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Japanese american internment camps

After Pearl Harbor, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in camps in the United States. We found three of them.

I was looking for a book to read at the public library in Ashland, Oregon, when, by chance, I came across their faces: in a black and white shot, Asian children were smiling incongruously behind barbed wire. “Where could this have happened? I wondered, thinking first of the Vietnam War. And it was then, at age 17, that I learned that civilians of Japanese descent had been arrested and detained in the United States during World War II. It was all the more surprising as I myself am the daughter of a Japanese immigrant.

Why did the United States imprison without trial more than 120,000 civilians, two-thirds of whom were American citizens? 

Junzo Jake Ohara, 89, is still struggling to answer: “It was probably because of racial prejudice, I don't know. He was interned for three years. “They must have been afraid of us. The answer lies not only in fear and prejudice, but also in the ability of politics to exacerbate both, if contemporary documents are to be believed. These reveal a country grappling with a world war, but also with a painful internal struggle over its ideals – a struggle that finds an echo in the current debate on immigration.

In 1980, Congress appointed the Commission on Wartime Civilian Relocation and Internment to investigate the US government's decision to intern people of Japanese descent during World War II. The commission dissected official documents and collected more than 750 depositions. Bottom line: xenophobia against people of Japanese descent existed long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

By the end of the 19th century, a growing number of political and labor leaders accused Japanese immigrants of stealing agricultural jobs from white Americans. On May 7, 1900, James Duval Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco, declared: “The Chinese and the Japanese are not genuine citizens. They never have the makings of American citizens. An editorial in San Francisco Chronicle asserted: "Our duty is to keep America for Americans and white races whom we can assimilate and whose children will have the American standard of living."

Immigration from Japan was initially restricted. Then, California prohibited the Japanese from owning land, and any person of Japanese descent from marrying a white man. In 1924,Congress prohibited immigration to all Asians. Those already installed could no longer become citizens. Only their children born in the United States could obtain citizenship (a constitutional right). In the 1930s, the animosity only grew, as Japan invaded Manchuria and continued to expand into China.

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (3,500 dead and wounded) threw the United States into war. This was the spark that fanned the fire against people of Japanese descent in the United States. And the anger mounted as Japan advanced in the Pacific. Fear gripped the United States: soon, Japan would invade the west coast of the country. According to a rumor,Japanese Americans from Hawaii had collaborated in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Frank Knox, the United States Secretary of the Navy, gave credence to the conspiracy theory. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron said, “We Shouldn't take risk another Pearl Harbor in Southern California. The dissenting voices were few. And, the Congressional Committee will observe long after, “the press amplified the heightened and unthinking emotions of the time”.

On February 14, 1942, General John L. DeWitt, in charge of military security for the west of the country, asked that people of Japanese origin be excluded from the West Coast by military necessity: "The Japanese race is an enemy race and, although many second- and third-generation Japanese born on US soil possess nationality and have become “Americanized,” the racial heritage remains intact.”

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed the executive order granting military commanders the power to arrest and incarcerate “some or all persons”—in other words, those of Japanese descent, even with American citizenship. Ralph Carr,Republican Governor of Colorado, was one of the few to oppose the measure. Facing a very hostile crowd, he declared: “An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. If you go after them, you have to go after me first. 

In March, American soldiers began knocking on the doors of homes and posting evacuation orders in targeted neighborhoods in California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona. Those rounded up were only allowed to take what they could carry. Some sold all their goods at a low price to profiteers; others piled up their belongings in improvised warehouses, rented their homes or found a caretaker for their property. But looted warehouses, unpaid rent, and wardens selling or abandoning the belongings in their care were legion.

Each family was assigned a registration number, shown on the tags hung on the luggage and on the people. The army was so effective that temporary assembly centers had to be set up at fairgrounds and racetracks, while relocation centers were built. The Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles was the largest of the temporary centers, with more than 18,000 internees forced to live in the stables.

Internees spent months in assembly centers before being moved, mostly by train, to ten camps located in remote mountains or deserts, as well as to other areas in the interior of the country. A "mass migration" intended to "create communities" in desert territories "full of possibilities": this is what a film produced at the time by the government presents. “We protect ourselves without violating principles of Christian decency,” the commentary says.

The congressional commission of inquiry

will describe living conditions as "harsh", 

with "harsh winters" and "unbearably hot and humid" summers. The prisoners lived in “gloomy”, hastily built barracks, with tar paper for all insulation and only one room per family, in camps surrounded by “barbed wire fences”. The military police provided surveillance from watchtowers equipped with machine guns and searchlights. Anyone who pretended to cross the boundaries of the camp was shot.

The US victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 reduced fears of a Japanese attack on the American mainland. The camps did not close, however. A few Japanese Americans deemed loyal were released, but most of the internees remained there, months becoming years. More than 5,000 children were born in detention, and nearly 2,000 people died there.

Some did not let themselves go. Young Fred Korematsu refused to obey orders. He remained in San Leandro (California) after the army had declared the place a "military zone", forbidden to anyone of Japanese descent. Sentenced by a court, Korematsu appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Frank Murphy wrote that treating people of Japanese descent differently from those with origins in Italy or Germany, countries also at war with the United States, amounted to the "legalization of racism".

However, the Court upheld Korematsu's conviction by six votes to three, agreeing with the government's opinion. The judges were unaware that, according to a Navy intelligence report, the Japanese-Americans posed no military threat, and there was no indication that they were disloyal, engaged in espionage or sending signals to submarines – as the government claimed. The judges were unaware of the report because, the government admitted in 2011, the US attorney general had concealed it from them.

In June 2018, the Supreme Court finally overturned its own 1944 decision. Its president, John G. Roberts Jr., wrote that locking up American citizens in "concentration camps, based solely and openly" on the ethnic origin, "is objectively illegal and does not come under the authority of the President". A decision that fell at the very moment when this same Supreme Court validated Donald Trump's anti-immigration decree.

Once engaged in the war, the American army understood that it needed more soldiers. A unit made up almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, the 100th Infantry battalion, was sent to Europe. Roosevelt called for volunteers for a second similar unit: the 442nd Infantry Regiment. In Hawaii, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans answered the call.

In the camps, hundreds of prisoners refused to enlist until their family members were released. For others, the engagement was an opportunity to prove their loyalty. A thousand young internees in the camps volunteered. Enlisted in the 442nd Regiment in Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, who later became a senator, remembered years later: "In addition to fighting the enemy, we all had an objective: to redeem our name, to enforce our honor. It was almost impossible to fail. We had to succeed. And they succeeded.

In seven major campaigns, the 442nd regiment totaled 9,486 casualties, including 600 killed. It is the most decorated combat unit, relative to its size, in United States history. On June 15, 1944 , the 100th Battalion merged with the 442nd Together, the two units fought in Italy, then in France, in the Vosges. After the war, President Truman will salute the 442nd in Washington, but prejudice will take longer to overcome.

Japanese Americans would continue to suffer aggression, racism and discrimination for years to come - though no evidence of disloyalty or wrongdoing by a Japanese American was ever found during World War II.

In 1988, President Reagan will sign a law granting 20,000 dollars in compensation to each of the 60,000 survivors of the camps. Junzo Jake Ohara, now 89, says his father never really recovered from the effort to rebuild his life, or from the shame of being seen as disloyal. We underestimated the emotional damage of internment, analyzes Satsuki Ina, born in captivity and became a trauma therapist, specializing in the experience of Americans of Japanese origin: “The public sees this as a resettlement. The vocabulary was changed to give the impression that the government was looking after us. But it was indeed an arrest. I see people who were young adults when they were incarcerated, and who, when they are old, try to understand what happened to them.

"We have given the pretty name of 'relocation centers' to these desert places, but that does not make them any less concentration camps", decided Harold Ickes, American Secretary of the Interior, in 1946. labels to identify families incarcerated in the United States were so humiliating that a large number of former internees still suffer from them, assures Satsuki Ina: “Becoming a number means no longer being known. Many felt this loss of identity and meaning when America turned its back on us. Satsuki Ina says she was very moved recently when she learned that the US government was separating children from their parents as part of Trump's anti-immigration measures.

During national debates on border policy and on the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Donald Trump's ban on entry to nationals of certain countries, many former Japanese-American detainees and their children, including those of Fred Korematsu, took a stand against government policy. “It can happen again, fears Kiyoshi Katsumoto, 82. We as citizens really need to understand what this country is about.

It was founded on the belief that it would welcome all people, based on freedom and law, and that we could succeed through hard work. You have to be well informed to have a country like that. It is easy to be led by demagogues. Paul Kitagaki Jr., whose photos illustrate this article, discovered in the National Archives of the United States photographs of his family members taken by Dorothea Lange. She had taken hundreds of empathetic photos as part of a government-commissioned "resettlement" report. Kitagaki then went in search of other former detainees, whom he now photographs to testify to their resilience and courage. "It's an American story," he said. This is what Americans have done to other Americans.

This story helps me better understand my own mother, although she came to the United States from Japan after the war. I understand why she was so embarrassed to speak English in public, why she insisted on raising the American flag in front of the house when she obtained citizenship, why she rarely missed the 4th of July parade. She admired the ideals of the United States and said to me, with her heavy accent: “Anna, you, American girl. Not speak Japanese. Speak English like other people.

My mother wanted what other immigrants want: to be accepted by the people of this country, which she had adopted. She ignored the racist epithets she received from time to time, convinced that things would work out for her and her children. I think she would like these photos to be a reminder that Americans can look like any of us.