Japanese American Incarceration: How It Happened Here

In 1942, a president’s executive order launched the U.S. government’s policy of rounding up, forcibly relocating, and incarcerating some 120,000 Japanese Americans.

On Feb. 19, 1942, a presidential executive order permitted the U.S. government to arrest some U.S. citizens and long-term residents and send them to incarceration camps scattered across the country. Forcibly removed from their homes were some 120,000 Japanese Americans living mostly on the West Coast, which had been designated a military area. 

The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II reveals a great deal not only about the nature of executive authority, but also the complicity of other branches of government. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066 was not made unilaterally in one night. Rather, the policy was several years in the making, and it was carried out through massive participation by both the Army and civilian agencies. 

As early as 1936, government officials began devising plans to arrest members of the Japanese American community in the event of war. In that year, after receiving reports that Japanese immigrants in Hawaii were having contact with incoming Japanese naval vessels, Roosevelt proposed the making of a list of every individual who had contact with such ships to be marked for arrest and incarceration in concentration camps. Meanwhile, the Office of Naval Intelligence sent secret agents to investigate Japanese communities on the West Coast to report back on their loyalty.

Evacuees appear for processing at a civil control station in San Francisco in response to Civilian Exclusion Order Number 20.

In 1940, as part of a broader buildup of the U.S. security state, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act. According to its provisions, noncitizens were forced to provide information on themselves to the government. Under orders from the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under Director J. Edgar Hoover, investigated members of Japanese, German, and Italian communities. Hoover’s agents drafted the so-called “ABC lists.” These lists ordered the arrest and detention of aliens who were deemed potential threats to national security, prioritizing those in the A category as the first to be arrested in the event of war. The Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service constructed a network of what Attorney General Francis Biddle publicly called “concentration camps” in the American interior.

Throughout this period, there was a barrage of fake news from official and unofficial sources about Japanese American spies. In 1935, California Democratic congressman John Dockweiler had claimed that in the event of war one-fourth of the state’s Japanese residents were ready to bear arms for Japan. He also charged falsely that fishing boats of first-generation Japanese immigrants were actually disguised Japanese naval vessels that could be refitted at a moment’s notice. In 1941 Texas congressman Martin Dies claimed he had evidence of plotting between Japanese naval personnel and Japanese American fishermen on Terminal Island. The island, located by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, had for decades been the home of a Japanese American community.

San Francisco Examiner headline, Feb. 19, 1942, announcing the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

As international tensions increased, the Office of Naval Intelligence expanded its investigations into Japanese American communities. In June 1941, Lt. Commander Kenneth Ringle led a nighttime raid on the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. Ringle uncovered a spy ring led by agents from Japan, leading to the expulsion of its members.

Yet both Ringle’s report and a separate memo produced by White House consultant Curtis Munson, who visited the West Coast in November 1941, proclaimed that the Japanese American community posed no threat to American national security. Rather, these reports emphasized that the nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) were thoroughly assimilated into American society and almost desperate to demonstrate their loyalty. 

Nonetheless, Roosevelt immediately invoked the Alien Enemies Act following the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, thereby pushing all Japanese immigrants (who under federal law were ineligible for naturalized citizenship on racial grounds) into the status of “enemy aliens” and limiting their freedom of movement and bank transactions. 

Paving Relocation Road

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Japanese consulates, language schools and businesses closed down. The FBI proceeded to arrest thousands of individuals named in the ABC lists. After spending weeks or months confined, they were given individual loyalty hearings. Those deemed dangerous remained under tight FBI security. The others were sent to be incarcerated with their families at War Relocation Authority camps such as the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California.

Nonetheless, some government officials and opinion leaders suggested those steps did not go far enough. Politicians, newspaper writers and organizations mobilized to urge the removal of the rest of the community. After a visit to Hawaii in December 1941, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox voiced false rumors of Japanese American fifth column activities. West Coast nativists and agribusiness leaders, seeing a golden opportunity to strike against their long-despised economic competitors, demanded action against Japanese Americans for the duration of the war. Groups such as the Native Sons of the Golden West, the American Legion, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, and the California Joint Immigration Committee produced propaganda that depicted Japanese Americans as agents of the Japanese government. 

Several newspapers, notably those belonging to the Hearst Corp., also peddled false rumors about Japanese American spy rings along the West Coast. Journalists regularly pointed to FBI arrests as evidence of disloyalty. Perhaps the most damaging attacks appeared in February 1942, when nationally syndicated columnists Walter Lippmann and Westbrook Pegler penned articles calling for the detention of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Lippmann, regarded as a respected public intellectual,
lent credence to spying rumors. A column he wrote on Feb. 12, 1942, was widely circulated in Congress and shared with Roosevelt.

Young evacuees of Japanese ancestry await relocation at Turlock, California, May 2, 1942.

Another turning point came in late January 1942 when the Roberts Commission, empaneled to investigate the Pearl Harbor disaster, released its report. It included a single ambiguous sentence regarding spying in Hawaii by Japanese consular officials and by “persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service.” That, too, was seized on as clear and definitive proof of a Japanese American fifth column. 

Western state leaders and U.S. Congress members also lobbied the president to take decisive action. California Representatives Leland Ford and Alfred Elliott gave speeches on the House floor attacking the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi famously proclaimed that every Japanese American should be locked in a concentration camp and deported from the U.S. Sen. Hiram Johnson of California pressured Roosevelt to grant the army the necessary power to detain Japanese Americans. Even though several moderates, such as California Sen. Sheridan Downey and Rep. Jerry Voorhis, called for restraint among Congressional leaders, their opinions represented a minority.

Within the executive branch, members of the Department of War and the Department of Justice battled over the Japanese American question. Attorney General Francis Biddle argued that spot raids on community leaders offered enough protection against fifth-column activity. Lt. General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command, on the other hand, lobbied Roosevelt to grant the military the power to define the entire West Coast as a combat zone and remove Japanese Americans from the region. 

While government surveys showed that the majority of Californians thought measures short of mass removal were sufficient, those surveyed did not challenge mass incarceration. Faced with pressure from the Army, Congress, and West Coast officials, Secretary of War Henry Stimson received authority from Roosevelt to “evacuate” the Pacific Coast of all ethnic Japanese. FDR’s Executive Order 9066 granted the military the power to remove “any and all persons” from designated combat zones. John McCloy, the chief operational officer responsible for forging and implementing the executive order, privately attributed the forced removal to public opinion. When his superior, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, sent him a memo in July 1942 asking about Japanese “internees,” McCloy’s response contained a rare and revealing handwritten postscript: “These people are not ‘internees’ — they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.”

The Roundups Begin

Newly assigned evacuees outside the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, April 29, 1942.

Within days of the executive order’s signing, the Army designated California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona as part of a broader combat area. The Army organized the Wartime Civil Control Administration to handle the roundups and initial detentions. Some government officials, however, began to question the nature of a forced removal policy and its handling by the Army. U.S. Rep. John Tolan organized hearings to investigate the anti-Japanese movement on the West Coast and the removal plans. Based on those hearings, the committee concluded that Roosevelt needed to create an appropriate government agency to operate centers for housing Japanese Americans under government custody.  

As a result, on March 18, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, which created the WRA, a civilian agency overseeing the housing of Japanese Americans for the duration of the war. In Congress, the House and Senate quickly passed Public Law 77-503, which provided the legal mechanism for enforcing forced removal by making violations of the exclusion order a felony. Even at the time, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft criticized the law’s shaky legal premise, claiming it would never pass during peacetime. Between April and August 1942, the Army confined all West Coast Japanese Americans for weeks or months in temporary assembly centers. 

Farmer of Japanese ancestry being interviewed at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station three days before evacuation.

Meanwhile, the WRA built a network of camps. The establishment of the WRA was a Herculean effort to mobilize bureaucrats with experience managing populations, notably from agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Agriculture. WRA staffers, consulting with other agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, drafted lists for locations of camps that were isolated from urban populations and situated on fertile land for farming. After several months of research and planning, the WRA settled on 10 locations in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Arkansas where Japanese Americans were held, in most cases until the end of World War II. Camps were euphemistically referred to as “relocation centers.”

Although the camp inhabitants were labeled “evacuees” and were told they were operating a self-sustaining community, the camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers with armed sentries. In 1943, a loyalty questionnaire was implemented by the Army to identify “disloyal” Japanese Americans. Those who demonstrated their loyalty were permitted to resettle outside of camp — but not on the West Coast. Those who responded negatively to the questionnaire were sent to a high-security center created at the Tule Lake camp, where the government pressed thousands of inmates into self-deporting to Japan.  

As the government implemented mass removal, several legal challenges from American citizens of Japanese ancestry arose in the courts. Four cases — those of Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo — ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. While three of the four cases ended with the Supreme Court siding with the government (in part due to suppression and manipulation of relevant evidence by War Department and Justice Department officials), the court unanimously ruled in a case known as Ex Parte Endo that the government did not have the power to detain concededly loyal Japanese Americans indefinitely, leading the Army to lift West Coast exclusion starting in January 1945.

When the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, California, was transformed into the Tanforan Assembly Center, horse stalls were used for living quarters for Japanese Americans.

Despite the government’s assertion of the reasons for its actions, some Americans believed the sight of forcibly detaining innocent people purely on the grounds of their race smacked of immorality. Michael Engh, S.J., LMU chancellor and former dean of the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has studied the activism of Edward Whelan, S.J., who was president of then-Loyola University.

Whelan served on the advisory board of the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play when it was formed in Los Angeles in June 1944. He hired Japanese Americans to campus jobs at a time when few employers did, Engh says. 

“Over five years,” says Engh, “he hired more than 75 Japanese and Japanese American returnees from the incarceration camps. When housing in the area was closed to them because of prejudice, Whelan created housing on campus. The last of those workers remained in those facilities until the 1970s; most had used their Loyola wages to reestablish their businesses and obtain housing. Their sons were also eligible for free tuition at the university.”

For many Japanese Americans, the impact of forced relocations reverberated for decades. John Flaherty, special assistant to the Vice President for Mission and Ministry at LMU, is the son of a Japanese immigrant who had several relatives incarcerated.

“The trauma our family and friends have experienced is generational,” Flaherty says, “and I see it made manifest in our friends’ children as well as my own who are two generations removed. While they are connected to our family members and close friends who were incarcerated, they don’t fully understand the behaviors exhibited by my aunts and uncles, including those behaviors that one might attribute to hoarding or what we would now interpret as extreme frugality. … With my own mother, a Japanese native who immigrated post-incarceration, this included the purchase of clothes and shoes she never wore and food that was kept years beyond expiration dates.”

Curtiss Takada Rooks, who teaches Asian and Asian American studies in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, also sees the impact of the war and racism of that time extending through generations. He and others of his generation were raised amid silence resulting from wartime trauma. 

“Those carried their own forms of silence as growing up we tried to break the emotional codes of our mothers,” Rooks says, “as we try to break the codes of the trauma of our own lives raised in silences, wondering what of those we have passed on to our children.” Rooks didn’t live through Japanese incarceration. But, he says, “it is interesting the ways that violence induces trauma [that] binds us as persons of Japanese ancestry.” 

A grandfather teaches his grandson to walk at Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California.

The mass hysteria of February 1942, the rapid construction of detention networks, and the harsh subjection of a population to forced relocations purely on the grounds of race made the incarceration one of the most shameful moments in American history. Remembering the incarceration is important not only to recognize those who suffered unjustly, but to remain vigilant so such events never occur again. 

Jonathan van Harmelen is a writer and historian of Japanese American history. He is writing a book about Congress and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and his work has appeared in The New Republic and The Nation. With Greg Robinson, he is co-author of “The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History.” Greg Robinson is professor of history at l’Université du Québec, in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans.