During World War II, around 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry, the majority of whom lived on the Pacific Coast, were forcibly transported and imprisoned in concentration camps in the country’s western heartland. Approximately two-thirds of the detained were nationals of the United States. Following Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, several actions were authorized.
The West Coast was home to 112,000 of the 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor assault. Around 80,000 Nisei (literal translation: ‘second generation’; American-born Japanese with American citizenship) and Sansei (‘third generation’, Nisei’s offspring) were there. The rest were Issei (‘first generation’) Japanese immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship in the United States under US law.
Based on local population densities and regional politics, Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps. More than 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were deported to internment camps in the interior. Only 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese Americans were detained in Hawaii (which was under martial law), when 150,000 or more Japanese Americans made up more than a third of the territory’s population. Though the internment was implemented to reduce a security risk that Japanese Americans were thought to pose, the scale of the internment in relation to the size of the Japanese American population far outweighed similar measures taken against German and Italian Americans, who were mostly non-citizens. Anyone with 1/16th Japanese ancestry or more was considered a candidate for internment by California. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, the program’s creator, said that everyone with “one drop of Japanese blood” was eligible.
Two months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which empowered regional military commanders to declare “military regions” from which “any or all civilians may be banned.” Despite the fact that the executive order did not specifically mention Japanese Americans, it was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were required to leave Alaska and the military exclusion zones from all of California, as well as parts of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, with the exception of those internees held in government camps. The internees comprised not only people of Japanese ancestry, but also a limited number of people of German and Italian heritage, as well as Germans who were exiled from Latin America and sent to the United States. Before March 1942, over 5,000 Japanese Americans had relocated beyond the exclusion zone, while about 5,500 community leaders had been captured shortly after the Pearl Harbor assault and were thus already detained.
By supplying particular individual census data on Japanese Americans, the United States Census Bureau aided the internment activities. Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, the Bureau denied its position for decades, and its role became more commonly acknowledged by 2007. In its 1944 ruling Korematsu v. United States, the United States Supreme Court supported the validity of the removals on the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The Court limited its judgement to the legitimacy of the exclusion orders, bypassing the problem of citizen confinement without due process, but the same day, in Ex parte Endo, the Court held that a loyal citizen could not be detained, allowing them to be released. The exclusion orders were revoked the day before the Korematsu and Endo judgements were made public.
President Jimmy Carter opened a study in the 1980s in response to rising criticism from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) other redress organizations to establish if the government’s decision to intern Japanese Americans in concentration camps was lawful. To investigate the camps, he formed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Personal Justice Denied, a 1983 report by the Commission, found scant evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and determined that the incarceration was the result of prejudice. It was suggested that the government compensate the detainees. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law in 1988, officially apologizing on behalf of the US government for the internment and authorizing a payment of $20,000 (equal to $44,000 in 2020) to each former internee who was still living at the time of the act’s passage. Government actions were founded on “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” according to the legislation. By 1992, the US government had paid out more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned (equal to $3,500,000,000 in 2020).
