Internment of Japanese Americans

Incarceration of Japanese Americans

Part of the history of Asian Americans and United States home front during World War II
Clockwise from top left: Boarding a train in Woodland, California Granada Relocation Center in Colorado Harvesting spinach at Gila River Adults in class at Manzanar Ice skating at Heart Mountain Making camouflage nets for the War Department
Date	February 19, 1942 – March 20, 1946
Location	Western United States[1]
Cause	Executive Order 9066 signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt
Motive	Anti-Japanese racism[2] Hysteria[2] following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Niihau incident
Perpetrator	United States federal government
Outcome	Partial financial compensation for lost property under the Japanese-American Claims Act of 1948 signed by Harry Truman Formal apology and financial reparations given to surviving victims under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 signed by Ronald Reagan
Deaths	At least 1,862;[3] at least 7 homicides by sentries[4]
Inquiries	Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (1983)
Prisoners	120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly living on the West Coast
Supreme Court cases	Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) Yasui v. United States (1943) Korematsu v. United States (1944) Ex parte Endo (1944)

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During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the detainees were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Before the war, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental United States, of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei ('second generation'; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei ('third generation', the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei ('first generation') immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii (then under martial law), where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.

Internment was intended to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose. The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. Following the executive order, the entire West Coast was designated a military exclusion area, and all Japanese Americans living there were taken to assembly centers before being sent to concentration camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. California defined anyone with 1⁄16th or more Japanese lineage as a person who should be incarcerated. A key member of the Western Defense Command, Colonel Karl Bendetsen, went so far as to say “I am determined that if they have "one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp."^[5] The United States Census Bureau assisted the incarceration efforts by providing specific individual census data. Internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many were forced to sell some or all of their property, including businesses. At the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards, internees lived in often-crowded and sparsely furnished barracks.

In its 1944 decision Korematsu v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removals under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens without due process, but ruled on the same day in Ex parte Endo that a loyal citizen could not be detained, which began their release. On December 17, 1944, the exclusion orders were rescinded, and nine of the ten camps were shut down by the end of 1945. Japanese Americans were initially barred from U.S. military service, but by 1943, they were allowed to join, with 20,000 serving during the war. Over 4,000 students were allowed to leave the camps to attend college. Hospitals in the camps recorded 5,981 births and 1,862 deaths during incarceration.

In the 1970s, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the decision to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. In 1983, the Commission's report, Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and concluded that the incarceration had been the product of racism. It recommended that the government pay reparations to the detainees. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the incarceration on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $52,000 in 2023) to each former detainee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." By 1992, the U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $4.12 billion in 2023) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated.