Hayward, California, May 8, 1942. Two children of the Mochida family who, with their parents, are awaiting an evacuation bus. The youngster on the right holds a sandwich given to her by one of a group of women who were present from a local church. The family unit is kept intact during evacuation and at War Relocation Authority centers where evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed for the duration. (Photo by Dorothea Lange).
After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to create zones from which certain persons could be excluded if they posed a threat to national security. Many people of Japanese ancestry were also suspected of espionage after the Pearl Harbor attack. Military Areas 1 and 2 were created soon after, encompassing all of California and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, and subsequent civilian exclusion orders informed Japanese Americans residing in these zones they would be scheduled for "evacuation." The executive order also applied to Alaska as well, bringing the entire United States West Coast as off-limits to Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese descent.[3]
On March 18, 1942, the WRA was formed via Executive Order 9102. It was in many ways a direct successor to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the efforts of both overlapped and intermingled for quite some time. From March until November, the WPA spent more on internment than any other agency including the Army and was on the scene with removal and relocation even before Executive Order 9192. Beginning on March 11, for example, Rex L. Nicholson, the WPA’s regional director, managed the first “Reception and Induction” centers. Another WPA veteran, Clayton E. Triggs, was the administrator the Manzanar Relocation Center, a facility which, according to one insider, was “manned just about 100% by the WPA.” Drawing on his background in New Deal road construction, Triggs installed such familiar concentration camp features as guard towers and spotlights. As the WPA wound down in late 1942 and early 1943, many of its employees moved over seamlessly to the WRA. [4]
Milton S. Eisenhower as the WRA's original director. Eisenhower was a proponent of Roosevelt's New Deal and disapproved of the idea of mass internment.[5]:57 Early on he had tried, unsuccessfully, to limit the internment to adult men, allowing women and children to remain free, and he pushed to keep WRA policy in line with the original idea of making the camps similar to subsistence homesteads in the rural interior of the country.[6] This, along with proposals for helping Japanese Americans resettle in labor-starved farming communities outside the exclusion zone, was met with opposition from the governors of these interior states, who worried about security issues and claimed it was "politically infeasible," at a meeting in Salt Lake City in April 1942.[5]:56–57 Shortly before the meeting Eisenhower wrote to his former boss, Secretary of AgricultureClaude Wickard, and said, "when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done".[5]:57
Disappointed, Eisenhower was director of the WRA for only ninety days, resigning June 18, 1942. However, during his tenure with the WRA he raised wages for interned Japanese Americans, worked with the Japanese American Citizens League to establish an internee advisory council, initiated a student leave program for college-age Nisei, and petitioned Congress to create programs for postwar rehabilitation. He also pushed Roosevelt to make a public statement in support of loyal Nisei and attempted to enlist the Federal Reserve Bank to protect the property left behind by displaced Japanese Americans, but was unable to overcome opposition to these proposals.[6][5]:57–58 Eisenhower was replaced by Dillon S. Myer, who would run the WRA until its dissolution at the end of the war.
Japanese Americans had already been removed from their West Coast homes and placed in temporary "assembly centers" (run by a separate military body, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration [WCCA]) over the spring of 1942; Myer's primary responsibility upon taking the position was to continue with the planning and construction of the more permanent replacements for the camps run by the WCCA.[7]
Selection of camp sites
The WRA considered 300 potential sites before settling on a total of ten camp locations, mostly on tribal lands. Site selection was based upon multiple criteria, including:
Ability to provide work in public works, agriculture, manufacturing.
Adequate transportation, power facilities, sufficient area of quality soil, water, and climate
The camps had to be built from the ground up, and wartime shortages of labor and lumber combined with the vast scope of each construction project (several of the WRA camps were among the largest "cities" in the states that housed them) meant that many sites were unfinished when transfers began to arrive from the assembly centers. At Manzanar, for example, internees were recruited to help complete construction.[7]
Life in the camps
A homemade planter and a doily beside a service portrait, a prayer, and a letter home. One of the few ways to earn permission to leave the camps was to enter military service.
Life in a WRA camp was difficult. Those fortunate enough to find a job worked long hours, usually in agricultural jobs. Resistance to camp guards and escape attempts were a low priority for most of the Japanese Americans held in the camps. Residents were more often concerned with the problems of day-to-day life: improving their often shoddily-constructed living quarters, getting an education, and, in some cases, preparing for eventual release. Many of those who were employed, particularly those with responsible or absorbing jobs, made these jobs the focus of their lives. However, the pay rate was deliberately set far lower than what inmates would have received outside camp, an administrative response to widespread rumors that Japanese Americans were receiving special treatment while the larger public suffered from wartime shortages. Non-skilled labor earned $14/month while doctors and dentists made a paltry $19/month.[7]
Many found consolation in religion, and both Christian and Buddhist services were held regularly. Others concentrated on hobbies or sought self-improvement by taking adult classes, ranging from Americanization and American history and government to vocational courses in secretarial skills and bookkeeping, and cultural courses in such things as ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement. The young people spent much of their time in recreational pursuits: news of sports, theatrics, and dances fills the pages of the camp newspaper.[5]:70–71
Living space was minimal. Families lived in army-style barracks partitioned into "apartments" with walls that usually did not reach the ceiling. These "apartments" were, at the largest, twenty by twenty-four feet (6.1 by 7.3m) and were expected to house a family of six. In April 1943, the Topaz camp averaged 114 square feet (10.6m2) (roughly six by nineteen feet [1.8 by 5.8m]) per person.[5]:67
Each inmate ate at one of several common mess halls, assigned by block. At the Army-run camps that housed dissidents and other "troublemakers", it was estimated that it cost 38.19 cents per day ($6.00 in present-day terms[9]) to feed each person. The WRA spent slightly more, capping per-person costs to 50 cents a day ($8.00 in present-day terms[9]) (again, to counteract rumors of "coddling" the inmates), but most people were able to supplement their diets with food grown in camp.[7][5]:67
The WRA allowed Japanese Americans to establish a form of self-governance, with elected inmate leaders working under administration supervisors to help run the camps. This allowed inmates to keep busy and have some say in their day-to-day life; however, it also served the WRA mission of "Americanizing" the inmates so that they could be assimilated into white communities after the war. The "enemy alien" Issei were excluded from running for office, and inmates and community analysts argued that the WRA pulled the strings on important issues, leaving only the most basic and inconsequential decisions to Nisei leaders.[7]
Community Analysis Section
In February 1943, the WRA established the Community Analysis Section (under the umbrella of the Community Management Division) in order to collect information on the lives of incarcerated Japanese Americans in all ten camps. Employing over twenty cultural anthropologists and social scientists—including John Embree, Marvin and Morris Opler, Margaret Lantis, Edward Spicer, and Weston La Barre—the CAS produced reports on education, community-building and assimilation efforts in the camps, taking data from observations of and interviews with camp residents.[10]
While some community analysts viewed the Japanese American inmates merely as research subjects, others opposed the incarceration and some of the WRA's policies in their reports, although very few made these criticisms public. Restricted by federal censors and WRA lawyers from publishing their full research from the camps, most of the (relatively few) reports produced by the CAS did not contradict the WRA's official stance that Japanese Americans remained, for the most part, happy behind the barbed wire. Morris Opler did, however, provide a prominent exception, writing two legal briefs challenging the exclusion for the Supreme Court cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu.[10]
Resettlement program
Concerned that Japanese Americans would become more dependent on the government the longer they remained in camp, Director Dillon Myer led the WRA in efforts to push inmates to leave camp and reintegrate into outside communities. Even before the establishment of the "relocation centers," agricultural laborers had been issued temporary work furloughs by the WCCA, and the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council had been placing Nisei in outside colleges since the spring of 1942. The WRA had initiated its own "leave permit" system in July 1942, although few took the trouble to go through the bureaucratic and cumbersome application process until it was streamlined over the following months.[7] (By the end of 1942, only 884 had volunteered for resettlement.)[11]
The need for a more easily navigable system, in addition to external pressure from pro-incarceration politicians and the general public to restrict who could exit the camps, led to a revision of the application process in 1943. Initially, applicants were required to find an outside sponsor, provide proof of employment or school enrollment, and pass an FBI background check. In the new system, inmates had only complete a registration form and pass a streamlined FBI check. (The "loyalty questionnaire," as the form came to be known after it was made mandatory for all adults regardless of their eligibility for resettlement, would later spark protests across all ten camps.)[11]
At this point, the WRA began to shift its focus from managing the camps to overseeing resettlement. Field offices were established in Chicago, Salt Lake City and other hubs that had attracted Japanese American resettlers. Administrators worked with housing, employment and education sponsors in addition to social service agencies to provide assistance. Following Myer's directive to "assimilate" Japanese Americans into mainstream society, this network of WRA officials (and the propaganda they circulated in camp) steered resettlers toward cities that lacked large Japanese American populations and warned against sticking out by spending too much time among other Nikkei, speaking Japanese or otherwise clinging to cultural ties.[7] By the end of 1944, close to 35,000 had left camp, mostly Nisei.[11]
Resistance to WRA policies
The WRA's "Americanization" efforts were not limited to the Nisei resettlers. Dillon Myer and other high-level officials believed that accepting the values and customs of white Americans was the best way for Japanese Americans to succeed both in and out of camp. Administrators sponsored patriotic activities and clubs, organized English classes for the Issei, encouraged young men to volunteer for the U.S. Army, and touted inmate self-government as an example of American democracy. "Good" inmates who toed the WRA line were rewarded, while "troublemakers" who protested their confinement and Issei elders who had been leaders in their prewar communities but found themselves stripped of this sway in camp were treated as a security threat. Resentment over poor working conditions and low wages, inadequate housing, and rumors of guards stealing food from inmates exacerbated tensions and created pro- and anti-administration factions. Labor strikes occurred at Poston,[12] Tule Lake[13] and Jerome,[14] and in two violent incidents at Poston and Manzanar in November and December 1942, individuals suspected of colluding with the WRA were beaten by other inmates. External opposition to the WRA came to a head following these events, in two congressional investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and another led by Senator Albert Chandler.[7]
The leave clearance registration process, dubbed the "loyalty questionnaire" by inmates, was another significant source of discontent among incarcerated Japanese Americans. Originally drafted as a War Department recruiting tool, the 28 questions were hastily, and poorly, revised for their new purpose of assessing inmate loyalty. The form was largely devoted to determining whether the respondent was a "real" American — baseball or judo, Boy Scouts or Japanese school — but most of the ire was directed at two questions that asked inmates to volunteer for combat duty and forswear their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Many were offended at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them, and believed the question of allegiance was an implicit accusation that they had been disloyal to the United States. Although most answered in the affirmative to both, 15 percent of the total inmate population refused to fill out the questionnaire or answered "no" to one or both questions. Under pressure from War Department officials, Myer reluctantly converted Tule Lake into a maximum security segregation center for the "no-nos" who flunked the loyalty test, in July 1943.[7]
Approximately 12,000 were transferred to Tule Lake, but of the previous residents cleared as loyal, only 6,500 accepted the WRA offer to move to another camp. The resulting overpopulation (almost 19,000 in a camp designed for 15,000 by the end of 1944) fueled existing resentment and morale problems.[13] Conditions worsened after another labor strike and an anti-WRA demonstration that attracted a crowd of 5,000 to 10,000[15] and ended with several inmates being badly beaten. The entire camp was placed under martial law on November 14, 1943. Military control lasted for two months, and during this time 200[16] to 350[13] men were imprisoned in an overcrowded stockade (held under charges such as "general troublemaker" and "too well educated for his own good"), while the general population was subject to curfews, unannounced searches, and restrictions on work and recreational activities.[16] Angry young men joined the Hoshi-dan and its auxiliary, the Hokoku-dan, a militaristic nationalist group aimed at preparing its members for a new life in Japan. This pro-Japan faction ran military drills, demonstrated against the WRA, and made threats against inmates seen as administration sympathizers.[17] When the Renunciation Act was passed in July 1944, 5,589 (over 97 percent of them Tule Lake inmates) expressed their resentment by giving up their U.S. citizenship and applying for "repatriation" to Japan.[15][18]
End of the camps
The West Coast was reopened to Japanese Americans on January 2, 1945 (delayed against the wishes of Dillon Myer and others until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign).[19] On July 13, 1945, Myer announced that all of the camps were to be closed between October 15 and December 15 of that year, except for Tule Lake, which held "renunciants" slated for deportation to Japan. (The vast majority of those who had renounced their U.S. citizenship later regretted the decision and fought to remain in the United States, with the help of civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins. The camp remained open until the 4,262 petitions were resolved.)[15] Despite wide-scale protests from inmates who had nothing to return to and felt unprepared to relocate yet again, the WRA began to eliminate all but the most basic services until those remaining were forcibly removed from camp and sent back to the West Coast.[7]
Tule Lake closed on March 20, 1946, and Executive Order 9742, signed by President Harry S. Truman on June 26, 1946, officially terminated the WRA's mission.[20]
Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945. Although it had over 10,000 inmates at its peak, it was one of the smaller internment camps. It is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California's Owens Valley, between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar means "apple orchard" in Spanish. The Manzanar National Historic Site, which preserves and interprets the legacy of Japanese American incarceration in the United States, was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the ten former camp sites.
During World War II, the United States, by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, forcibly relocated and incarcerated at least 125,284 people of Japanese descent in 75 identified incarceration sites. Most lived on the Pacific Coast, in concentration camps in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the inmates were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066 following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei and Sansei. The rest were Issei immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.
Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944), was a United States Supreme Court ex parte decision handed down on December 18, 1944, in which the Justices unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States. Although the Court did not touch on the constitutionality of the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, which it had found not to violate citizen rights in its Korematsu v. United States decision on the same date, the Endo ruling nonetheless led to the reopening of the West Coast to Japanese Americans after their incarceration in camps across the U.S. interior during World War II.
The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, named after nearby Heart Mountain and located midway between the northwest Wyoming towns of Cody and Powell, was one of ten concentration camps used for the internment of Japanese Americans evicted during World War II from their local communities in the West Coast Exclusion Zone by the executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The Gila River War Relocation Center was an American concentration camp in Arizona, one of several built by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) during the Second World War for the incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. It was located within the Gila River Indian Reservation near the town of Sacaton, about 30 mi (48.3 km) southeast of Phoenix. With a peak population of 13,348, it became the fourth-largest city in the state, operating from May 1942 to November 16, 1945.
The Tule Lake National Monument in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California, consists primarily of the site of the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, one of ten concentration camps constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarcerate Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. They totaled nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. Among the inmates, the notation "鶴嶺湖" was sometimes applied.
Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States. It commemorates the more than 13,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War. Among the inmates, the notation 峰土香 or 峯土香 was sometimes applied.
The Amache National Historic Site, formally the Granada War Relocation Center but known to the internees as Camp Amache, was a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in Prowers County, Colorado. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and sent to remote camps. Among the inmates, the notation "亜町" was sometimes applied.
The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp that housed Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945.
The Poston Internment Camp, located in Yuma County in southwestern Arizona, was the largest of the 10 American concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority during World War II.
The Jerome War Relocation Center was a Japanese American internment camp located in southeastern Arkansas, near the town of Jerome in the Arkansas Delta. Open from October 6, 1942, until June 30, 1944, it was the last American concentration camp to open and the first to close. At one point it held as many as 8,497 detainees. After closing, it was converted into a holding camp for German prisoners of war. Today, few remains of the camp are visible, as the wooden buildings were taken down. The smokestack from the hospital incinerator still stands.
The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American concentration camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942, until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California. Among the inmates, the notation "朗和" was sometimes applied. The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Camp Tulelake was a federal work facility and War Relocation Authority isolation center located in Siskiyou County, five miles west of Tulelake, California. It was established by the United States government in 1935 during the Great Depression for vocational training and work relief for young men, in a program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps. The camp was established initially for CCC enrollees to work on the Klamath Reclamation Project.
Togo W. Tanaka was an American newspaper journalist and editor who reported on the difficult conditions in the Manzanar camp, where he was one of 110,000 Japanese Americans who had been relocated after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The Manzanar Children's Village was an orphanage for children of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II as a result of Executive Order 9066, under which President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. Contained within the Manzanar concentration camp in Owens Valley, California, it held a total of 101 orphans from June 1942 to September 1945.
Dillon Seymour Myer was a United States government official who served as Director of the War Relocation Authority during World War II, Director of the Federal Public Housing Authority, and Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1950s. He also served as President of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs. He is the subject of Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism by Richard T. Drinnon.
The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee was a group organized in 1943 to protest the draft of Nisei, from Japanese American concentration camps during World War II. Kiyoshi Okamoto formed a "Fair Play Committee of One" in response to the War Relocation Authority's controversial loyalty questionnaire in 1943, and was later joined by Frank Emi and other inmates of the Heart Mountain camp. With seven older leaders at its core, the Committee's membership grew as draft notices began to arrive in camp. To challenge their forced "evacuation" by the government, they refused to volunteer or participate in the draft, but the Committee required its members to be citizens loyal to the United States willing to serve if their rights were restored. By June 1944, several dozen young men had been arrested and charged by the U.S. government with felony draft evasion. While the camp at Poston, Arizona produced the largest group of draft resisters, at 106, the Fair Play Committee was the most prominent inmate organization to protest the draft, and the rate of draft resistance at Heart Mountain was the highest of any camp. The number of resisters eventually numbered nearly 300 from all ten camps.
The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) was a research project funded by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), an agency responsible for overseeing the relocation of Japanese Americans, The University of California, the Giannini Foundation, the Columbian Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation with the total amount of funding reaching almost 100,000 U.S. dollars. It was conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team was led by sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a Lecturer in Sociology for the Giannini Foundation and a professor of rural sociology, and included anthropologists John Collier Jr. and Alexander Leighton, among others. The study combined each of the major social sciences such as sociology, social anthropology, political science, social psychology, and economics to effectively illustrate the effects of internment on Japanese Americans. The terminology of "relocation" can be confusing: The WRA termed the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast an "evacuation" and called the incarceration of these people in the ten camps as "relocation." Later it also applied the term "relocation" to the program that enabled the evacuees to leave the camps (provided they had been certified as loyal.
Dalton Wells Isolation Center was a camp located in Moab, Utah. The Dalton Wells camp was in use from 1935 to 1943. The camp played a role in two significant events during the twentieth century. During the New Deal programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the camp was built as a CCC camp to provide jobs for young men. Starting in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II, the camp was used as a relocation and isolation center for Japanese Americans. The camp never housed large numbers of Japanese Americans since the camp's function was only to house internees deemed "troublemakers" from other relocation camps after problematic events such as the Manzanar riot.
↑ Brian Garfield (February 1, 1995). The Thousand-mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians. University of Alaska Press. pp.60–62.
↑ Beito, David T. (2023). The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Firsted.). Oakland: Independent Institute. pp.182–183. ISBN978-1598133561.
↑ Burton, Jeffrey; Farrell, Mary; Lord, Florence; Lord, Richard. Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites, Chapter 10, "Poston Relocation Center," (National Park Service, 2000).
Beito, David T. (2023). The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Firsted.). Oakland: Independent Institute. pp.4–7. ISBN978-1598133561.
Myer, Dillon S.Uprooted Americans; the Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority During World War II. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971.
Riley, Karen Lea. Schools Behind Barbed Wire: the Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
Tyson, Thomas N; Fleischman, Richard K. (June 2006). "Accounting for interned Japanese-American civilians during World War II: Creating incentives and establishing controls for captive workers". Accounting Historians Journal. Thomson Gale. 33 (1): 167. doi:10.2308/0148-4184.33.1.167.
"The Evacuation of the Japanese." Population Index 8.3 (July 1942): 166-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
