- After the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, more than 122,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly sent to internment camps.
- The move came amid fears about national security, but also economic competition and racism.
In a speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 as "a date which will live in infamy." The bombing thrust the United States fully into World War II, but also stoked existing xenophobia and racialized fear about national security.
The reaction to Pearl Harbor was swift. The same day, just hours after the attack, the FBI rounded up nearly 1,300 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets. More than 850 Germans and 150 Italians were also arrested.
Two months later on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate military areas along the West Coast and remove civilians from these areas "in his discretion." A few weeks later, Congress passed a law that gave teeth to the order, making violations punishable by imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.
Although Executive Order 9066 did not specify any ethnic groups, military commanders like Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issued a proclamation that specifically forced Japanese Americans to evacuate from their homes.
"A Jap's a Jap – it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not," DeWitt reportedly said.
Throughout the war, at least 122,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded "assembly centers" and "relocation centers," also known as "internment camps." More than half of the evacuees were legal American citizens, and ranged from a 92-year-old woman and a baby boy born a few months before the last camp closed three years later in 1945.
A history of discrimination
Many non-military Americans supported the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans due to economic competition, distrust of the "other," and lasting anti-Asian racism, according to scholars.
"Discrimination against Asian Americans had been common in the U.S. since the 19th century. Americans blamed Asians for taking away jobs and were generally xenophobic against perceived negative cultural as well as economic influences from the 'yellow peril,'" Nancy Qian, a professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told Insider.
Following the end of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which later expanded to prohibit immigration from most Asian countries, thousands of Japanese immigrants settled in America. They found success in farming and other small businesses in Hawaii and other West Coast states — a success that some white farmers and business owners viewed as threats.
In 1913, the California State Assembly passed an act that restricted land ownership to only those eligible to be citizens. And, in 1922, the Supreme Court upheld the government's right to deny US citizenship to Japanese immigrants.
"We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the White man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men," Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of a farming association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942. "If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks because the White farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either."
Poor living conditions
Japanese Americans were temporarily housed at assembly centers before they were transported to internment camps. The assembly centers were often old fairgrounds or racetracks with buildings meant for livestock, hastily converted into living quarters for families up to six, according to oral histories of internees.
The internment camps were no better. Four or five families shared tar-papered, army-style barracks with communal mess halls, schools, and work facilities surrounding them. The camps were ringed by barbed wire and guard towers. Prisoners were shot for walking too close to the fence.
Some Japanese Americans rioted against the poor living conditions they were subjected to, including insufficient rations, substandard sanitation, and overcrowding. But nascent attempts at an uprising were swiftly quelled by US Army guards.
Decades till reparations
The internment camps ended in 1945 after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the military had "no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal" to the United States.
The Supreme Court had, however, held in a separate case that same year that compulsory exclusion of citizens during times of war was justified to reduce the risk of espionage. Scholars have condemned the widely-criticized ruling as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry," and as "a stain on American jurisprudence."
In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered $20,000 checks to camp survivors and issued a formal apology for the "grave injustice" that "was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War II."
The law also acknowledged that the actions were "carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
A lingering legacy
The last camp closed in May 1945, but the implications of the forced evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor linger today in the political theater.
"The internment of the Japanese Americans is a stain on the collective memories of all Asian Americans. It puts into question how they will be treated by America in the event of an international conflict between the country of their ancestors and the US," Qian said, citing the backlash Chinese Americans faced amid the Trump-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic.
"One interpretation is that the perceived backlash is actually the combination of isolated incidents and political rhetoric, and that most Asian Americans are safe and will be treated fairly," Qian continued. "But this sanguine view is undermined by the recollection of the Japanese American experience during WWII."