Racism and hatred of immigrants has been a disease ever since
the founding of the United States of America. Every immigrant group
not originating from northwest Europe has suffered persecution from a
small minority of ignorant citizens who think of themselves as the
only true Americans. At the time of World War II, when Japan joined
forces with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy, ethnic Japanese
people gained first hand experience of the bigotry and hate that
remains a chronic sickness in American society to this day.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Meiji era Japan opened its doors
to international trade and commerce in a bid to modernize their
kingdom. An economic recession resulted and many Japanese people fled
to America in search of work and economic opportunity. Most of them
were peasants and farm laborers and the majority of them relocated to
Hawaii and California. The Japanese immigrants were highly successful
as agriculturalists and businessmen; farmers in California brought
with them a new irrigation technique that made raising crops in
difficult terrain much easier. They lived in quiet communities, spoke
their own language, and practiced their own traditions. The white
farm owners, many of which were less successful financially than the
Japanese immigrants, were not happy about their presence on American
soil.
But the Japanese people remained. Then on December 7, 1941,
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and public sentiment turned
from quiet resentment to open hatred. Fearing the possibility that
the ethnic Japanese community would rise up to fight the USA on its
own shores, possibly even building espionage networks to assist their
Asian ancestors, became a fear of the American military. The
government began a clandestine investigative committee and
surveillance program to spy on the Japanese people and assess their
level of loyalty to the United States. The committee found that they
were deeply committed to their adopted nation with little to no
sympathy for Japan. No anti-American propaganda was found in their
communities, no pro-Japanese sentiment was heard of, and no spy
networks were uncovered. Despite these positive findings, the
military leaders insisted that Asian people were incapable of being
true Americans and in the end their loyalty would go to the Japanese
aggressors. Empirical evidence counted for nothing and racist hatred
counted for everything. When it came to bigotry in politics, nothing
could penetrate the thick fog of stupidity that clouded the vision of
white Americans of that time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, long considered a champion of the poor
and oppressed people of the USA, passed Executive Order 9066. The
forced relocation and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans had begun.
At first, zones of exclusion were drawn up. Territories in
California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona were demarcated on maps
and Japanese people were informed that they were not, under any
circumstances, allowed to leave those areas. Next a curfew that only
applied to Asian people was put into effect, making it illegal for
them to be outside their homes after dark. Then the military ordered
all Japanese people to voluntarily bring whatever they could carry to
the train stations; they were put on trains, and transported to
redistribution centers in the desert northeast of Los Angeles.
Finally they were transported to concentration camps located
throughout the country; all of them were on the most inhospitable
land in deserts, swamps, and Indian reservations. People who were
thought to be potentially dangerous were sent to a high-security
facility in Nevada.
About sixty percent of the detainees were legally naturalized
American citizens, mostly second and third generation people who were
born in America. The government defined a Japanese-American as anyone
being 1/16th Japanese, meaning having one great-great-grandparent of
Japanese ancestry qualified the individual as being a potentially
criminal ethnic minority. Elderly Japanese people as well as little
children and the mentally disabled were deemed too dangerous to be
allowed to live freely in American society. Ethnic Korean and
Taiwanese people were also imprisoned because the Japanese had once
conquered and colonized those respective nations, thereby making them
potentially suspicious communities.
Obviously, life in the internment camps was not easy. Most were
located in high desert regions and the weather was hot and extreme in
all of them. Surrounded by barbed wire fencing and monitored by
guards armed with rifles, the barracks style houses were cramped and
uncomfortable. Hastily constructed, they were little more than
mosquito-infested wood boxes with tarpaper roofs. Families were kept
together but 25 people were forced to sleep in houses that were made
to hold only four. The beds were small cots and having so many people
crowded together in small confined spaces led to outbreaks of
illnesses and disease. Physically-fit adults were put to work doing
manual labor to maintain the camps; they were paid 49 cents a day so
that they could buy food from their captors to feed their hungry,
malnourished families. Children and teenagers were forced to go to
school where conventional curriculum was not taught; instead they
were force-fed a steady stream of pro-American propaganda making the
schools look uncomfortably like the communist re-education camps that
were later to be set up in China and Vietnam. In the evening, men and
women were forced to play baseball in an attempt to use the sport to
make them more “American”.
Some of the Japanese prisoners were given chances to prove their
loyalty to their country, even though none of them had ever been
anything but loyal. Questionnaires were distributed asking the people
their opinion about how much they loved their country. Being worded
in complicated and confusing ways, some people, especially those who
were only moderately fluent in English, had trouble answering the
questions correctly. Some, infuriated over their unnecessary
imprisonment, sarcastically answered that they felt no admiration for
the USA. Those who gave the wrong answers were shipped off to the
high-risk concentration camp and eventually deported back to Japan.
Many of them were old or uneducated people who did not understand
what they were doing. But some young people who proved themselves to
be intelligent were sent to progressive colleges on the east coast.
Others were allowed to enlist in the army; these Japanese soldiers
formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and went on to
become some of the most decorated fighters for America in World War
II since they assisted in the liberation of Dachau and were involved
in a major operation to disrupt trains taking Jews to concentration
camps in southern Germany.
Very few prisoners tried to escape. The ones who did were either
shot and killed or sent to the maximum security camp in Nevada.
In 1944, World War II began to wind down. The Japanese-American
prison camps were starting to closed. Most inmates were given $25 and
a train ticket to return to their former homes. Most of them found
their houses and possessions to be stolen or vandalized. Some of
their property was burned or destroyed. Many American citizens
treated them with hostility and contempt. A group of white
supremacists petitioned the government to permanently remove all
people of Asian descent from California. Otherwise Americans mostly
remained silent on the issue for many years.
Then during the 1960s, young Japanese-American college students,
inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, began agitating for
reparations. Eventually both Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter
gave speeches condemning the internment camps. By the 1980s bills
were passed through Congress with bipartisan support and the Civil
Rights Act of 1988 was ratified by Ronald Reagan, giving $20,000 in
reparation money to the survivors of the concentration camps. The
disbursement of the money was overseen by both George H.W. Bush and
Bill Clinton during their terms of office. Bush gave a speech
proclaiming that the forced imprisonment of innocent ethnic
minorities will never be allowed to happen again. As we pass into the
21st century, it is obvious that some Americans have
refused to learned this historical lesson.
Ultimately, reparation money and the building of monuments is
fine. However, one has to ask if these gestures are really enough to
heal the psychological damage that has been done to American society
because of sadly idiotic mistakes made in the past.
References
Kelly, Edward H. and Harbison, Winifred A., The American
Constitution: Its Origins and Development. W.W. Norton &
Company, 1946.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural
America, Revised Edition. Back Bay Books, 2008.
