Japanese American Internment

¶ … World War II as a great triumph in American history. The United States forces were victorious in both the Pacific and European Theatres of war. Two military aggressive regimes were destroyed, and peace was restored, due in large part to America's involvement. What many people do not realize is that some of the actions of the United States were just as morally corrupt as those of the Axis powers. Similar to the Nazi's imprisonment of Jews in Europe, the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese-Americans on the West Coast.

Worst of all, the internment of Japanese was more of an act of racism than actual perceived threat. The premise of this paper is to prove that the internment of Japanese in 1942 was a decision motivated by race rather than defensive strategy. I will chronicle the events leading up to the internment, the presence of racism before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I will conclude by relating the imprisonment of Japanese in America with the current war on terrorism.

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on U.S. naval forces in Pearl Harbor (Daniels 22). The attack caught American forces and leadership completely off guard, and fear and surprise riveted throughout the country. The U.S., which had remained neutral until the attacked, immediately began mobilizing for a war in the Pacific and Europe. The attack left many on the West Coast bewildered at how the Japanese could be so successful in their bombing.

They immediately started to suspect espionage by Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens living in the U.S. These perceived threats were immediately addressed by the state and federal governments. On December 8, the Department of Justice issued a closure of immigration from Japan to the U.S. (Daniels 27). A string of major military losses in the Pacific caused even more tension and bitterness towards Japanese on the West Coast. Military leaders falsely presumed that Japanese forces were extremely close to the U.S.

coastline, and that attacks on Los Angeles and San Francisco were imminent. They also presumed that the success of Pearl Harbor was due in part to espionage by Japanese-Americans, and that they posed a threat to the further defense of the country. On February 19, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which called for the relocation of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast (Daniels 46). Executive Order 9066 was not based on any substantial evidence, but rather just perceived notions of threats that stemmed from racism against people of Japanese descent.

Racism against the Japanese people living in the U.S. was not a result of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but rather something that had been built up over time. The media and government for decades before the onset of World War II targeted Japanese and Chinese. California, in particular, passed laws and approved regulations aimed at slowing Japanese immigration into the state (Daniels 10). As early as 1905, California politicians and media were denouncing the Japanese as "undesirable," and "transient" (Daniels 10).

The racist views displayed by the politicians and media were reflected by many of the citizens of California. They were resentful of the relative success of Japanese businessmen and landowners. Japanese farmers in California controlled nearly 150,000 acres of farmland by 1909, and Japanese business throughout the major cities were thriving (Daniels 17). Jealous of the success of their Japanese counterparts, white American farmers sought to ruin their reputations through anti-Japanese propaganda (Daniels 17).

They told their constituents in the state legislatures that Japanese farmers had driven them out of their land, which was clearly false, as the Issei had started their farms on new lands (Daniels 17). The racism targeted at Japanese on the West Coast was sharply perpetuated by the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Not only were they seen as economic rivals for Americans, but after Pearl Harbor, they were viewed as "enemies." Many of those who discriminated against Japanese before the bombing, found the war against Japan to be a "stepping stool," for propagating fear of the Japanese-Americans. Journalists' published falsified or exaggerated stories to instill fear in people. They suggested, without any evidence to back it up, that Japanese forces were within a hundred miles of the mainland, and that Japanese in America were spying and sabotaging (Daniels 29).

It is clear that there was no persuasive evidence of sabotage by Japanese-Americans. There were only two cases of attacks against the mainland by Japanese submarines, both of which had escaped naval surveillance, but nothing more (Daniels 46). There were no cases of Japanese-Americans caught spying, or sabotaging, yet the media constantly printed stories claiming these events had occurred (Daniels 47).

As Daniels points out, a 1981 report by the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians admitted that the internment was, "not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it...we not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race, prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" (1).

While the most notorious, the internment of Japanese has not been the only time in American history when ethnic or racial groups are singled out for detention by the government. The Carter administration took preliminary steps to detain Iranian students living in the United States after U.S. Embassy in.