Japanese Americans in WWII - Essay Example

Japanese Americans in WWII This subject of Japanese Americans and World War II is clearly the most written about episode in Asian American history and perhaps is the most recognized historical event of significance to Asian Americans among contemporary Americans. That memory is perpetuated, in both books and the public discourse, in large part by those who, like Mikkelsen, highlight the past to secure the future. For example, the Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, created in 1980, recommended that funds be set aside for research and public education on the Japanese American detention and similar events, because, the commission wrote, "a nation which wishes to remain just to its citizens must not forget its lapses."(Mikkelsen, 235) During the Second World War, the American government forcefully evacuated the Japanese Americans even though this was a strict violation of citizenship rights. This period in American history is one of the blackest blots on American history. Indeed, Andrews was correct. It is now generally recognized that the removal of over 100,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II and their internment in so-called "relocation centers" was not motivated by legitimate security needs; rather the Roosevelt Administration's policy both developed from and fanned anti- Japanese racism in this country. The U.S. government itself has apologized for its wartime actions that, as one presidential commission retrospectively concluded, constituted "a grave injustice ... to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry." (Mikkelsen, 211) In the panic after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, leaders in the Japanese American communities of the western United States were rounded up and sent to "internment camps," prisons run by the Justice Department. Within three months, everyone else of Japanese ancestry who remained on the West Coast was sent first to an assembly center and then to a camp administered by a new civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority. There were ten "relocation camps." In them, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, were interned for three years. No attempt was made to identify the potential threat to national security of an eighty year-old grandmother, a ten-year-old orphan, a pregnant mother, or an immigrant shopkeeper or gardener. All left behind their friends, homes, and possessions for an undeclared period of time and an indefinite future. At the beginning of World War II, millions of immigrants arriving in the United States from Japan, Italy, and Germany were officially classified as "enemy aliens." Following Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US government was very worried about the possibility of espionage by Japanese Americans. Although many Japanese Americans were enlisted as soldiers in the US Armed Forces, some people gave in to fear and paranoia, and clung to the groundless suspicion that Japanese citizens would sabotage the US war effort. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the relocation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to inland concentration camps. The US War Relocation Authority was created to prevent the feared espionage. They built 10 internment camps in states such as Idaho and Arkansas. Japanese Americans living in Washington, Oregon and California were forced to leave their jobs, homes, and in some cases, their families, to move into the camps. Over 110,000 people, half of them children, were forcibly relocated against their will, even though they had committed no crime. Conditions in the camps were deplorable: armed guards patrolled the barbed-wire perimeter, medical care was inadequate, and entire families were forced to live in poorly constructed, one-room cells. The camps were closed when the war ended in 1945. It wasn't until the 1970s that details began to emerge about the atrocities committed by the US government against Japanese Americans. Of the thousands detained in the camps, 70,000 were US citizens. In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. After examining the impact of the internment period on the Japanese American community, the commission concluded that the federal government was guilty of discrimination against its citizens. The US government formally admitted its mistake in 1988. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Provisions of the Act included an official apology and a promise of symbolic payments of $20,000 to each of the 60,000 internment prisoners still alive at that time. Also, the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund was created in order to educate the public about the hardships endured by the relocated Japanese Americans. In 2000, President Bill Clinton directed the US Department of the Interior, in association with the National Park Service, to concentrate on the preservation of internment sites as historical landmarks. To underscore the seriousness with which they treated those apparently "fantastic" scenarios, the intelligence community and military planners charted a course of action for dealing with Japanese Americans in preparation for the coming great conflict. In 1922, the Bureau of Investigation maintained a list of 157 Japanese, including merchants, Buddhist priests, Japanese -language school principals and teachers, laborers, Christian ministers, and others under the heading "Japanese Espionage -America." A year later, America’s military drew up defensive plans for a war with Japan that included a declaration of martial law, the registration of all enemy aliens, the internment of those deemed security risks, and the placing of restrictions on labor, movement, and public information. Before the end of the decade, the military proposed to classify all Japanese, aliens and citizens alike, as enemy aliens, and its criterion for internment changed from an adjudged capacity for espionage to simply a position of leadership in the Japanese American community. 72 Bereft of leaders, the reasoning went; America’s Japanese would be cowed, confused, and easily controlled. Indeed, Japanese Americans had been studied, argued over, classified, and marked for removal and confinement decades before war came to America. By early 1941, the FBI maintained a list of over 2,000 Japanese on the mainland, including fishermen, farmers, businessmen, Buddhist and Shinto priests, Japanese -language schoolteachers, newspaper editors, travel agents, martial arts instructors, and community leaders, grouped in to A, B, and C categories that designated the supposed danger they posed. 8 The list resembled the 1922 version drawn up by the Bureau of Investigation of America’s Japanese, in that they both sought to identify the leaders of Japanese America for the purpose of confining them in the event of war. That program of selective detention was designed to control the population as a whole by leaving them bereft of their leaders and fearful of a similar fate. During the 1930s, as America's Japanese struggled to survive during the Great Depression, brewed illegal sake and Okolona despite Prohibition, and distributed food to the needy in the darkness of night, the military and civilian intelligence agencies spread their surveillance network and refined their plans for containing the "Japanese problem." It was during those preparations that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the military's Joint Board chief in Washington on August 10, 1936: "Has the local Joint Planning Committee any recommendation to make? One obvious thought occurs to me -- that every Japanese citizen or noncitizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection President Bush's 1990 redress letter acknowledged that Japanese Americans suffered serious injustices during their incarceration. It is important to understand the nature of these injustices to appreciate the application of social justice theory to the study of redress and its impact. Japanese Americans were imprisoned on the basis of ethnicity alone. Although the United States was at war with Germany and Italy, neither German Americans nor Italian Americans faced Mikkelsen internment. It is particularly noteworthy that the incarceration orders applied even to the second-generation Nisei who were U.S. citizens born in this country. All Japanese Americans, citizens and aliens alike, were denied due process. No formal charges were brought against them, and there was no opportunity for an individual review, a trial, or an attorney before their imprisonment. Japanese Americans also suffered ethnic denigration and humiliation as well as losses of property, possessions, and liberty. Most faced two separate dislocations, first to temporary “assembly centers” where thousands of Japanese Americans lived crowded together in fairground pavilions and horse stalls at racetracks, then later to the more permanent camps in the deserts and swamplands of the interior United States. These injustices had powerful consequences that led to numerous psychological and physical hardships. The purposeful nature of the government's actions exacerbated the nature of the trauma (Mikkelsen, 241). Lingering feelings of shame and self-doubt (Mikkelsen, 223) and an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and earlier death have been observed among former internees. Nagata also found intergenerational effects among the third-generation (Sansei) offspring of interned Nisei. Despite being born after the war, some adult children of former internees have personally experienced a loss of self-esteem and an increased sense of vulnerability that they attribute to their parents' wartime incarceration. Overall, the Japanese-American internment was a bad episode in the history of the United States of America, which had a very bad impact on the goodwill of this great nation. Works Cited Mikkelsen, Vincent; "Retrieving the American Past" Pearson Custom Publishing; 209-250 Read More