Japanese Concentration Camps in America

The attack on Pearl Harbor had scared many Americans into thinking that the United States might be attacked next. This, naturally, caused many Americans to be afraid and paranoid of their Japanese American neighbors. Soon, many false rumors were spread about Japanese Americans, ranging from the belief that they were poisoning farm foods to committing sabotage by mining coastal waters.

In response to this widespread paranoia and based on strong recommendations from the military, Roosevelt signed an order requiring the removal of people with Japanese ancestry from California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Roosevelt justified this move as one necessary to maintain national security.

One of the problems this mass removal of Japanese Americans caused was most noticeable in Hawaii. In Hawaii, 37% of the people were Japanese Americans. The removal of all these people would lead to serious problems concerning the economy. Eventually the United Sates settled with the internment of 1,444 Japanese Americans, 1% of Hawaii’s Japanese American population. This was enough to satisfy the public of government actions, but minute enough that Hawaii’s economy would not be affected.

This roundup of Japanese Americans, aside from the ones in Hawaii, resulted in 110,000 of them being relocated to ten hastily constructed remote “relocation centers.” In reality, these were prison camps. Two – thirds of these Japanese Americans were Nisei, or Japanese people born in this country of parents who emigrated from Japan. The irony of this is that thousands of Nisei had joined the armed forces, fighting for America.

Once the war ended, Japanese Americans fought for justice and compensation for property they lost when they were moved to the concentration camps. Initially, the Supreme Court decided in Korematsu v. United States that the government’s eviction of so many Japanese Americans was justified, in the interest of national security. Afterwards, the Japanese American Citizens League worked to get the government to compensate Japanese Americans who had been sent to the camps. Although in 1965 Congress authorized the spending of 38 million dollars specifically for that purpose, it hardly covered the actual costs of Japanese Americans’ losses. It wasn’t until 1990 when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that promised 20,000 dollars to every Japanese American that was sent to the relocation camps that Japanese Americans got a fraction of what they deserved.

by Andy Yeh and Jonathan Marson