Japanese American internment during World War II: an ethnographic survey

Anthropology

Japanese-American Internment during the Second World War:

An Ethnographic Survey

The interning of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War ranks among the most infamous episodes of American history. Cores of thousands of men, women, and children - many of them native born citizens of the United States - were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and held under detention in camps in the interior portions of the country. The reason given for these extraordinary measures was one of wartime necessity, the need to eliminate potentially subversive elements from the general population. Japanese-Americans, being of different race, ethnicity, and cultural background than the vast majority of Americans were viewed as an alien population living in the midst of the nation's cities, towns, and countryside. Suspect because they were different, it took little to convince many "real" Americans that Japanese-Americans' first loyalty would lie with the Empire of Japan, and not with the United States. The United States was at war with Japan, and all Japanese - American or not - would be treated as enemy aliens. Oddly, the situation stood in stark contrast to that of those persons with ethnic and historical ties to that of America's other wartime foe - Hitler's Germany. Unlike their fellow citizens of Japanese origin or descent, German-Americans continued to live unmolested. They continued to walk the streets of America, to hold jobs, own property, and go to school - their lives continues as normal. What then led to this singling out of the Japanese-American population? Why were Japanese-Americans subjected to such harsh, unconstitutional, and un-American treatment as a result of the War?

The answers to these questions are to be found in majority white America's attitudes toward individuals of different races and culture, and in the unique history of the Japanese-American community and its relationship to the larger whole of the United States.

Background: The Japanese Experience in America

The United States of America has always envision itself as a land of freedom and opportunity; a place to which the oppressed masses of the world come and being new lives. Regardless of race, religion, creed, or ethnic or national origin, all would be equal in the new land, at liberty to purse the American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - or so ran the national mythology. Yet America was never so free or welcoming. The first centuries of European settlement in the land that was to become the United States witnessed the beginning of the end for the continent's indigenous inhabitants as the Native American populations were decimated by disease, driven off their land, or outright slaughtered. Many hundreds of thousands of Black slaves were brought from Africa to be put to labor on plantations of tobacco, rice, indigo, and later cotton. Neither Native Americans, nor these new African-Americans, enjoyed the rights of citizens. Rather, they were treated as subject peoples, denied basic freedoms, and were subjected to onerous regulations and restrictions. Already, by the Mid-Nineteenth Century Ralph Waldo Emerson had given form to a peculiarly American doctrine of progress and the perfectibility of mankind that fused high-minded ideals with a sense of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race:

Transcendental thought, of which Emerson was the principal representative, gave Manifest Destiny its ideological base, by popularizing geographical determinism, the active role of Divine Providence in the nation's destiny, the natural progress of the human race, and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race in promoting that progress."

The voluntary immigrants who came in increasing numbers during the Nineteenth Century were thus placed immediately on a lower rung of society from their "more equal" White counterparts of Anglo-Saxon descent.

Naturally, the situation was worse the further removed from the Anglo-Saxon ideal a group might chance to be. After the Civil War, the newly reunited nation demanded a huge supply of cheap labor to build its rapidly expanding railroad network. In the West, this labor was provided, to a large extent, by settlers from Japan and China. Labor Contractors, generally Japanese or Chinese themselves actively recruited these workers and brought them to America.

They helped to lay the foundations of America's industrial prosperity. White American racial attitudes combined with a nationwide railroad strike in 1877 to create the necessary conditions for a crackdown on Asian immigration.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was soon followed by other, stricter acts, in 1892, 1902, and 1904.

And as White America saw little, if any difference, between Japanese and any other Asians, the anti-Chinese immigration laws were followed by a Japanese Exclusion Act in 1907. By 1924, the United States had imposed an almost total ban on all immigration from East Asia,

The once free and unrestricted immigration policy of the United States was systematically curtailed on economic, cultural, and political grounds. California workers claimed Asian workers who already faced discrimination here were paid poorly and employers gave preference to these poorly paid workers over native born workers in order to save money."

The attitudes of racial and cultural superiority that had long been second nature to many Americans were now fusing with an image of Japanese, and other Asians, as competitors who took needed jobs by driving down wages.

Nevertheless, Japanese-Americans would not long remain on the lowest levels of the economic ladder. By the 1920s, the picture of the Japanese immigrant, and his by now native-born children and grandchildren, as simple laborers was inaccurate. Already, at this time, American-born Japanese had reached educational parity with American whites.

Though established in sizeable numbers in what was then the Territory of Hawaii, in the continental United States, Japanese settled overwhelmingly in just three Western states, California, Oregon, and Washington. Their pattern of settlement was overwhelmingly rural, with only a slightly higher tendency to gravitate toward urban areas in the State of Washington.

The Japanese became especially successful in small-scale agriculture despite discriminatory laws that prevented aliens from owning land.

Many avoided these strictures either by leasing, or putting land in the name of their native-born children and grandchildren.

Others found work as small-scale entrepreneurs, prohibited as they were from membership in virtually all major unions (the sole exception was the Industrial Workers of the world) on account of their race and ethnicity.

Nonetheless, the Japanese formed a coherent and tight-knit community, one that was uniquely organized along generational lines. Japanese immigration had occurred almost entirely during a single discrete period, allowing the initial arrivals to become established as a distinct elder class called the Issei. Born and raised in Japan, the Issei were the leaders of the Japanese-American community on the eve of World War Two. Their children, fluent in English and born in the United States were called Nisei, and the children of the Nisei, were known as Sansei.

As Japanese war planes rained down bombs on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was the Issei who dominated Japanese-American society. In the existing climate of racial prejudice and discrimination, it was easy to identify the entire Japanese-American population as a band of foreign subversives. The next step was the internment of scores of thousands of men, women, and children as "real" Americans i.e. white Anglo-Saxon Americans reacted to irrational fears of alien conquest from within.

Prejudice Unleashed: The Internment Experience

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the American military the authority to create military areas in the West Coast states.

That spring, the United States government began the rounding up and evacuation of the approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese origin or descent then living on the West Coast. With only a few days warning, these individuals and their families were to gather up what belongings they could, and then be sent to internment camps in the interior of the country. Two-thirds of these men, women, and children were native-born citizens of the United States of America.

Having committed no other offense than being Japanese, these people would be held indefinitely... until at least the cessation of hostilities with the Empire of Japan.

The imprisonment of an entire, formerly free population - for no apparent crime - was unprecedented in the annals of American history. The process itself, and the experience and conditions of internment, were to leave lasting impressions on the lives of countless Japanese-Americans and on the whole American psyche.

The racist origins of the internment of Japanese-Americans can clearly be seen in government attitudes toward people of Japanese origin in the years between the two World Wars. A few months after a 1920 sugar plantation strike, the Bureau of Investigations, precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, described the "Japanese Problem" as,

Almost unbelievable' in scope. Japan, the bureau's agent contended, was bent on a 'program for world supremacy' and saw California as a dumping ground for its 'constantly increasing surplus population.' If the tide of immigration was not stemmed, warned the report, 'the white race, in no long space of time, would be driven from the state and California eventually become a province of Japan.... further, that it would be only a question of time until the entire Pacific coast region would be controlled by the Japanese.' Yet Japan's ultimate aim was not limited to California or the Pacific Coast but was global domination achieved through a race war. 'It is the determined purpose of Japan,' the report stated, 'to amalgamate the entire colored races of the world against the Nordic or white race, with Japan at the head of the coalition, for the purpose of wrestling away the supremacy of the white race and placing such supremacy in the colored peoples under the dominion of Japan.'

The presence of sizeable numbers of persons of Japanese origin in California and other Western states was seen as but the beginnings of a Japanese attempt to not merely expand territorially into the United States, but to literally substitute the existing racial order with a new scheme entirely under Imperial Japanese control. Interestingly, the "Japanese menace" is also linked directly to white American fears of all, non-white, and therefore inferior races. It is the old terror of African-Americans, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and a host of hostile "others" that have, or will, insinuate themselves within the body of "pure" American society.

Anti-Japanese racial attitudes were further enhanced and encouraged by the treatment that resulted from the attitudes themselves. Japanese who attempted to "make it" in white American society, to succeed on the terms of their new country found themselves under attack. A case in point is that of Yamato Ichihashi, who pursued a career at Stanford University. A professor of history at the university, Ichihashi was evacuated along with other Japanese in 1942.

Japanese academics, like Ichihashi, were commonly accused of stealing jobs from whites; a charge that led the government of Japan to employ Ichihashi as an agent to counteract anti-Japanese propaganda.

The Japanese government believed money to support Ichihashi and others like him who were sympathetic to Japan was money well spent."

The situation created a catch-22 in which, by accepting payment from the Japanese government to improve white Americans' images of Japan and the Japanese people, Ichihashi and others, were simultaneously appearing to confirm those same white Americans' suspicions that they were nothing more than agents of the Japanese government.

Ichihashi publicly urged Japanese immigrants to 'Americanize.' They should assimilate as 'the first step for their success,' he maintained, and then by 'contributing to the national interests of America they could attain their own economic development.' They should not live a sojourner life, planning to make quick money and return to Japan, but rather should accept America as their permanent home."

It was this sort of thinking that made the Nisei believe, in the early months of the war, that they would be safe from any anti-Japanese agitation. They accepted that restrictions would be placed upon their Japanese-born parents, but believed that their own American birth set them apart.

The appointment of General John L. DeWitt - who had remarked, "A Jap's a Jap" - as the official in charge of the evacuation of Japanese-Americans confirmed their worst fears.

Within the space of only sixty-eight days, nearly the entire Japanese-American population of the West Coast had been herded into detention centers, from there to be transferred to concentration camps - grim facilities consisting of stark, uniform barracks.

The facilities were surrounded by barbed while searchlights played up and down on any nearby streets. "Families were to sleep in the barracks; they were to eat, wash themselves and their clothes, go to the toilet, and play in the communal buildings in the center of the block.

Inmates were dependent on government administrator sin the camp for food and medicine, while those who could work were forbidden to earn more than twenty-one dollars a day - white workers continued to garner regular wages.

In short, Japanese-Americans - men, women, and children, had been reduced to the level of prisoners. Their liberties were gone and they would henceforth be entirely dependent upon the good graces of the military authorities.

Such conditions produced extremism on both sides. Denied their rights, and treated as enemy aliens, many Japanese-Americans actually embraced ultranationalist Japanese ideologies. In the Tule Lake Camp, fanatical groups, such as the Young Men's and Young Women's National Defense Associations (Hokoku Dan) and the Service Association (H-shi Dan), would occasionally engage in violent acts.

Military authorities responded with martial law, and a program of harassment for all Japanese-Americans. Shots were fired from tanks and, on May 24, 1944, James Okamoto, a Nisei who was returning from a work detail outside the camp, was fired on by a guard at the front gate - "Okamoto died the following day. The soldier was of course disciplined. The charge against him? Wasting a bullet. His punishment? A fine of one dollar."

More than anything else, it was a question of cultural identity. Both Japanese-Americans, and their white American captors were being forced by circumstances to take sides; to choose, as it were, a culture, a civilization... An identity. Prior to the war, Nisei identity had been shaped by the twin goals of Americanization and the maintenance of their Japanese heritage. Japanese-Americans acculturated themselves to the customs of the United States in school, while at home they learned the Japanese language, together with Japanese values and behaviors.

The experience of detention shattered the inner norms and forced the individual to re-think her or his connections to society. It produced what,

Political philosophers have generally described as 'obligation' -- that is, the idea of willful membership that forms the basis for a citizen's sense of active support in matters of public interest, and the moral obligation to obey laws, as well as the range of commitments that arise between family members and friends, or in groups of a more religious or social nature."

Cultural identity - whether Japanese or American, or some combination of the two - could no longer be taken for granted. A nearly osmotic evolution of identity was replaced by a need to analyze everything, to consciously accept, or reject, each and every part of the whole. The new framework that would emerge from such a process would be different for each individual, depending on his or her personal experiences; his or her understanding of the camps, his or her interpretation of the meaning of detention. The cohesive organism that had been Japanese-American society before the War, would be shaken to its core; forced to re-invent the connections between its component parts, and between itself and the larger "other" of majority white America.

The dreams of transnationalism - the belief that different nations could be linked together in a single world - that had informed much of the Japanese-American experience until the time of the evacuations were being replaced by new realities. The stereotyping of all Japanese as enemies of the United States of America was rendering it impossible to cling to the hope that one could possess and maintain two national identities, for those national identities were now rendered distinct and irreconcilable. In the concentration camps, Japanese-Americans were encouraged to turn on one another, based on positions of national and cultural allegiance:

Authorities went so far,

As to segregate the 'loyal' from the 'disloyal' internees by means of a questionnaire that demanded a declaration of each individual's national loyalties and willingness to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. The questionnaire precipitated intense conflict within families. Many Nisei found themselves in bitter disagreement with fathers and mothers; brothers and sisters chose opposing sides."

Abandoning one country and culture, therefore, equaled abandoning certain family members, or perhaps, an entire generation. The respect for tradition that was so central to traditional Japanese and Japanese-American life was being torn away by the catastrophic events of the War. The family, too, had always enshrined those same traditions, and now its authority was being contested, or worse, denied. The notion that Japanese-Americans suffered from "collective guilt" by virtue of their national and ethnic origin made moral imperatives of these forced choices.

Make the wrong decision, and one committed a sin -- but a sin against what? The moral and ethical dilemmas of wartime confinement ran the gamut from the most deeply personal to those issues which defined an entire ethnic population.

The transnationalist dichotomy of the pre-war years would become, through the experience of the concentration camps, a much more genuine fusion of cultures and identities. The Nisei had lived in what were essentially self-contained communities. Though they hoped to be both American and Japanese - these cultural values were specifically values of the Japanese-American community. Though born on American soil, the Nisei in fact lived and grew up in Japanese cultural enclaves that just happened to be located in the midst of American cultural territory. Though these enclaves had never been legally defined, the conditions of detention brought home the realities of cultural separateness, and the awful distinctness of the Japanese-American population. The Nisei, unlike the Sansei who grew up after the War, would have been unlikely to have many close non-Japanese-American friends and associates.

The same experience that reinforced the barriers between Japanese-Americans and white Americans also helped to break them down, by helping members of the Japanese-American community to realize that many of their customs contributed to their isolation. In turn, it was their isolation and adherence to distinctly Japanese ways of doing things that helped to augment white prejudice. Nevertheless, the transnational ideal that was espoused by the Japanese-American community before Pearl Harbor, was defeated more by white attitudes toward persons of Japanese descent than anything else.

Stereotypes were primarily responsible for the single-minded treatment of the Japanese-American ethnic group. The white population of the United States projected onto an entire group of people a narrow set of images and fears that, for them, served to define that same population. The major stereotype of Japanese-Americans was, of course, the firm belief on the part of the white community that Japanese - even those born in the United States - were essentially foreigners whose true loyalties always lay with the Empire of Japan. One way for Japanese internees to prove this stereotype wrong was to volunteer to fight the very people whom they were believed to support. The Japanese-American volunteers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the 100th Infantry Battalion, and others who served in Military Intelligence, and other capacities were "risking their lives in defense of this nation while their families and friends were behind barbed wire."

Though mocked by others in the camps, their actions made clear to white America that they were no less citizens of the United States than anyone else, and as such, no less loyal.

Yet stereotyping can produce some unusual conditions, particularly within a group that has been singled out to such an extreme. Another result of the wartime experience on many sansei, was the development of stereotypes of person not of Japanese descent, but also of individuals of Japanese ancestry. Many sansei can feel as uncomfortable around other sansei as they can among non-Japanese-Americans. The condition was described by one Sansei man, didn't feel comfortable being among white people. I mean, I did not feel comfortable socializing with so many white people. I rather felt comfortable mixing with mixed people. But the funny thing about it, too, is I did not feel comfortable socializing with exclusively Japanese-Americans, either.... Part of it is because [in high school], I had a very hard time being accepted by those Sanseis. So I intentionally tried to find other things to do without Sanseis. So, I'm a very peculiar person who feels uncomfortable in either extreme."

The development signifies the realization on the part of many Japanese-Americans that, if they conform too closely to Japanese traditions they risk being stereotyped as the perpetual foreigner the un-American individual who was imagined to exist everywhere among the Japanese-American community during the Second World War. On the other hand, the Japanese-American man or woman who becomes too American falls victim to a second round of prejudice from his or her own people. To become too thoroughly Americanized is to lose one's ties with the Japanese community. At the same time, a full identification with white America can mean belonging nowhere at all - another artifact of cultural stereotypes. This switching between identities is not unusual, "switches take place according to the negative or positive valuation attached to certain ethnic stereotypes.... individuals tend to select one ethnic identity over another, reducing or extending their distance from their ethnic group, according to the direct benefits they hope to derive."