Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the War Department to designate “military areas” and to exclude “any and all persons” from them. Although the executive order did not specify any individual group, it led to the relocation oe Japanese Americans from the West Coast and to the incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, about two-thirds of them American citizens, during World War II.
A number of factors accounted for the much different treatment given Japanese Americans than German Americans and Italian Americans, the other two ethnic groups whose unnaturalized immigrants were designated as enemy aliens. By contrast to Italian Americans and German Americans, who played important roles in the economy and had political influence, mainland Japanese Americans were few in number, often isolated and unassimilated, and politically powerless. Such factors also help to explain why the large numbers of people (up to 200,000) of Japanese ancestry who made up more than one-third of the population of militarily vulnerable Hawaii were not relocated.
The reason given for Executive Order 9066 and the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans was military security. And indeed there were fears and rumors of attacks, sabotage, and espionage on the West Coast, although never any evidence of them. But racism and racial prejudice were at the heart of what happened. AntiJapanese sentiment and restrictions had shaped the Japanese experience in America. On the West Coast, Japanese Americans had faced not only prejudice and discrimination in jobs and housing but also legal sanctions barring them from the full enjoyment of civil rights. National law prevented Japanese immigrants from becoming American citizens.
The attack on Pearl Harbor inflamed anti-Japanese feelings and triggered fear of Japanese Americans. Local citizens (some of them also harboring economic resentments against the Japanese) and politicians pressed for action, and the military agreed. Speaking for such groups, the army general in charge of the Western Defense Command said of the Japanese Americans: “A Jap’s a Jap. . . . It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. . . . Racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race.”
Pressed by local and military officials, President Roosevelt agreed to Executive Order 9066 over the objections of Justice Department officials. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson implemented the order only on the West Coast and only against Japanese Americans. Some 15,000 Japanese Americans moved of their own accord before such voluntary relocation was stopped, and more than 110,000 were relocated by the government and incarcerated in internment camps run by the War Relocation Authority. Stimson understood that the policy made a “tremendous hole in our constitutional system.” Nonetheless, the Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
Some compensatory and corrective action was taken after the war. In 1948, Congress approved some reparations to internees—$37 million for the relocation and the loss of an estimated $400 million in property. In 1988, Congress acknowledged the “fundamental injustice” of the policy and awarded $20,000 to each living survivor of the relocation.
Further reading: Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975); Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
World History
