JAPANESE ON U.S. WEST COAST TO BE RELOCATED
Washington, D.C. • February 19, 1942
Eighty-one years ago on this date in 1942, celebrated today as the Day of Remembrance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It authorized the War Department to designate “military areas” in the U.S. and admit, exclude, or remove from these areas anyone whom the department felt to be a danger to the security of the nation. The next month Roosevelt signed an Act of Congress that made any violation of mandates issued under his executive order (e.g., public proclamations issued by senior military authorities) a federal crime. Although the unprecedented order appeared carefully neutral, Executive Order 9066 ultimately led to the exile and internment of almost 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, citizens and noncitizens alike, living along the U.S. West Coast.
Approximately 80,000 of those interned under FDR’s executive order were second-generation American citizens born in the United States (Nisei), not-so-cleverly reclassified by the government as “non-aliens” in a ham-fisted suspension of their birthright under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Almost half the internees were children. (In Canada, 22,000 Japanese Canadians and Japanese [62 percent Canadian-born] suffered similar and worse treatment: the government confiscated and sold their property to help defray the cost of relocating and detaining them. South of the border almost 5,000 Japanese were evicted from Mexico’s Pacific Coast and plunked down in Mexico City and Guadalajara.) Suddenly uprooted from their homes and workplaces and deprived of or forced to sell off practically everything they had acquired over a lifetime (many had their bank accounts frozen), native-born Japanese Americans and Japanese-born U.S. residents (the latter known as Issei and prevented by law from holding U.S. citizenship) were taken first to one of 15 assembly centers, or temporary detention camps. California’s San Joaquin County Fairgrounds and Santa Anita and Tanforan racetrack stables, still reeking of their former occupants, were three converted temporary camps. Then they were shipped to one of 10 permanent inland relocation centers where they were imprisoned without charge and “for the duration” inside barbed wire enclosures, watched over by armed guards (see map below).
People of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii and German Americans and German U.S. residents were not interned en masse and therefore escaped disenfranchisement, measureless separation, precious lost years, miserable deprivation, monotonous camp routine, enforced idleness, and dependence on the federal government for their food and shelter. Under the U.S. Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Control Program, the government detained and interned just over 11,000 German enemy aliens, as well as a small number of German American citizens, either naturalized or native born. The population of German citizens in the United States—not to mention American citizens of German birth—was far too large for a general policy of disenfranchisement and internment comparable to that used against the Japanese. Instead, German citizens were detained and removed from coastal areas on an individual basis. The evictions amounted to only several hundred. In addition, over 4,500 ethnic Germans were brought to the U.S. from Central and South America and the Caribbean island of Cuba and similarly detained based on a list covertly drawn up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the encouragement of President Roosevelt. The FBI suspected these Germans of subversive activities abroad and, following Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S., demanded the eviction of these “dangerous Axis agents” to this country for detention in camps operated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Justice Department or else their repatriation to Germany. Many Germans had been residents of Latin America for years, some for decades. Nine Latin American countries and Canada set up their own Axis internment camps. Only pro-Fascist Argentina refused to play along.
Executive Order 9066 Cleared the Way for the Forced Exile and Relocation of West Coast Enemy Aliens and Japanese Americans to a New Existence in Internment Camps Far From Their Homes
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Above: Map showing (a) the massive West Coast World War II exclusion area (Military Areas 1 and 2) and (b) internment camps in the continental U.S. for Japanese Americans as well as for over 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families interned under the Enemy Alien Control Program. The 10 hastily built internment camps, euphemistically called “relocation centers,” are identified by black triangles. The camps were built in 7 states all west of the Mississippi. All the camps were remote; many were situated in desolate deserts or swamps. U.S. Department of Justice-administered camps (there were 27) and U.S. Army camps (18) are represented by stars; for example, Fort Missoula Internment Camp in Montana and Fort Lincoln Internment Camp 5 miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. It was to these often former Civilian Conservation Corps camps that people arrested in December 1941 and early 1942—that is, before Executive Order 9066 was in place—as well as thousands of German and Italian nationals living in the U.S. or deported from Central and South America were brought. In the map legend, WCCA = Wartime Civil Control Administration, WRA = War Relocation Authority. Purportedly for their own safety roughly 75,000 Japanese American citizens and 45,000 immigrants from Japan living in the U.S., a number equivalent to the population of Wilmington, N.C., would eventually be torn from their homes, neighborhoods, farms, fishing boats, and places of employment and worship in California (where the majority lived), Western Oregon and Washington, and Southern Arizona as part of the single-largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Eighty-five percent of all ethnic Japanese living in the continental U.S. were affected. The Poston War Relocation Center on the Colorado Indian Reservation south of Parker was the largest such camp in America (peak population 17,814). Housing Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals mostly from Southern and Central California, Posten became the third-largest “city” in Arizona at the time. Together with the Rivers War Relocation Center on the Gila River Indian Reservation southeast of Phoenix, the two sites grew to hold 30,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens. In Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were removed to the mainland and interned. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, there were 17 internment sites, the largest and longest-operating being Honouliuli Internment Camp, which held 320 internees and 4,000 prisoners of war. For their own “protection,” nearly 900 indigenous Aleuts were rounded up and interned in abandoned salmon canneries near Alaska’s capital Juneau, 2,000 miles from their island villages, which were burned to the ground as part of a “scorched earth” policy. On December 17, 1944, the Roosevelt administration rescinded Executive Order 9066, ending mass forced relocation and allowing internees to return to the West Coast exclusion area (Military Areas 1 and 2). Except for Tule Lake, the WRA camps would be emptied by the end of 1945.
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Left: “OUSTER OF ALL JAPS IN CALIFORNIA NEAR!” San Francisco Examiner headlines of Japanese relocation, February 27, 1942. On May 21, 1942, the rival San Francisco Chronicle told its readers: “S.F. Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs. . . . The last group, 274 of them, were moved yesterday.” Photo by Dorothea Lange. Lange was one of three photographers in the WRA Photography Section, or WRAPS, in 1942–1943. The other two were Clem Albers and Francis Stewart.
Right: Official notice of exclusion and removal, April 1, 1942. Photograph by Dorothea Lange. The posted exclusion order directed Japanese Americans living in the first San Francisco section to evacuate. Years before the December 7, 1941, Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. government had drafted plans to intern some Japanese Americans and immigrant aliens and had already placed some West Coast communities under surveillance. This in spite of years worth of FBI and naval intelligence data that attested to residents of Japanese descent posing no national security threat. The exclusion order also swept up Japanese American soldiers who had taken an oath of allegiance to their country of birth.
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Left: With luggage tags affixed to their clothing—an aid in keeping family units intact during all phases of their forced removal—members of the Mochida family await an evacuation bus, Alameda County (San Francisco Bay area), California, May 8, 1942. On the luggage tags was written the family’s designated identification number. The Mochidas had operated a two-acre nursery and greenhouse in Eden, Alameda County, before the family’s incarceration. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
Right: The forced exodus of Japanese in Los Angeles started at the end of March 1942. Staring into uncertainty 2-year-old Yuki Okinaga Hayakawa, clutching a tiny purse and an apple with a few bites gone, waits with the family’s allotment of baggage before leaving Los Angeles’s Union Station, eventually arriving with her mother at Manzanar War Relocation Center, more than 200 miles north of LA in California’s Owens Valley, which would be her home for the next 3 years. Each family member was permitted to take bedding and linens (no mattress), toilet articles, extra clothing, and “essential personal effects,” nothing more; in other words, only what could be carried. Photograph by Clem Albers.
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Left: This Oakland, California green grocer closed his store in March 1942 following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas (Military Area 1; see map above). The owner, a University of California graduate, had placed the “I AM AN AMERICAN” sign on his store front on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. Declarations like this San Francisco area store owner’s were insufficient to overcome the suspicion and contempt directed at people who looked like the enemy and who, it was commonly assumed at the time, remained loyal to Japan and its emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa). Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
Right: In 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders, described by many Americans as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U.S. history. After years of lawsuits and negotiations, on August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which formally acknowledged that the wartime exclusion, evacuation, and internment of Japanese Americans had been unreasonable. The act granted $20,000 in reparations to each surviving Japanese American (about 82,000 people), costing the U.S. Treasury $1.6 billion. (A month later the Canadian prime minister signed a similar settlement and apology.) It took a decade to locate all eligible U.S. recipients and deliver them their checks and formal apology. In 1991 survivors of the more than 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent who were evicted by their governments and incarcerated in U.S. camps were compensated with a pitifully small $5,000 check. A late 20th-century study concluded that the internal government decisions that led to Roosevelt issuing Executive Order 9066 were based on racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and failed political leadership.