This paper examines the forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans by the U.S. federal government between 1942 and 1945. While Pearl Harbor served as the immediate catalyst, the paper argues that the internment policy was rooted in decades of entrenched anti-Asian sentiment. Drawing on TenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson, the essay traces discriminatory legislation — including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 — as evidence of longstanding racial hostility. The paper ultimately contends that public acceptance of internment was made possible by pre-existing prejudice, not simply wartime fear.
Between 1942 and 1945, the United States federal government forcibly interned more than 100,000 immigrants and citizens — the majority of them American-born — in what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself referred to as "concentration camps." At the time, supporters of the program argued that Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans posed a genuine threat to the American war effort. In reality, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War did not emerge out of thin air, but rather resulted from the outrage over the attack on Pearl Harbor combined with nearly a century of entrenched anti-Asian sentiment.
Undoubtedly, Pearl Harbor served as the immediate catalyst for internment. As TenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson make clear on page 86, "The decision to evacuate all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast… was reached in a context of gathering fear, suspicion, and anger on the part of the American public." Americans were shocked by the seemingly unprovoked attack and feared that Pearl Harbor might be the first in a series of strikes against U.S. territory. This partly explains the intensity of anger and racism directed at the Japanese specifically: Germany never managed to attack U.S. territory during the war, making Japan seem a far more immediate existential threat.
However, focusing only on these proximate causes obscures the broader racist context in which internment policy operated. Just as Adolf Hitler did not invent German anti-Semitism but instead capitalized on an existing animus toward Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and the mentally disabled, so too the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized latent American anti-Asian prejudice. Pearl Harbor did not cause American racism toward the Japanese — it simply gave racists a pretext to express it openly.
TenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson are right to frame their chapter around the "activation of the stereotype" rather than the "invention of the stereotype," because anti-Asian hostility in America had a far longer history. As the authors note on page 68, "half a century of agitation and antipathy directed against Japanese-Americans… had by 1941 diffused among the West Coast population a rigidly stereotyped set of attitudes toward Orientals which centered on suspicion and distrust."
"Exclusion acts codified anti-Asian hostility in law"
"Why Americans tolerated internment of fellow citizens"
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