Shortly after the Japaneseattack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Some 5,500 Issei men arrested by the FBI immediately after Pearl Harbor were already in Justice Department or Army custody,[1] and 5,000 were able to "voluntarily" relocate outside the exclusion zone;[2] the remaining Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from their homes and placed in isolated concentration camps over the spring of 1942. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens and half were under age 18.[1]
In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the forced eviction, when Fred Korematsu's challenge to his conviction for violating an exclusion order was struck down (see below). The Court limited its decision to the validity of the orders to leave the West Coast military area, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens.
In 1948, the Evacuation Claims Act provided some compensation for property losses, but the act required documentation that many former inmates had lost during their removal and excluded lost opportunities, wages or interest from its calculations. Less than 24,000 filed a claim, and most received only a fraction of the losses they claimed.[3]
felt that the curfew violated his Fifth Amendment right of due process. He disobeyed it.[5]
He further did not report for confinement to the bus that was supposed to take him to the camp he had been assigned to, which led to the charges against him becoming more severe. It was only in 1987 that the charges against Hirabayashi were dropped by the Supreme Court:
It took 40 years for a legal scholar reviewing declassified government documents to unearth memos sent by the government lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court to their superiors. In the memos, they complained that they were being forced to tell lies in court about the threat posed by the Japanese
—Hirabayashi Versus the United States, 2005.
The discussion this case sparked involved two key issues. The first was one of power, and if the curfew law was unconstitutional. The second issue was the question of racial discrimination, a constant theme within all of these cases.
The supreme court ruled that the curfew policy was constitutional and that it is merely for "protective measure."[6]
Endo hired a lawyer, James Purcell, to represent her legal protest against her illegal relocation and dismissal. Purcell and Endo filed a habeas corpus in court as a representation of her plea. The writ requested that Endo be released from the relocation camp so that she could challenge the terms of her dismissal. However, the court agreed to releasing Endo outside the West Coast area only: The U.S. government responded by offering to release Endo outside the West Coast rather than test the constitutionality of detention. Endo bravely refused the offer and remained confined without charge for another two years as she pursued her case. ("Mitsuye Endo Persevering for Justice")
It was two years later that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that persons of Japanese descent could not be held in confinement without proof of their disloyalty, stating that
detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by the Congress or the Executive, but it is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism in the entire evacuation program
—Mitsuye Endo Persevering for Justice
and Endo and thousands of her fellow detainees were allowed to return to their homes on the Pacific Coast.
This case was special for a few reasons. First, Endo was a woman, while the other three internment cases dealt with Japanese American men. And secondly, this case was different because it arose from a habeas corpus petition.
A case that focused on Japanese Americans who were denied citizenship and forced to move is the case of Korematsu v. United States. Fred Korematsu refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was arrested and convicted. After losing in the Court of Appeals, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the deportation order.
The Supreme Court upheld the order excluding persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast war zone during World War II. Three justices dissented.
Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said that legal restrictions on the rights of a single racial group will always be:
"suspect" and that "courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny." However, they are not necessarily unconstitutional. The exclusion order imposed hardships upon a large group of American citizens. But hardships are part of war. Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.
[This] is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States.
Justice Robert Jackson said that comparable burdens were not imposed upon descendants of the other nationalities such as Germans and Italians with whom the United States was also at war.
Swept up in the larger civil rights movement and ethnic pride of the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Nikkei activists began pushing for a reexamination of their parents' and grandparents' wartime experiences. Many had only recently learned of the incarceration, as their elders had remained hesitant to discuss the issue openly, and a debate over whether the community was owed reparations began to spread.
In 1970, the Japanese American Citizens League endorsed a resolution to urge Congress to compensate each camp survivor for each day they had spent in confinement (although the organization committed no resources to actual lobbying).[3] Redress efforts stalled for several years due to internal divisions and external opposition. In 1979, the JACL's National Committee for Redress proposed the creation of a federal commission to investigate the incarceration, but Seattle and Chicago chapter members, favoring an immediate push for monetary compensation over the national leadership's more bureaucratic approach, left to form the National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR).[3] The NCJAR lobbied in support of Washington State Congressman Mike Lowry's bill to compensate camp survivors, but the bill was killed in committee. The following year, the JACL, with help from Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, pushed a bill through Congress to create their investigative commission, and President Jimmy Carter appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC).[8] Meanwhile, younger and more left-leaning redress activists formed the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR), and worked to open the CWRIC hearings to Japanese Americans outside the elite, non-confrontational cohort favored by JACL leadership.[3] After the hearings, NCRR activists continued to wage a grass roots campaign for redress, while the JACL focused on passing legislation that would implement the CWRIC's recommendations and NCJAR turned its efforts to a federal lawsuit that would force the government to compensate former camp inmates. The class-action suit was ultimately unsuccessful, but the work of all three organizations contributed to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
Timeline
1970: Edison Uno introduces a resolution to push Congress to provide reparations to camp survivors, which the JACL endorses.[9]
1976: Michi Weglyn publishes the book Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, whose meticulous investigation of government documents and correspondence helped fuel the redress movement
January 1979: The JACL's redress committee agrees to lobby for a federal commission to investigate the causes and effects of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. The decision to shift focus from monetary compensation to legislation is controversial and deepens existing rifts in the organization.
May 1979: Dissident JACL members form the National Council for Japanese American redress.[10]
August 1979: JACL-backed bills for the creation of an investigative committee are introduced in the House and Senate.
November 28, 1979: Congressman Mike Lowry introduces an NCJAR-backed bill to grant $15,000 plus $15 for each day spent in confinement to former inmates.[10]
1980: The National Coalition for Redress/Reparations is established.
July 31, 1980: President Carter approves the creation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.
July to December 1981: The CWRIC holds eleven hearings in ten U.S. cities. More than 750 provide personal testimony of their confinement during World War II. For many it is the first time they have spoken of their wartime experiences.[8]
February 24, 1983: The CWRIC issues its final report, titled Personal Justice Denied. The report concludes that the wartime incarceration was caused by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership," and recommends a formal apology, the creation of a foundation to educate the public about the injustice, and $20,000 in reparations paid to each former inmate.
March 16, 1983: NCJAR files a class-action lawsuit against the government, calling for $220,000 to each camp survivor (a total of $27 billion) for "constitutional violations, loss of property and earnings, personal injury, and pain and suffering."[10]
1984 to 1985: The government's motion to dismiss the lawsuit is granted, and NCJAR files an appeal with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The court rules in favor of NCJAR, but reduces the case's original 22 causes of action to one and maintains the lower court's stance on sovereign immunity.[10]
1986: The Supreme Court allows NCJAR lawyers to present arguments for their lawsuit but eventually orders the case be heard in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals instead.
September 17, 1987: H.R. 442, named after the famed all-Japanese combat unit, is brought to the House floor for discussion and eventually passes 243 to 141.[11]
May 11, 1988: The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals dismisses the NCJAR lawsuit.
August 10, 1988: President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act into law. The act's provisions incorporate the recommendations outlined in Personal Justice Denied.
October 9, 1990: A ceremony is held to present the first redress checks to nine Issei.
1993: Issuance of redress checks is completed. A total of 82,219 former camp inmates received reparations.[8]
In 1981, during testimony before the CWRIC, the Nisei attorney Frank Chuman proposed using the writ of coram nobis to overturn the convictions of Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui. Shortly thereafter, scholar Peter Irons and attorney Dale Minami submitted a coram nobis petition, based on recently discovered evidence of official misconduct.[12] These proceedings would eventually nullify the convictions of the 1940s.
Hohri v. the United States, 1986
Another case that took place during the redress movement was that of Hohri versus the U.S. The plaintiffs in this case were nineteen Japanese Americans and their descendants, who brought
civil actions against the United States seeking declaratory relief and compensation for injuries sustained when the detainees were forced to evacuate their homes and relocate to internment camps during the Second World War
—Leigh 1986, p. 648.
William Hohri was living in San Francisco when he was removed and forcibly incarcerated during World War II in Manzanar. He filed the case on behalf of all the incarceration victims, claiming that apart from injuries, the prisoners suffered "summary removal from their homes, imprisonment in racially segregated prison camps, and mass deprivations of their constitutional rights" (Legacies of Incarceration, 2002). Although the case was dismissed in 1988, it is representative of many of the claims for redress made by Japanese Americans.[13]
↑ Randall, V.R. (2002). Internment of Japanese Americans at Concentration CampsOnline Available, Randall reveals that in addition to the forced incarcerations of Japanese Americans, Peruvians of Japanese descent were also essentially abducted from their homes in Peru and detained at incarceration camps in the U.S. during World War II. This page also contains several links to informative articles on the subject of incarceration and redress. accessed 2007
↑ Hirabayashi Versus the United States, accessed 2007
3. http://www.spartacus-educational.com/USAjapanact.htm This page provides extensive first-hand accounts and testimonies of Japanese Americans on their treatment in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the government's subsequent decision to place all Japanese Americans in confinement within the interiors of the country. The various testimonies describe how the camps were overcrowded, and many prisoners committed suicide; businesses collapsed, leaving people without a means of livelihood even after their eventual release; many people lost family members who were forcibly removed from such gatherings at weddings and taken to undisclosed destinations; and how the detainees were forcibly confined in prisons which "were little better than concentration camps."
8. Randall, V.R. (2002). "Internment of Japanese Americans at Concentration camps." Available at http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/intern01.htm#Hirabayashi. Randall reveals that in addition to the forced incarcerations of Japanese Americans, Peruvians of Japanese descent were also essentially abducted from their homes in Peru and detained at incarceration camps in the U.S. during World War II. This page also contains several links to informative articles on the subject of incarceration and redress.
9. "Caught in the Crossfire: Arab Americans." Available at https://www.pbs.org/itvs/caughtinthecrossfire/arab_americans.html. This article reveals how not only have American Muslims suffered prejudices as a result of their ethnicity, but that there is also fear of police and other authorities to the extent that people in such communities are not reporting crimes, for fear of racist discrimination against the victims of such crimes.
10. "Korematsu v. United States (1944)". Available at http://www.infoplease.com/us/supreme-court/cases/ar18.html. This case is about Fred Korematsu, who refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was arrested and convicted. After losing in the Court of Appeals, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the deportation order.
Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the secretary of war to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the incarceration of nearly all 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, born and raised in the United States.
During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom 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 president Franklin D. Roosevelt via executive order shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has been widely criticized, with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry", and as "a stain on American jurisprudence". Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in his majority opinion in the 2018 case of Trump v. Hawaii. The case is often cited as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time.
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 Civil Liberties Act of 1988 is a United States federal law that granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the United States government during World War II. The act was sponsored by California Democratic congressman and former internee Norman Mineta, Wyoming Republican senator Alan K. Simpson and California senator Pete Wilson. The bill was supported by the majority of Democrats in Congress, while the majority of Republicans voted against it. The act was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
The Japanese American Citizens League is an Asian American civil rights charity, headquartered in San Francisco, with regional chapters across the United States.
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.
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was an American civil rights activist who resisted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast from their homes and their mandatory imprisonment in incarceration camps, but Korematsu instead challenged the orders and became a fugitive.
Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group were constitutional when the nation was at war with the country from which that group's ancestors originated. The case arose out of the issuance of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had authorized military commanders to secure areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded", and Japanese Americans living in the West Coast were subject to a curfew and other restrictions before being removed to internment camps. The plaintiff, Gordon Hirabayashi, was convicted of violating the curfew and had appealed to the Supreme Court. Yasui v. United States was a companion case decided the same day. Both convictions were overturned in coram nobis proceedings in the 1980s.
The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) was a group of nine people appointed by the U.S. Congress in 1980 to conduct an official governmental study into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
On February 19, 1942, shortly after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the forced removal of over 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and into internment camps for the duration of the war. The personal rights, liberties, and freedoms of Japanese Americans were suspended by the United States government. In the "relocation centers", internees were housed in tar-papered army-style barracks. Some individuals who protested their treatment were sent to a special camp at Tule Lake, California.
Minoru Yasui was an American lawyer from Oregon. Born in Hood River, Oregon, he earned both an undergraduate degree and his law degree at the University of Oregon. He was one of the few Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor who fought laws that directly targeted Japanese Americans or Japanese immigrants. His case was the first case to test the constitutionality of the curfews targeted at minority groups.
Yasui v. United States, 320 U.S. 115 (1943), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the constitutionality of curfews used during World War II when they were applied to citizens of the United States. The case arose out of the implementation of Executive Order 9066 by the U.S. military to create zones of exclusion along the West Coast of the United States, where Japanese Americans were subjected to curfews and eventual removal to relocation centers. This Presidential order followed the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into World War II and inflamed the existing anti-Japanese sentiment in the country.
Charles Fahy was an American lawyer and judge who served as the 26th Solicitor General of the United States and later served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The Day of Remembrance is a day of observance for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Events in numerous U.S. states, especially in the West Coast, are held on or near February 19, the day in 1942 that Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, requiring internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Mitsuye Maureen Endo Tsutsumi was an American woman of Japanese descent who was placed in an internment camp during World War II. Endo filed a writ of habeas corpus that ultimately led to a United States Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was a Japanese American political activist who played a major role in the Japanese American redress movement. She was the lead researcher of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a bipartisan federal committee appointed by Congress in 1980 to review the causes and effects of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. As a young woman, Herzig-Yoshinaga was confined in the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas, and Rohwer War Relocation Center also in Arkansas. She later uncovered government documents that debunked the wartime administration's claims of "military necessity" and helped compile the CWRIC's final report, Personal Justice Denied, which led to the issuance of a formal apology and reparations for former camp inmates. She also contributed pivotal evidence and testimony to the Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui coram nobis cases.
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.
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