In WWII did Americans employ the use of camps (concentrate anybody?) to put Japanese(sp?)-American civilians in. I realize that the whole war propaganda/american pride thing cause alot of bigotry and racism all across this “wonderful” country of ours, but this seems like some urban legend. Would Amercians so basely take away the right to not be wrongfully imprisoned? Help me dopers.
**Hopefully this is a question that can be answered and not turn into a debate. [/disclaimer]
Unfortunately it’s no Urban Legend. This U.S. Department of Justice web page gives the basic details. (This is actually from a “Kid’s Page” section of the DOJ site.)
Yes, America did put Japanese-Americans in camps. They were called “internment camps.” The conditions weren’t all that bad, nothing even close to that of the concentration camps of the Nazis. The reason for putting them in the camps was the fear of spying. Americans believed that since you couldn’t tell a spy from a civilian, you should just throw them all in jail. There was propaganda all across the nation showing people distinguishing features between a Japanese person and a Chinese person. At the time, America had no problems with the Chinese, so they didn’t want to imprison them. You should read the book Farewell to Manzanar. The author’s name is Houston. This is a book about a Japanese family’s struggle to live through internment camps during the war. An enlightening book.
Oh yeah… try the movie of ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ for a (recent) movie about this.
What I’ve always wondered… if the Americans had known in 1941 what horrors were being committed in the German concentration camps, would we have gone down the internment camp route… (as in, ‘we wouldn’t want people to think we were like THAT’)
The internment of Japanese-Americans really did happen and it really was a pretty bad violation of their civil rights. It had a lot to do with racism (German-Americans and Italian-Americans weren’t interned). I wish I could give you some references for this, but I’m sure you can find info on this either on the web or at a library. The novel (and Movie) “Snow Falling on Cedars” talk a bit about this. I seem to remember a kids book on this as well (though I don’t remember the name.)
Basically, yes, the Americans violated Japanese-American’s rights pretty badly during WWII. On the other hand, they weren’t alone in violating civil rights. The Nazis obviously did this, and the Japanese were probably just as bad as the Americans about this (possibly worse, I don’t know).
It should be noted that US Government allowed Japanese men who took a loyalty oath to the United States to fight in the armed forces. Some did, and some wanted to fight but felt that the loyaly oath was degrading since they had done nothing wrong and the German and Italian-Americans weren’t required to sign an oath.
We also shouldn’t forget those Americans who refused to fight in the war on the grounds of being pacifists, they were often jailed without trial.
I remember reading a book that contained WWII era reporting and I remember an article written during the Japanese interment about the whole situation. The reporter seemed sympathetic to the Japanese-American’s plight and questioned the usefulness of the interment. As far as I know he never got in serious trouble over this. I think at least that is something to be proud of.
German-Americans and Italian-Americans most certainly WERE interned. On the West coast, most particularly in San Francisco, the Italian-American fishing fleet was prohibited from leaving port, and many malcontents who protested this action were interned. Many German-Americans were not just interned, but imprisoned for suspicion of spying.
Get your facts straight. Just because the quantity of interned Japanese-Americans was vastly greater and more concentrated than the other ethnic groups, doesn’t mean it was any more egregious a violation of their civil rights.
You may also want to check out TOYOSABURO KOREMATSU v. UNITED STATES, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the federal “exclusion orders” which were part of the internment process.
George Takei, the actor most famous as Mr. Sulu from “Star Trek,” spent a number of his pre-teen years in such a camp in Arkansas, I believe.
Sir Rhosis
**
Yes, and it is quite a dissappointment in what was one of the United States finest couple of years. During the same time period Italian Americans on the east coast lost jobs and were subjected to some government scrutiny. During WWI Americans of German ancestry were discriminated against.
During WWII many Japanese Americans volunteered to fight and they served primarily in the European theater. They served with distinction and won quite a few medals.
**
First off it is a wonderful country. That doesn’t mean we’re perfect all the time but this is a pretty damn nice place to live. And yes Americans, like many others, will accept the violation of rights if they’re convinced that it will make them safer. The detention camps in the United States aren’t some mysterious urban legend. I’m sure you can find information on the web. I believe there is a camp in Texas that is a historical park now.
What’s to debate? They existed.
Marc
Actually, there was a story in Readers’ Digest about this, some time ago. Many of the Japanese returning from the camps after the war found their property had been repossesed, for various reasons, such as the (ridiculous) ‘You didn’t pay you taxes’.
It’s not such a bad old country - at least we tend to 'fess up to our mistakes and even occasionally try to do something about them. In this case, reparations are being made to the surviving citizens who were unjustly interned.
From this site:
August 10, 1988
H.R. 442 is signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. It provides for individual payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee and a $1.25 billion education fund among other provisions.
It’s a very informative site, though hard to read.
Canada did exactly the same thing; thousands of Canadians who were of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and their property was confiscated. Some Italian- and German-Canadians suffered the same fate. Not until the 1980s was restitution finally made.
The United States also interned Japanese immigrants who were living in South American countries. Those people are also seeking redress from the U.S. government.
The internment issue is a very big deal among Japanese-Americans, but not among the Japanese, who think that those living in the U.S. dwell too much on the past. However, many Americans cling to the idea that Japanese-Americans have a lot in common with the people of Japan, which isn’t the case at all.
The Korematsu decision was reversed many years later by a Federal judge and Korematsu’s conviction was expunged from his record.
The Manazanar Relocation Center is now a National Monument, but intense opposition from locals in the Owens Valley have prevented the Park Service from building any facilities at the site.
Two good museums to visit to find out info on this topic are either the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in DC or the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
An excellent book on the subject is ‘Years of Infamy- The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps’ by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, published by University of Washington Press 1976, 1996.
This is a much more fair-minded approach to the issue than some of the more apologist treatments available. Conditions were terrible, and this was a racist atrocity- even Japanese Americans who had lived in California since the mid-late nineteenth century- third generation Americans- were incarcerated because of their skin color. I know of this second hand as in the sixties I dated a Nisei- third generation Japanese-American whose parents had been interned and whose older brothers were born in the camps. The pain was still there in her father’s voice when he talked of the wounding experience of his incarceration and the loss of the family business.
Last year there was an excellent museum exhibit on this in The Museum of American History in Washington DC. This may still be current. The section in this on the legal justifications of this under the constitution shows how rafts of guarantees given by the constitution could be ignored if racism, fear and hatred are sufficiently high. Not that surprising when one considers the treatment of African Americans in the hundred years previous to the internment.
A lesson from the past and a guide for the future.
[nitpick]
A Nisei is a second-generation Japanese-American immigrant. A Sansei is a third-generation Japanese-American immigrant.
[/nitpick]
Thanks for the corrction. I remembered Nisei correctly and forgot the generation- her father had been born in Japan, but was a US citizen.
A question about the OP: Don’t people learn about the Japanese-American internment camps in high school American History classes these days?
Chas.E writes:
> German-Americans and Italian-Americans most certainly
> WERE interned. On the West coast, most particularly in
> San Francisco, the Italian-American fishing fleet was
> prohibited from leaving port, and many malcontents who
> protested this action were interned. Many German
> Americans were not just interned, but imprisoned for
> suspicion of spying.
You somewhat exaggerate the amount of internment of German-Americans and Italian-Americans. Compared to Japanese-Americans, it was a fairly limited group. All Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, regardless how many generations they had been in the U.S., were interned.
I asked my father once if he recalled ever encountering any prejudice during World War II because of his obviously German last name. He said that the only thing he could remember was that he was nicknamed “Von” in his Marine unit.
It’s hard to believe that these things happened, kind of like the witch trials or the whole commie-hunt. It’s shocking that I never learned this in high school, and this was the main reason that I disbelieved it. I stand corrected however.
I know that America is not that bad of a country, and to say otherwise is to hold it up to standards that cannot be met. I have my beef with many of the views that seem to be shared by many of my fellow country-men and woman, but I could not be certain that they are views that are only held by Americans.
We can only hope we learn from our mistakes in the past and work to not allow these injustices to occur again.
In terms of raw numbers, the interned Japanese were a bit fewer than half the foreign nationals interned during WWII. Germans, Italians, Rumanians, and Bulgarians were also detained, many of them placed in camps or minimum security prisons, and some held as late as 1948.
The significant difference between most of the detainees and the ethnic Japanese, was that (with a few exceptions) the non-Japanese detainees were people who had actually been investigated by the FBI or some other agency and were detained while they were evaluated for risk.
The Japanese were simply rounded up wholesale and shipped off without any examination of their conduct or loyalty.
Several Italian communities in California (home, at the time, of America’s finest xenophobia) suffered Japanese-like harrassment, as was mentioned above.
In what was probably his only ethical act in decades of leading the FBI, Hoover actually protested Executive Order 9066, stating that the FBI was examining potential security risks and that there was no need for the mass detention.
A few related sites, in no paricular order:
This site provides links to a lot of further information. It generally takes the position that no internment was ever permissible. My view differs in that I am sure that many individuals suffered under innacurate charges, but that during a war–especially in its earliest days when the need for security was greatest and the knowledge of who may or may not have been loyal was lowest–mistakes will be made. In general, the U.S. did a decent (not great) job of allowing recent immigrants and their children to remain in society although there were some really bad individual examples to the contrary. The site also includes as “equal mistreatment” people who were detained for three days while a background check was run and people who were still interned as late as 1948.
From the site:
Regardless of personal opinion, the site does have a wealth of legal and factual information:
Despite its title, the site addresses internment of several different groups.
World War II - The internment of German American civilians
A chronology from the same site (that at one point notes 256,000 aliens are under suspicion, but does not quite remember to note that we only detained 10% of that number):
Chronology – Suspicion, Arrest, and Internment
CNN: ‘Secret’ of WWII: Italian-Americans forced to move
An interesting chronology of the Japanese experience (marred by a background that makes reading difficult).
WWII Internment Timeline
I’m more shocked to learn that the internment of Japanese-Americans isn’t mentioned in current high school American History textbooks than I was to learn about the internment itself. I guess I’m no longer surprised to learn about injustices in American history or in the history of any other nation. You mean there was once slavery in the U.S.? You mean that schools were still segregrated in the U.S. as recently as the 1950’s? You mean that the Indians were just thrown off their land? You mean the Germans tried to kill all the Jews in Europe? I guess I’m pretty cynical, but none of that bothers me anymore. I know that our ancestors weren’t paragons of virtue. What bothers me is that their actions are being passed over in history classes.