1941
As Japan's activity in WWII escalated, U.S. officials began investigating Japanese immigrants, many of whom had immigrated around the turn of the century. Within 48 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, almost 1,200 men were arrested and held as "enemy aliens" until the end of the war.
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Villified in the press as spies, saboteurs, and enemy agents, Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese ancestry were targeted by communities, pushed out of jobs, and subjected to warrantless searches. Racism that had been bubbling under the surface in many places was suddenly popular and widely accepted. All Japanese Americans were considered to be loyal to Imperial Japan, but especially targeted were successful businessmen and Japanese language teachers.
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1942
In February of 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the removal of all "excluded" people from specified areas. Residents were forced to liquidate their belongings, largely for a fraction of what they were worth.
The American government built large relocation camps, hastily constructed from siding and tar-paper, ill suited to their locations, some in Wyoming, Arizona, and Idaho. People were told to pack only what they could carry and report to assembly centers. Many times, the assembly centers were converted race tracks, and families were housed in horse stalls until they were transported to their assigned camps. The ethnic Japanese population complied with government orders to prove themselves loyal citizens.
Once inside the camps, families were assigned rooms in barracks with cots. They had no running water, unpartitioned toilets, and ate rationed food in large mess halls. There was barbed wire surrounding the camps, and armed guards. Though the food was adequate and physical abuse rare, these camps were military style prisons for around 120,000 people, 60% of which were American citizens. Residents of the camps did their best to make life as normal as possible, and set up schools, governing councils, newspapers, and sports teams.
1943
One of the most diverse camps, in Crystal City, Texas, also housed a large number of German and Italian immigrants under suspicion. Soon they also began to recieve Peruvian Japanese. The U.S. had been pressuring Latin American countries to deport, detain, or turn over to the U.S., their ethnic Japanese population, both immigrants and citizens. In all, 14 countries sent a total of 2,118 peope to the U.S. for internment. Many people were not allowed to return home after the war, and were forced to move to Japan or try to find a home in the U.S.
Many citizens voluteered for service, and by 1943 the military was actively recruiting volunteers from the camps for all Japanese-American combat units. One of the units, the 442nd Combat team, was the most decorated team of it's size in U.S. History, receiving more that 18,000 individual decorations. It included 52 Distinguished Service Crosses and a Congressional Medal of Honor. More than 30,000 Japanese-American men served in the military during the war. |
1944
In December of 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that while the exclusionary order as a whole was constitutional, detaining loyal citizens was not. Immigrants were given the choice to repatriate to Japan or start over, since all immigrant-held property was seized and considered forfeit. In all, 1,327 immigrants chose to move.
1945
In February of 1945, the exclusion order was officially retracted, and residents of the camp were given $25 and a train ticket home. Many of them returned to find nothing left of their pre-war lives.
1988
A formal acknowledgement and apology was finally issued by the U.S. government, and Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed by President Reagan, stating that the internment was "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." The Act provided redress of $20,000 to each person retained by the camps.
No person of Japanese ancestry was ever found to have committed an act of sabatoge or espionage during the war.