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"Puzzlement" |
Established in 1995, the JACL Speakers Bureau serves as an educational resource for schools, churches, and community organizations about the Japanese American experience. If interested in hosting a speaker or panel of speakers, please contact Dr. Sumi Koide at (914) 693-2058. Brochures available upon request.
by Sumi Koide
In the spring of 1942, over 120,000 ethnic Japanese were forcibly removed from their homes for detention in concentration camps, established by the US government. This incarceration took place very quickly and quietly, during the early months of the second world war with little attention drawn to it outside the west coast. Approximately 77,000 of these individuals were American citizens and 43,000 were legal aliens.
Major constitutional violations had taken place. No accusations of wrong doing were imposed. No hearings took place. They were deprived of the right to life, liberty, and property without due process of the law. The reasons given by the government were "military necessity" and the protection of the Japanese.
However, according to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a commission created by an Act of Congress, their findings were that it was due to "race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership." There was a long history of anti-Asian discrimination on the west coast dating back to immigration of the Chinese from the 1840s and the Japanese from the 1880s. By the early decades of the 1900s, anti-Japanese agitation by labor unions, civic, fraternal, and social organizations, farm growers, and farm labor groups, the media, and local politicians had resulted in discrimination in housing, employment, schooling, public accommodation, social interaction, and the denial of citizenship, the franchise, and the right to own property.
The Japanese immigrants, the Issei, who had come to this country with the hopes and dreams of a better life for themselves and their children, like most immigrants, had to place their aspirations on hold for the duration of the war. Many individuals spent more than three years in the concentration camps behind barbed wire fences.
Citizens and resident aliens alike were all presumed guilty of potential disloyalty solely on the basis of their ancestry. Not a single charge of espionage or sabotage was brought against any of the detainees. All had been deprived of the their constitutional rights.
During the war, some inmates of the camps exercised their objection to the treatment by civil disobedience and were sentenced to prison for protesting the abrogation of their rights. However, at the same time, more than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the US military with unprecedented valor by the segregated all-Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team in the European Theater of Operations and by the Military Intelligence Service in the South Pacific and China Burma India Theater of World War II. Over 800 Nisei soldiers gave their lives for America in World War II.
Japanese Americans returned from the camps into the mainstream of American society after the end of the war in 1945. The struggle against the barriers of race, prejudice, and discrimination has been long and arduous. But progress has been made. Race is no longer a barrier to citizenship, the franchise, and the ownership of property. The injustices suffered by Americans of Japanese Ancestry have been recognized by Presidential Proclamation in the report of the CWRIC, culminating in the Japanese Americans' struggle for justice, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which apologized for the government's actions and offered monetary compensation to survivors of the camps. Federal judges declared that the original decisions in wartime were manifestly unjust as in the cases of Hirabayashi, Korematsu, and Yasui, which were set aside or were invalidated. In the Mitsuye Endo case, the Supreme Court freed the Nikkei from the concentration camps.