America's Detention Camps

John is a junior college English teacher. When he was three years old, the United States government sent him, and his family, to a detention camp. Howard, a newspaper publisher, spent eight months imprisoned with his wife and children in a one-room tarpaper shack. He had committed no crime; his imprisonment was legal. Jeanne, an author, was sent to a prison camp when she was seven. She spent three years there and now says: "All I knew was that we were in camp, behind barbed wire. Everything had fallen apart. No more Christmas, Thanksgiving."

John, Howard, and Jeanne had all been in America; neither they nor their families had committed, been tried for, or been convicted of a crime. They were imprisoned in "internment camps" simply because their parents or grandparents (or even great-grandparents) had come to America from Japan. They had Japanese faces.

In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and destroyed America's Pacific fleet. The rallying cry in America was "Remember Pearl Harbor!" and the country was plunged into a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It allowed the military to move Japanese American civilians to ten relocation camps, stretching from California to Arkansas. Most Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast, and the government acted on fears that they would become saboteurs and spies for Japan.

Eventually, almost 110,000 civilians, over two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were forced to move. Laws were passed penalizing those who disobeyed military orders. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled that the confinement of these people, based only on race, was legal; the Court also upheld rulings on curfews and travel restrictions for Japanese Americans.

Many of those who were interned left families, prosperous businesses, farms, and personal possessions behind. The resettlement was swift; money was lost in the shuffle or confiscated by the government. One California bank, in 1942, estimated the loss by Japanese Americans at $400 million. Japanese American homes were searched without warrants, and workers were fired for no reason.

The Japanese, of course, were not America's only enemies in World War II; we also fought Germans and Italians. However, none of these immigrants or their children received the treatment that the Japanese did. They were not interned or taken to "safe" locations. Strong racial prejudice against the Japanese seemed to be at work. Earl Warren (later to become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court) was then attorney general of California. Even Warren, who became known as a strong fighter for civil liberties, appeared to show racial bias. In 1942, he said: "We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them . . . but when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound."

During the war, second-generation Japanese Americans (called Nisei) were eventually allowed to join the army; they made up a special unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, that fought in the European theater, especially the Italian campaign. Many of these men came out of internment camps to fight for the country they loved, the country that had so wronged them. The Nisei won more decorations than any regiment in history and suffered an extremely high casualty rate. Senator Daniel Inouye, who served on the Watergate investigation committee, is a Nisei who lost an arm in the war.

When the war ended, the Japanese Americans were released. They went back to their homes and attempted to pick up the pieces of their lives. The Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 was to compensate them for their economic losses, but it returned only $38 million to the internees-less than 10 percent of the estimated losses.

How do Japanese Americans feel about this treatment now? One, an army sergeant, says:

I was born in [a camp] in 1944. Living quarters were small, and they never had enough blankets. . . . The guns around the camp were always pointed into the camp, not outward. . . . My folks say they want to forget this ever happened. They lost a lot of relatives who went to Europe with the 442nd Combat Team.

Some Japanese Americans feel that a financial repayment is called for. Others feel that money is no longer important, but justice is. Since their rights were violated, since they were denied the privileges of citizens, they want an apology. One woman says: "It is the gesture, the recognition, the honor that is restored. It is the symbolic gesture of the government standing up and saying it was wrong." Since no other immigrant group has ever been singled out for such harsh and unfair treatment, this seems to be the least our government could do.

Japanese Americans were not allowed to fight in World War II.