a MacGyver moment in terms of capturing the information, collecting the data? Have you ever been in an archive area and needed or tried to get information that might have been restricted?

Well, we were able to get copies of a journal of a gentleman who was in Camp Livingston and we read over that journal I don’t even know how many times. There was a reference to someone coming and taking a photograph in the camp. So basically, we did a lot of online sleuthing to find out who this man was who worked for the Red Cross. And then to locate his family, we did a lot of Google searching and public records searching and were able to find his family. The response of his son who I was able to locate was, ‘yes, I am the son of this man, how did you find me?’ So we had to pull some magic tricks on that one, but we got lucky and were able to locate him. So that was a little MacGyverish.

And as far as restricted information, one of the things that we’re having to deal with, unfortunately... On our recent trip to California, we were going through a lot of correspondence between the men who were interned and their families and so much of it was actually censored. So there’s no MacGyvering around it, it’s just picking up a letter and half of it’s either cut out…

Just holes.

So we don’t know if they were naming people, or they were naming locations, we don’t know. But it’s been something to see because you hear about things being censored, and I always think, like Russia, but turns out no, it was happening for that kind of correspondence.

So you’re actually holding those pieces of, those documents, and you’re seeing first-hand.

And it’s unbelievable, and thank god they did, to have kept their correspondence because these letters that we’re finding are not at the National Archives, these are going to be in archives, like university archives where families have donated their papers so that’s a whole different type of, I guess, librarian MacGyvering is trying to figure out where to go, where does this information exist, how to find it. Then a lot of times we get surprised because the way that things are catalogued don’t necessarily go into an item-level description, this is librarian speak…

They very rarely do.

So sometimes you’ll open a box or a file then surprise, there’s something that’ll make the project.

KYLE One other challenge I just realized might have come up: Do either of you speak fluent Japanese?

That is something we discussed not too long ago actually.

No, neither one of us speaks Japanese, and that has been a big issue for us as far as like, we’re in an archive and we find a whole collection that’s in Japanese, is this something that we need to spend our time photographing? And if it is, how are we going to get this translated? We have been lucky enough to work with a professor here at LSU who has done some translations for us. But no, neither one of us has any knowledge of Japanese.

So you’ve had to have other professors translate these journals for you?

And what’s been interesting is the Japanese that we are looking at is not...

It’s not modern Japanese.

It’s pre-war Japanese. And so you have to have somebody who maybe grew up fluent, or has been studying this particular type of Japanese to be able to translate it.

It’s a lot more time intensive, which translates to expensive when you’re dealing with grant funds, to have that translated.

This has been one great big puzzle. And really searching a lot of different locations for the missing pieces.

Absolutely. We’ve gone coast to coast and everywhere in between to locate information.

Have you found the one spot that you enjoy going back to in particular?

I would love, me personally, to go back to the Japanese American National Museum.

Yeah, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface there. There are so many other collections that we could not access at that time so that would be amazing.

For anyone interested, that's in Los Angeles. They don't just do... internment is not necessarily the focus, it’s the Japanese-American experience. They had, they just kept bringing stuff, the archivist there…

Yeah, they don’t just have papers. They have artifacts, which is amazing to be able to see for the first time.

[50:40] The other question I like to ask participants of this podcast, and keeping in line with the topic, what's the coolest, craziest, weirdest, or most dangerous thing you've done in the name of your research?

When we were at the National Archives, this is not even dangerous but...The National Archives has extremely… remember it's a government building so to get in is basically, like you have to get a new driver's license and then to get out is like they give you a body cavity search [laughs] but not really. But it feels like that. So you are not allowed to have anything on your person except for your ID to get in, which they make for you, and that's about it. We had received notice that there was something for us down at the very front desk, so we have to go through three levels of security and the guy that we were talking to gave us a Post-It note. Gave us, we did not bring in the Post-It note.

[51:56] So we had to bring the Post-it note to the desk and they put it in a bag, which they locked so that we can go downstairs, because anything has to go in the bag and gets locked.

And then, all hell broke loose because they thought that we had provided the Post-it note and that we were then, just, I don't know, going around to their entire collection and then...

And just putting Post-It notes everywhere.

And for those that don't know, a little archival note, the sticky on the back of a Post-It note will ruin any document that you have, give it about a year. That was that was something. It was like full lockdown.

The Post-It note fiasco.

We are clearly being hyperbolic but it was something that really made us understand the difference between... We are librarians entering an archival world and we have a different idea of information sharing. Whereas all we want to do is share information, where our archivists want to share information but they're also charged with protecting and preserving these historic documents, books, it could be anything. Movies. All of it is their purview to protect so they have to do that fine line and then we're rolling up like, ‘give us the red carpet, we’re librarians, we know everything!’ And so it was a real learning curve.

I didn't think that I would get to hear about a debacle with a Post-It note.

But I do want to say thank you both, Sarah and Hayley, very much for sharing this with us. I'm glad that the two of you have been able to be inspired by an article and be able to uncover so much about our past. I'm very excited about all of your future endeavors and where this is going to take you.

And thank you Kyle for sitting in on this one. Honestly, I’m excited to see where you all go and I look forward to potentially talking to you again very soon.

Thank you for allowing us to share this. This has been wonderful. Thank you.

This episode of LSU Experimental was recorded and produced in the CxC Studio 151, here on the campus of Louisiana State University and is supported by LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum and the College of Science. Today’s interview was conducted by me, Becky Carmichael, and Kyle Sirovy. Kyle also edited this episode. Theme music is “Brumby at Full Gallop” by PCIII. To learn more about today’s episode, ask questions, and recommend future investigators, visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental. While you’re there, subscribe to the podcast—we’re available on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

Korematsu v. United States and Japanese Internment DBQ

Use this lesson to h

• Students will understand the major events related to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
• Students will examine and apply constitutional principles at issue in Korematsu v. U.S. to evaluate the Supreme Court’s ruling in that case.
• Students will write a thesis statement that responds to a document-based question prompt.

Expand Materials Materials

• Handout A: Student Document Packet Part 1
• Handout B: Student Document Packet Part 2

Expand More Information More Information

Students should have prior knowledge of how to approach primary sources and of events on the home front during World War II. Background knowledge should include the context of nativism/racism that has shadowed U.S. history in general and , more specifically, negative attitudes toward Asian immigrants and their descendants . These instructions will facilitate a moot court in which students consider the same questions the Supreme Court did.

Expand Warmup Warmup

Lead students in a brief discussion or quick-write responding to the following prompt: “If, as a result of a government order, your family had 48 hours to dispose of your home, car, and all other property before being required to move into distant temporary housing for an undetermined time, which of your inalienable rights might be in jeopardy?” Discuss: In 1942, Japanese Americans living along the West Coast, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, lost both liberty and property under these circumstances. Many sold homes and businesses for only a few dollars or simply abandoned their property. In this activity, students will analyze and evaluate the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark case, Korematsu v. United States (1944).

• As a class, identify the constitutional question that the Supreme Court must answer in this case. Tip: Construct this question as a yes/no question referring specifically to the relevant law in the case and to one or more provisions of the U.S. Constitution. (For teacher reference only: In this case, it might be something like this: “By depriving Fred Korematsu of his liberty and his property, did the exclusion order in Executive Order 9066 violate Korematsu’s Fifth Amendment right to due process?”)
• For student reference throughout the lesson, write the question that the class constructs on the board.

Expand Activities Activities

Distribute  Handout A: Student Document Packet Part 1 , instructing students to work through Documents 1–5. They should annotate information in the documents to show main ideas that will help each side in the controversy. Have students work individually, with a partner, or in small groups to read each source in sequence, answer the accompanying questions, and show how the document could be used to help one side or the other in the case.

• Continue to explore both sides of the case, either as a whole class, or alternatively, by dividing the class into groups. If you were Fred Korematsu’s attorney presenting oral argument before the Supreme Court, what are the main points you would make for the Court’s consideration? Point to specific pieces of evidence from the documents to support your answer.
• If you were the U.S. Solicitor General (the attorney tasked with presenting the government’s argument in Supreme Court cases), what are the main points you would make for the Court’s consideration? Point to specific pieces of evidence from the documents to support your answer.

You might divide the class in half and assign one-half to compose the argument that each attorney would present to the Supreme Court. Remind students that this is just an exercise in disciplined thinking and they may be assigned a side with which they personally disagree. See  Moot Court Procedures .

After both sides have had an equal opportunity to present their case, have the class vote on how they would answer the constitutional question you wrote on the board: If you were a Supreme Court justice, how would you decide this case? Explain your reasoning.

Expand Wrap Up Wrap Up

After students have decided the case, distribute  Handout B: Student Document Packet Part 2 and have the students read Documents 6 and 7, which provide excerpts of the majority and dissenting opinions in this 6–3 decision. Encourage students to compare the justices’ reasoning with their own. Do students think the Court’s majority got it right? For those who say the dissenters were right, ask: What if we discover in the future that there was a well-concealed Japanese spy ring that was thwarted by the exclusion and detention process—would that change your mind?

Direct students to read Document 8: “Duty of Absolute Candor: Katyal Blog Post,” which shows that in his presentation to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Charles Fahy deliberately withheld important information related to the government’s position in the case. Memos compiled in 1943 by Justice Department attorney Edward Ennis directly refuted the government’s position that internment was a military necessity. Ennis had collected documents showing that, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of Naval Intelligence, and other intelligence agencies, there was no known threat of espionage from Japanese Americans. Furthermore, Ennis had uncovered reports that only a few Japanese individuals were even suspected of disloyalty, and that those few were being surveilled at the time. Fahy ignored these documents in making his argument to the Supreme Court that the exclusion of Japanese Americans from their homes in coastal regions and their confinement at inland relocation centers was a military necessity.

For homework, have each student write a thesis statement responding to the  DBQ prompt: How did wartime experiences lead to challenges to the civil liberties of Japanese Americans?

On the next class day, you might solicit volunteers to share their thesis and workshop several using the following questions, or have students share with a partner and provide feedback on the following questions:

• Does the thesis answer the question without restating the prompt?
• Does the thesis make sense?
• Is the thesis historically accurate?
• Does the thesis provide clear and cohesive reasoning?
• Does the thesis provide a road map or “table of contents” for an essay?

Thesis statements can be collected and assessed using the criteria from the  College Board  for a successful thesis statement, or with an individual class rubric.

Depending on where students are in their understanding of the DBQ essay, have students outline their response or write a full essay, as best fits your teaching situation.

Expand Extensions Extensions

Encourage students to explore other cases dealing with civil liberties in wartime.

In  Ex Parte Milligan  (1866), after the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the Court ruled that civilians could not be tried in military tribunals as long as civil courts were operational. If government can ignore the rule of law in emergencies, the result, according to the Court, is “anarchy or despotism.”

In  Hirabayashi v. United States  (1943), Hirabayashi had been convicted of violating the curfew order that required all persons of Japanese ancestry to be in their residences between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. The Court held that the curfew was reasonable because it was a war measure “necessary to meet the threat of sabotage and espionage.” The reasoning was that “in time of war, residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy may be a greater source of danger than those of a different ancestry . . . The Fifth Amendment contains no equal protection clause, and it restrains only such discriminatory legislation by congress as amounts to a denial of due process.”

The Court announced the decision in  Ex Parte Mitsuye Endo  (1944) on the same day that it announced the ruling in Korematsu’s case, December 18, 1944. In Endo’s case, the government ruled that, even though the removal and detention process was within the government’s power as a wartime measure, once the government conceded an individual’s loyalty, that person must be released. “The authority to detain a citizen or to grant him a conditional release as a protection against espionage or sabotage is exhausted at least when his loyalty is conceded. If we held that the authority to detain continued thereafter, we would transform an espionage or sabotage measure into something else. . . . To read [Executive Order 9066] that broadly would be to assume that the Congress and the President intended that this discriminatory action should be taken against these people wholly on account of their ancestry even though the government conceded their loyalty to this country. We cannot make such an assumption. . . ”

“George H. W. Bush, Letter from President Bush to Internees (1991).” In this letter written nearly 50 years after Executive Order 9066, President Bush referred to the constitutional ideals of freedom, equality, and justice in issuing a letter of apology and $20,000 in restitution for lost property to each living survivor of the internment camps. He wrote, “We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.”

To address more recent questions regarding the rule of law during wartime, see  BRI curriculum,  Liberty and Security in Modern Times . This resource contains lessons on McCarthyism, due process, and fair trials during the War on Terror, and the USA Patriot Act.

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