Newswise — The imprisonment of more than 117,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry was no spur-of-the-moment decision launched in reaction to the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Rather it was the end game in a long, deliberate process undertaken by the United States government, which was unable or unwilling to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, a University of Washington scholar contends in a new book.
Writing in "Judgment without Trial," Tetsuden Kashima, a professor of American ethnic studies, traced the initial idea for rounding up Japanese people back to the 1920s. He also points out in detail that there was no uniform camp experience for those who were detained. Instead, imprisonment ranged from posh to punitive. Resorts such as the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulfur Springs, W. Va., housed diplomats and businessmen, while facilities such as the army's camp at Lordsburg, N.M., and the War Relocation Authority's isolation camps at Leupp, Ariz., and Moab, Utah, employed "Gestapo-like methods" to control prisoners, according to Kashima.
The book, published by the University of Washington Press, stems in part from Kashima's own unanswered questions from his childhood. He was an infant on Dec. 7 and years later his mother told him his father, a Buddhist priest who died in 1953, expected to be arrested by the FBI after the attack on Pearl Harbor. That never happened and Kashima's mother never explained why his father thought he'd be arrested. But after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, providing authority for the mass incarceration, the Kashima family was ordered to report to an assembly center at a racetrack south of San Francisco. Several months later the family was sent to the War Relocation Authority's camp at Topaz, Utah, for the duration of the war.
In his book, Kashima traces the eventual imprisonment of JapaneseAmericans to the 1920s when, he says, federal agencies became concerned that Japanese immigrants might pose a security risk in a future war. Among the documents he cites is a 1934 State Department memorandum claiming "the entire Japanese population will rise and commit sabotage" in an eventual war between Japan and the United States. Both the Justice and War departments maneuvered in that decade for jurisdiction to gather counterintelligence on foreign nationals and American citizens. A 1938 army document cited by Kashima justified collecting data on California's Japanese population "in case at a future date it might be necessary to establish concentration camps for Japanese in case of emergency."
Geography played a role in the unequal treatment inflicted on Japanese Americans once war broke out. It was harshest on the West Coast, where there was a long history of discrimination against Asians, and where most of the mainland Japanese-American population resided. But in Hawaii, which was home to a larger Japanese-American population, few were imprisoned.
"The difference was a combination of leadership, sociological and economic issues," said Kashima. "In Hawaii there was a strong military voice, including that of the commander, Air Force Lt. Gen. Delos Emmons, who said Japanese Americans did not pose any military threat. Public opinion also was favorable because the Japanese constituted a numerically significant portion of the population and were more a part of society than they were on the mainland. People of Japanese ancestry also were a major factor in the islands' work force."
By contrast, Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, headquartered in San Francisco, was virulently anti-Japanese and a strong supporter of their exclusion from the West Coast and incarceration. DeWitt's attitude meshed with the region's long-standing anti-Asian sentiment and the desire of agricultural interests who wanted to remove Japanese farmers to get the crops they already had planted and the land they had leased, Kashima said.
Once they were incarcerated in camps surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, life was harsh. People were classified as "pro-American" or "pro-Japanese," and badgered into signing or rejecting loyalty oaths. Some were shifted from camp to camp and others were segregated depending on their perceived loyalty or disloyalty. A number of inmates protested and there were uprisings in several camps, most notably in a so-called riot at the War Relocation Authority's camp at Manzanar, Calif., that resulted in the death of two prisoners in December 1942. As a result, isolation centers for alleged troublemakers were established in Moab and Leupp.
Seven American soldiers were court marshaled for killing Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans during the war. All seven were found not guilty, according to Kashima, although one was fined $1 for "the unauthorized expenditure of government property, for using a bullet to kill an inmate."
Kashima thinks there are parallels and differences between the treatment of Japanese people in World War II and what is happening today in the war on terrorism.
"My personal view is the use of the Patriot Act and having the president declare war on terror is a legally justifiable way of dealing with people accused of terrorism," he said. "But what is a terrorist and how do we prove it are questions that have to be answered. The problem today is that we are at war with terrorism, not a nation, and the definition of a terrorist is not clear. What we are facing today in preserving civil liberties is comparable to World War II in an important way. If we have learned anything at all from the Japanese-American World War II experience, we must allow for judicial due process and a speedy resolution to any charges placed against an individual."
During World War II, Kashima said, prisoner categories for Japanese shifted back and forth.
"There were different rationales for alien Japanese and citizens and different rationales for internment or detainment. This really confounded the situation. The main justification for this seems to be racial. It is fair to say that for more than 30 years after WWII, most Americans knew nothing about the issues concerning the internment process. Records of those prisoners were kept by the various government agencies and thus out of the eyes of the American public, and the only people who knew about them were those who went through the camp experience. And for various reasons, Japanese Americans kept silent about the events of the World War II years."
"The story of the camps and imprisonment is a complex one. I don't want people to get lost in the details, but it is important to know that this wasn't done as a result of just war hysteria. The inability to distinguish between alien Japanese and Japanese Americans was there as far back as the 1920s. And people need to know that there was more than a single type of camp experience," Kashima said.
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