why were they interned
In the spring and summer of 1942, the United States government gathered 120,000 Japanese Americans and incarnated them in concentration camps. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt justified his action on the grounds of military necessity. The government exiled these Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, and housed them in concentration camps simply because they or their parents had been born in Japan. Although many view the Pearl Harbor attack as the primary cause of the Japanese-Americans’ incarceration, they had suffered racism ever since immigrating to America.
An anti-Japanese writer during this time period, Columnist Henry McLemore wrote: |
I am for immediate removal of every Japanese… to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either… Let ‘em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.” |
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, many Americans advocated for the removal of Japanese-Americans and brainstormed justifications for their proposal, even commenting “Abraham Lincoln would justify what they were doing.” Many people harbored anti-Japanese-American prejudices, alluding that a Japanese attack on the mainland was an indication that West Coast Japanese-Americans had aided in the attack, due to California’s proximity to Hawaii.
General John L. DeWitt, Commander of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, voiced his anti-Japanese-American prejudice and strong desire to relocate the Japanese Americans: |
“The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted… It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today.” He even viewed the lack of Japanese espionage or treason as a negative, warning, “the very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.” |
In his book Prisoners Without Trial, author Roger Daniels describes the justifications for the Japanese-American internment: “Once characterized as ‘our worst wartime mistake,' this was neither a mistake nor an error in judgement nor an inadvertence. The wartime abuse of Japanese Americans, it is now clear, was merely a link in a chain of racism that stretched back to the earliest contacts between Asians and whites on American soil.” To fully understand the US government’s actions, one should analyze America’s attitudes towards Asians prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. Americans displayed racism against non-whites during the time of Asian immigration to the Americas during the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, most Americans during this time period would not recognize their actions as racist, rather merely “American.” During this time, the US was an explicitly racist nation discriminating against anyone who was not “white.”
As more Japanese immigrated to America to build a better life, the discrimination became more prevalent. When the first Japanese immigrants arrived, an anti-Japanese movement developed initially in California and then spread throughout the West. Prior to 1905, the anti-Japanese movement was limited to California and the Far West. However, in February of 1905, the conservative San Francisco Chronicle, the most influential newspaper on the Pacific coast, ran many anti-Japanese articles, beginning with front page headline of “The Japanese Invasion, the Problem of the Hour," the article maintained that Japanese men were a menace to white women, that every immigrant was a “Japanese spy," and it claimed with great inaccuracy, that there were at least 100,000 of the “little brown men" in the country. Typical headlines of the Chronicle read “Crime and Poverty go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor”, “Japanese a Menace to American Women”, and “The Yellow Peril-How Japanese Crowd out the White Race”. After these articles were published, the anti-Japanese movement began to gain momentum. Japanese immigrants were denounced as "undesirable," as not wishing "to assimilate with our people or to become Americans" . A month after the Chronicle series began, California politicians embarked on an anti-Japanese crusade. Both houses of the state legislature adopted an insulting anti-Japanese resolution. Additionally, in 1924, the United States nearly ended Japanese immigration to the United States, further exacerbating tensions between the two nations. Tensions would continue to grow between the two international super powers and would reach a climax at Pearl Harbor.