From ‘Infamy’ to Incarceration: Executive Order 9066
This article was written by Harrison Golden
This article was published in How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945
Registration for incoming incarcerees to Manzanar. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)
Smoke clouded the Sunday morning sky. Beneath the black plumes, more than 2,400 Americans were dead, with at least another 1,000 wounded. Twenty-one American ships were either damaged or sinking. Some 188 American aircraft lay destroyed.1 The USS Oklahoma, struck by as many as nine torpedoes, capsized within minutes.2 The USS Nevada and USS West Virginia fell to the bottom of the sea. The USS Arizona was a total loss. In and around the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the Imperial Japanese Navy took less than two hours to level most of America’s Pacific fleet.3
The raid on Pearl Harbor stunned Americans who had long thought their neighboring oceans would shield them from foreign military assault. Though ties with Japan had broken in recent months due to the empire’s takeover of French Indochina and America’s halting of oil shipments in protest, few if any had predicted such ruin. Even fewer expected it on a day often used for rest and churchgoing, let alone weeks before Christmas.
“December 7, 1941,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress the next day, “a date which will live in infamy.”
The president asked the House and Senate to authorize war on Japan. Near-unanimous approval came minutes later.4
America’s forceful response, however, was already underway—not yet on distant battlefields but inside American towns.
Roosevelt was in the early stages of flexing an age-old power. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which only two presidents before him had invoked, allowed him to subject any foreign national to arrest whenever a “predatory incursion” is “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened.”5 In the case of Presidential Proclamation 2525, issued hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the “alien enemies” were Japanese-born American noncitizens, or Issei.6
Panic spread. Rumors claimed that some of the Japanese pilots, as they plunged to their deaths, had worn class rings from Honolulu’s McKinley High School; Californians told each other that the rings were from either UCLA or Stanford University.7 A report suggested that a spy had carved arrows through a cane field so the men could find and strike Pearl Harbor.8 Conspiracy theorists stated that Issei were using flashlights to guide Japanese submarines and warships to their next targets, perhaps California or Washington state.9
The hearsay was later debunked, but US government officials took no chances. The Navy ordered Issei-owned fishing boats back onto land.10 Issei-owned bank accounts were frozen.11 The US Department of Justice ordered all Japanese-born people to surrender their firearms, knives, shortwave radios, and cameras.12 In Hawaii and on the West Coast, where most Japanese Americans lived, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation began rounding up Issei men who seemed to maintain the strongest ties to Japanese culture. Among the most wanted were Buddhist clergy, journalists, farmers, business owners, and Japanese-language teachers.13 The FBI scoured homes for even the smallest clues, making arrests before the smoke had cleared.
Hoping to avoid arrest, Issei destroyed evidence of their roots: Japanese flags, Japanese literature and musical albums, documents, samurai swords, and portraits of ancestors. They used fireplaces, bare hands, and whatever tools they could find on such short notice—and still, certain Issei were jailed anyway. “These precautions didn’t do [Papa] much good,” wrote Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was seven years old at the time of her father’s arrest in Southern California. “He was not only an alien; he held a commercial fishing license, and in the early days of the war, the FBI was picking up all such men, for fear they were somehow making contact with enemy ships off the coast.”14
Arrests continued over the next few days. Because German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini had signed a pact with Japan in 1940, the US government pursued immigrants from Germany and Italy as well. On December 10, a day before Congress authorized war against the two European nations, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said “practically all” suspects were in custody.15 Of the detainees, some 850 were German-born, nearly 150 were Italian-born, and roughly 1,300 were Issei.16
Some newspaper writers and political figures urged the public not to respond with racism or xenophobia, particularly against the roughly 285,000 Japanese people who lived in either Hawaii or the continental US.17 “[T]he great mass of our people, stemming from these various national ties, must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans,” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the December 16 edition of her syndicated “My Day” column.18 A Sacramento Bee editorial read, “Racial hatred belongs in the arsenal of Nazi weapons.…The wise and sensible American will avoid any of them as he would a deadly poison or a fatal pestilence.”19 On December 10, California representative Bertrand W. Gearhart read a telegram on the House floor from an Issei constituent whom he described as an “American patriot.”20
But the calls against prejudice did little to calm an emerging storm. Hysteria over the possibility of another attack left America’s masses vulnerable to mis- and disinformation. Anxieties became misdirected. Even Americans who considered themselves well-meaning assumed the arrests of Issei men must have been for a good reason. Rogue voices outfoxed experienced statesmen and won the president’s ear.
Further inflamed were the nativists who believed the Pearl Harbor raid only confirmed their long-held bias. Anyone who so much as looked Japanese, the argument went, was out to steal power.
As armed United States military police stand by, the first of many cars carrying Japanese Americans to the Manzanar incarceration camp arrives. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)
Diagrams and articles used stereotypes to differentiate Japanese and Chinese traits. A Department of War comic showed “Japs,” as they were offensively called then, with “lemon yellow” skin, buck teeth, and legs that appeared “joined directly to his chest.”21 In a late December 1941 issue of Time magazine, a writer claimed that “although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid (which makes them look almond-eyed), Japanese eyes are usually set closer together.” The Time article also claimed that “virtually all Japanese are short” and “except for wrestlers—are seldom fat…Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open.…Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time.”22 A Life magazine caption stated that while “Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists,” Japanese people “show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.”23
Yet beyond any crass wartime contrasts, anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese venom in America had long been close-knit. The first major wave of Japanese migrants came to the continental US in the 1880s, as a federal ban on Chinese immigration took hold. With fewer Chinese settlers taking low-wage jobs on West Coast farms, the Japanese newcomers filled the gaps. By 1900 more than 24,000 Japanese people had reached the continental US.24 In time they faced allegations similar to what the Chinese laborers had endured.
California labor leaders were among the first to say Japanese workers were stealing job opportunities from White men. San Francisco dry goods hauler Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant who had advocated for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, told members of his Workingmen’s Party in 1900 that the US should also curb Japanese arrivals.25 San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan told a similar crowd that year that “the Japanese…are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.”26
Indeed, Japanese immigrants could not be made American citizens, but only because of laws passed by White lawmakers. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship to “any alien, being a free White person.”27 An 1870 revision allowed “aliens of African nativity and…persons of African descent” to become citizens as well, but the extension stopped there.28 Entering the twentieth century, Issei—and just about every other Asian-born person—remained ineligible for citizenship.
The American-born children of Issei, however, were US citizens. Known as Nisei, their citizenship was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” Section 1 of the amendment notes, “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall…deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”29
But Japanese children, whether they were American citizens or not, were not immune from racism. In 1905 the San Francisco Chronicle published a headline that warned of “THE YELLOW PERIL: HOW THE JAPANESE CROWD OUT THE WHITE RACE.”30 In October 1906, under pressure from a new locally formed Asiatic Exclusion League, San Francisco’s board of education relocated 93 Japanese American students to the city’s segregated Chinese American public school.31
The removals incensed Japanese diplomats, who didn’t want their ethnic kin mistreated. In response President Theodore Roosevelt struck an informal deal with Japan’s government. The so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 allowed Japanese students to attend San Francisco’s White schools, all the while ensuring that the US government would not directly ban Japanese immigration. And to appease White exclusionists whom he feared might “perform acts of lawless violence” otherwise,32 Roosevelt persuaded Tokyo to stop giving passports to Japanese workers intent on coming to America. The only Japanese applicants who could move to the US, under the agreement, were those with a parent, spouse, or child already on American soil.33
Many White laborers remained angry, even after the limitations took hold. Hearing concerns that Japanese immigrants were buying land to start their own farms, California lawmakers passed the Alien Land Law of 1913. The legislation forbade all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” including but not limited to Issei, from owning land in the state.34 Similar laws eventually passed in Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington.35
More actions against Japanese Americans followed. In 1921, fueled by false claims that Japan’s emperor had required Japanese wives in California to give birth at least once a year, California state controller John S. Chambers wrote a magazine article warning that “by 1949 they will outnumber the white people.”36 In 1922 the Supreme Court unanimously reiterated that Issei could not become American citizens.37 In 1924 the federal Immigration Act prevented any more Asians from coming at all. Three years after Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, a State Department report argued, “When war breaks out, the entire Japanese population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.”38
The Japanese people who already lived on the US mainland responded by forming ethnic enclaves. Issei expanded their farms, often with land bought years earlier using their Nisei children’s names. They built schools, churches, gardens, orchards, stores, and recreation halls. They avoided confronting or competing with White farmers, instead choosing the safety of friends and family.
Still, anti-Japanese statements bordered increasingly on irony. White lawmakers who had excluded the Japanese immigrants accused them of being cliquish. In 1940, Japanese Americans comprised only two percent of California’s population and less than one one-thousandth of the continental US population—but suspicions of mass takeovers festered all the same.39
And as more world events unfolded, more messengers joined in.
***
Americans had reason to feel nervous in wartime. On December 10, 1941—less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack—Japanese troops landed on the Pacific island of Guam.40 Between December 18 and December 24, Japanese submarines attacked eight American shipping vessels off the West Coast and sank two of them.41 Japanese soldiers captured Wake Island on December 23 and Hong Kong on December 25. American parents sent sons off to fight enemy soldiers. Wives and children wondered when reunions would come, if at all.
But in many cases those nerves devolved into blame toward an entire people. “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior,” Hearst Newspapers columnist Henry McLemore wrote in January 1942. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off…Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it.”42
Anti-Japanese cartoons attracted parents and youth alike. Children’s author and illustrator Dr. Seuss, whose caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini did not demonize Germans or Italians at large, used stereotypes to mock Japanese people as bucktoothed and pig-nosed.43 Years before releasing Horton Hears a Who!, a 1954 book seen by many as his postwar apology,44 Seuss made up a series of wartime drawings for New York’s PM newspaper: one depicting Japanese people in line to obtain explosives, another showing Japanese cats swarming an American bird.45 Other cartoonists, in publications and posters across the US, drew the Japanese diaspora as a bunch of fanged, squinty-eyed animals: monkeys, bats, snakes, and rats.46 Historian Roger Daniels later summarized the growing belief this way: “The evil deeds of Hitler’s Germany were the deeds of bad men; the evil deeds of Tojo and Hirohito’s Japan were the deeds of a bad race.”47
Newspaper headlines ranged from misleading to inaccurate: “JAP BOAT FLASHES MESSAGE ASHORE”; “JAPANESE HERE SENT VITAL DATA TO TOKYO”; “CAPS ON JAPANESE TOMATO PLANTS POINT TO AIR BASE.”48 On December 11, 1941, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reader could have easily seen a subheading on the paper’s front page—“Flaming Arrows Planted by 5th Columnists to Guide Foe Toward Seattle”—without reading the next page: “[Assistant to the governor Ross] Cunningham told the Associated Press that the fires had been set by white men who had been clearing land.”49
Articles about the FBI confiscating guns, ammunition, radios, and cameras from Issei often lacked crucial details. Issei families had used these items for recreation or farming, not arsenal-building. Most confiscated weapons had come from a licensed gun shop and a general store warehouse, not homes.50 To quote a Justice Department spokesperson at the time: “We have not found a single machine gun, nor have we found any gun in any circumstances indicating that it was to be used in a manner helpful to our enemies. We have not found a single camera which we have reason to believe was for use in espionage.”51
More Americans either chose to ignore certain facts or were never exposed to them at all. They took the confiscations as proof that Issei had sent images abroad, communicated with Japanese bases and battleships, and aspired to topple America’s tunnels, bridges, highways, and ports.
An extreme faction came to believe this: Even if these immigrants weren’t plotting anything bad in America yet, the chance that they might was bad enough.
***
Roosevelt told his aides what he really thought of Japanese people. He used the word “treacherous.”52 He spouted a theory that their “skull pattern, being less developed than that of Caucasians, might be responsible for their aggressive behavior.”53 Perhaps, he suggested in private, an old Chinese tale about them descending from baboons held merit.54
The president’s proclamation on January 14, 1942, required noncitizens from Italy, Germany, and Japan to register with the US Department of Justice, but a growing crowd wanted the White House to go further—especially on Japanese matters. Los Angeles-based congressman Leland Ford sent identical letters to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle on January 16. Ford demanded that “all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps…[I]f an American-born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and wishes to make his contribution to the safety and welfare of this country, right here is the opportunity to do so.”55
Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who oversaw the Army’s West Coast defense operations, had seesawed for weeks on the issue of removing the Japanese population, but nearing January’s end he sounded like a longtime believer. “The fact that nothing has happened so far [on the West Coast] is more or less ominous,” he said on January 24.56 In other words, in his view, the absence of sabotage made sabotage more likely.
However twisted DeWitt’s logic was, more American institutions bought it. The Los Angeles Times editorial board, whose December 10 headline had read “LET’S NOT GET RATTLED,” reversed course.57 A January 28 editorial stated that “the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots.”58 On February 2 the board said Nisei were just as dangerous as their Issei relatives: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched…So a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents…grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”59 By early February, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, California governor Culbert Olson, and state attorney general Earl Warren each favored removing Japanese Americans.
Attorney General Biddle did not like the trend he was seeing. Though he had already approved the formation of limited evacuation zones, he got the sense that personnel within the Department of War were looking to oust more Japanese people from their West Coast homes. In early February he handed war officials a press release to co-sign: “The Department of War and the Department of Justice are in agreement that the present military situation does not at this time require the removal of American citizens of Japanese race.”
The officials—Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Army Provost Marshal General Allen W. Gullion, and Major Karl Bendetsen—rejected Biddle’s document.60
The attorney general answered back with a refusal of his own. On February 9 he denied DeWitt’s request to establish larger evacuation zones in Washington and Oregon. In a letter later that day to Secretary of War Stimson, he wrote, “No reasons were given for this mass evacuation.…The Department of Justice is not equipped to carry out any mass evacuation.”61
Even Stimson, a former US attorney under two presidents, held legal reservations. He disclosed, in his diary, his fear that the mass removal of Japanese American citizens would “make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system.”62
Stimson and McCloy sought advice from their commander in chief. On February 11 they asked Roosevelt whether he would allow the Department of War to evacuate Japanese “citizens as well as aliens” not just from the existing evacuation zones but from “the entire strip DeWitt originally recommended, which involves a number of over 100,000 people.”63
Roosevelt’s answer was cryptic. According to Stimson, the president said to “go ahead and do anything you think necessary…[but] be as reasonable as you can.”64
The Pentagon leaders took the president’s response as a blessing. “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the president’s concerned,” McCloy told the newly promoted Colonel Bendetsen. “The president specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens.”65
The exclusion effort was taking shape. DeWitt submitted a formal recommendation of it on February 13, saying the “Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second- and third-generation Japanese…have become ‘Americanized,’ their racial stains are undiluted.”66 Influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that the Pacific Coast was “officially a combat zone.…Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”67 A February 16 column by conservative commentator Westbrook Pegler proclaimed, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”68
Biddle pleaded. In a February 17 memo to Roosevelt, he repeated what both the FBI and the presidentially commissioned Munson Report had found: “[T]here is no evidence of planned sabotage.”69 He accused “Armchair Strategists” like Lippmann and Pegler of “shouting fire! in a crowded theater; and if race riots occur, these writers will bear a heavy responsibility.”70
But neither the attorney general’s nor First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s private objections stopped the evacuation plan from becoming official. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the Department of War “to prescribe military areas…from which any or all persons may be excluded.”71
Japanese Americans were not mentioned in the order. Nor were any specific races, ethnicities, or nationalities. No person of Japanese ancestry in the US had been—or would be—charged, tried, or convicted of crimes against America. Yet there was no doubt: The order targeted them.
Incarcerees were issued General Infantry blankets upon arriving to Manzanar. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)
As Japanese Americans on the West Coast awaited further instruction, it soon became clear what would not happen under Executive Order 9066.
Immigrants from other Axis nations would, by and large, not have to move. True, neither Germany nor Italy had directly hit Pearl Harbor, but the decision to keep most German and Italian Americans in place was also about familiarity; San Francisco mayor Angelo J. Rossi’s father was from Italy; New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio, the San Francisco native whose record-setting 56-game hitting streak less than a year earlier had captivated the nation, was the son of Sicilians. At a congressional hearing to discuss mass migrations, former US attorney Chauncey Tramutolo said, “To evacuate the senior DiMaggios would…present, I am sure you will agree with me, a serious situation.”72 Indeed, military leaders ultimately agreed that they could tell the loyal Italians and Germans apart from the disloyal—without hauling or jailing them based on ethnicity alone. And most Italian and German immigrants who were arrested received hearings, trials, and chances to prove their innocence.
Most Japanese Hawaiians would not have to move either. This seemed odd to some, as Hawaii was the site of the Pearl Harbor disaster, sat closer to Japan than California did, and had a higher percentage of Japanese descendants than any of the 48 US states at the time.73 But Hawaii’s large Japanese population—about 160,000, nearly 40 percent of the territory’s total count—was precisely why its businesspeople did not want them all gone; the place needed their labor and spending money.74 While General John DeWitt pushed for mass removal of Japanese Americans from the mainland under Executive Order 9066, Hawaii military governor Delos Emmons resisted similar large-scale roundups in Hawaii, though about 1,500 Japanese Hawaiians would wind up in mainland camps before the war’s end.75
Meanwhile, enthusiasm remained high for removing Japanese populations from California, Oregon, and Washington. Two days after President Roosevelt signed his executive order, a San Francisco Chronicle editorialist wrote, “We have to be tough, even if civil rights do take a beating for a time.”76 A March 1942 poll showed that 93 percent of Americans supported moving Japanese noncitizens from the West Coast; 59 percent wanted American-born Japanese people moved as well.77
Some high-profile Nisei concurred. The Japanese American Citizens League, founded in 1929 to advocate for American citizens of Japanese descent, cooperated in hopes that doing so would show all Americans how pro-American they were. JACL leader Mike Masaoka told Congress in 1942, “With any policy of evacuation definitely arising from reasons of military necessity and national safety, we are in complete agreement.”78 The Doho, a Los Angeles-based Japanese newspaper, published an editorial stating that “this is no time to holler that our civil liberties and constitutional rights are being denied us.”79
Critics of the order made dire appeals. Many Issei warned their Nisei children that even if they complied and went wherever the soldiers with guns told them to, other Americans would still see them as less than. A letter to the president, signed by educational reformer John Dewey and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr among others, argued that removing Japanese people would resemble “the totalitarian theory of justice practiced by the Nazis in their treatment of the Jews.”80 Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. stressed that the financial impact on Japanese American communities would prove disastrous, to which Roosevelt replied, “I am not concerned about that.”81
With the president holding firm, the restrictions became reality. The president assigned DeWitt to rid the West Coast of anyone who was so much as one-sixteenth Japanese, regardless of citizenship.82 Less than a week later, the US Navy ordered about 500 Japanese American families on California’s Terminal Island to leave within 48 hours.83 A proclamation issued on March 2 split California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona into two military areas. An executive order signed on March 18 created the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency tasked with relocating Issei, Nisei, and their families to places inland.
The government’s initial goal was to have Japanese Americans leave “voluntarily.” Historians have since used quotation marks because, in the words of journalist John Hersey, “it was obvious to those who ‘voluntarily’ moved that they were being pushed out.”84 At any rate, 4,889 residents left the newly carved military jurisdictions, resettling for the most part in Colorado or Utah.85
But the “voluntary” exodus stopped there. Between Military Areas No. 1 and 2, there still lived more than 112,000 Japanese Americans, at least 70,000 of them American-born.86 Some had driven hundreds of miles to look for new homes, only to be turned away by armed White vigilantes and “NO JAPS WANTED” signs.87 Others opted not to try at all, in part because the continued freeze on Issei bank accounts left them with little money. Moving would have been expensive, especially to a different state. In what increasingly seemed like a lose-lose situation, they tried convincing themselves to stay where they were—with people they knew—for as long as they could.
Government officials answered back with tighter demands. Congress passed a law that criminalized violations of any military decree stemming from Executive Order 9066. Violators risked a $5,000 fine and one-year imprisonment.88 On March 24, 54 Japanese families from Bainbridge Island, Washington, received six days’ notice to report to a nearby fairgrounds and bring only what they could carry.89 On March 29 the military stopped allowing “voluntary” relocation. A curfew took effect for all enemy aliens and “persons of Japanese ancestry” who still lived within the military areas: 8 PM to 6 AM, with no movement allowed anytime “more than five miles from their place of residence.”90
The last day of March brought an even more sweeping move. Notices of exclusion orders began covering store windows, poles, fences, and bulletin boards all along the West Coast, with this heading: “INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY.”91 From the moment these were posted, heads of households had to register with local military offices. Families often had less than a week to surrender at a designated place.
Few Japanese Americans knew where the government would take them. None knew how long they would be gone. What they did know, by reading the signs, was that the forced removals applied to “aliens and non-aliens alike.” “The term ‘non-alien’ might have been used,” author David K. Fremon later wrote, “because the government was ashamed to admit that it was rounding up and detaining United States citizens.”92
Each person could bring one suitcase, sometimes two. They could keep whatever clothes, bedding, cups, silverware, and toiletries fit. Some had helpful non-Japanese neighbors who agreed to care for their homes, pets, cars, furniture, and heirlooms in their absence. But for many, surrendering to the US government meant leaving behind lifetimes of belongings.93
“For the first time in 81 years,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 21, 1942, “not a single Japanese is walking the streets of San Francisco.”94
***
A handful resisted. At 11 PM one night, Minoru Yasui walked outside his Oregon home, deliberately violating a curfew. Gordon Hirabayashi entered a Seattle FBI office and told agents he would not register for evacuation. Bay Area native Fred Korematsu tried escaping mass roundup by undergoing eye surgery to look less Japanese, only to be caught and convicted of violating military orders. Sacramento native Mitsuye Endo filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing her incarceration was unlawful. All four would take their cases to the US Supreme Court. Only Endo’s case would succeed, with a 9-0 ruling that ultimately let Japanese people walk freely again, but that wouldn’t happen until late 1944.
Relief, to many Japanese Americans on the West Coast, felt far away in Spring 1942. Without trial or proof of guilt, most were stuffed inside buses and trains, often with window shades down. Only when they neared their destination did the wheels slow and shades go up. From behind the window glass, they saw barbed wire, searchlights, watchtowers, and soldiers with machine guns.95 They arrived at what the government called an “assembly center,” a harmless-sounding term for yet another cramped space.
Most of the 15 or so military-run assembly centers stood on converted fairgrounds or racetracks—and it was obvious. Tarpaper barracks replaced Ferris wheels and roller coasters. Families slept in horse stalls that reeked of manure. Straw-filled sacks became beds. Floors were either asphalt or dirt. Thin walls destroyed any sense of privacy. Showers and toilets lacked partitions. Black dots gathered on the yellow flypaper that adorned dining halls. Food poisoning was common. One could only wonder where all the horses had gone.96
The assembly centers stayed filled for months, until the WRA finished building what it generously called “relocation centers.” These camps were more isolated and permanent, with 10 in all: Gila River and Poston in Arizona, Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, Topaz in Utah, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, and Jerome and Rohwer in the Arkansas marshlands. At each, the scenes of armed guards, watchtowers, thin walls, and tight quarters were similar.97
By the time the US government had hauled 112,000 Japanese Americans into the new camps, it was late October.98 The Battle of Midway, which eliminated any chance Japan had of invading the West Coast, had been over since the first week of June. “If military necessity was the only reason for evacuation, it could have stopped right there,” a writer said long after the war. “But sometimes people and governments continue mistakes rather than admit them.”99
***
Acknowledgment took years, and even then, it came with limits. The Supreme Court’s December 1944 ruling in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo declared that the WRA had “no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure,” but the justices stopped short of denouncing mass detentions without due process.100 The camps closed in 1946, after World War II had ended, but that didn’t change the fact that many Japanese Americans no longer had homes to return to. For the most part, whatever items the Issei and Nisei families could not fit in their suitcases in 1942 were long gone, as were businesses and jobs. The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 provided some help, but it was mostly limited to property loss; and due to strict documentation requirements, the $148 million worth of claims yielded many denials and only $37 million in compensation.101
The coming decades brought somewhat deeper amends. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 allowed Asian immigrants, including Issei, to become American citizens. In 1960 President Dwight Eisenhower gave Nisei civil service workers retirement and sick-leave credit for time lost during the war. A series of federal actions allowed Issei to redeem their once-frozen Japanese bank funds—and eventually convert their yen into dollars using a more generous prewar rate.102 And on February 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford issued a proclamation rescinding Executive Order 9066: “Learning from our mistakes is not pleasant, but as a great philosopher once admonished, we must do so if we want to avoid repeating them.”103
A nine-member congressional panel appointed by President Jimmy Carter advanced Ford’s message. From July to December 1981 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians heard testimony from more than 750 people, including former detainees, government officials, and historians.104 The result was a 467-page report that declared Executive Order 9066 “not justified by military necessity.”105 The commission agreed that the order had been a “grave injustice” caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”106
In 1983, a year after the report’s release, a federal judge reversed Fred Korematsu’s conviction. By January 1988 all charges against Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui, as they pertained to evading detention more than 40 years earlier, were dropped.107 In time all three received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.108
A formal White House apology finally came on August 10, 1988. President Ronald Reagan, himself a former governor of California, signed the Civil Liberties Act into law. The legislation—sponsored by California representative Norman Mineta (a Heart Mountain survivor) and Hawaii senator Spark Matsunaga—promised a presidential apology letter and tax-free $20,000 payment to any surviving Japanese American wrongly detained during World War II. “Yet no payment can make up for those lost years,” Reagan said upon signing the act. “So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong.”109
Still, however unprecedented they were, the act and Reagan’s admission were not fix-alls. The per-person reparations were far less than the $220,000 proposed by the National Council for Japanese American Redress years earlier.110 Tens of thousands of camp survivors died before they could ever receive a presidential apology or redress.111
“I remember my dad’s reaction,” said Don Wakamatsu, whose father was born in the Tule Lake camp and received a $20,000 check, “that it was too little too late.”112
But for Wakamatsu, a former Chicago White Sox catcher who in 2009 became Major League Baseball’s first Asian American manager, seeing his father open the check marked a beginning.113 He decided then, while he still could, to ask him about the camp experience, all that had preceded it, and the lessons to carry forward: “Any time you can talk about it, it immortalizes it a bit more.”114
HARRISON GOLDEN is a retired Little League first baseman who found his second act in journalism. He has served as a news reporter, photographer, anchor, and producer. He has contributed work to CNN.com, USA Today, Interview, and NBC News. He is a frequent writer and fact-checker for the SABR Games Project. He currently lives in North Carolina.
NOTES
1 The numbers of Americans dead and wounded, as well as the numbers of American ships and aircraft damaged or destroyed, come from “Overview of the Pearl Harbor Attack,” Naval History and Heritage Command, accessed June 2025, https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/p/the-pearl-harbor-attack-7-december-1941.html.
2 “USS Oklahoma—Pearl Harbor National Memorial,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://home.nps.gov/perl/learn/historyculture/uss-oklahoma.htm.
3 Lila Perl, Behind Barbed Wire: The Story of Japanese American Internment During World War II (New York: Benchmark Books, 2003), 7.
4 The only dissenting vote came from Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist representative from Montana. Historian James L. Dickerson notes that Rankin cast her vote “with tears streaming down her cheeks.” James L. Dickerson, Inside America’s Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 61-62.
5 A copy of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is available at “Alien and Sedition Acts (1798),” National Archives, accessed July 2025, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts.
6 The text of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Proclamation 2525 is available here: “Proclamation 2525—Alien Enemies, Japanese,” American Presidency Project, accessed June 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2525-alien-enemies-japanese.
7 Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans and Internment (Paramus, New Jersey: Globe Fearon, 1994), 30; Louis Fiset, “President Franklin Roosevelt Signs Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942,” History Link, April 13, 2016, https://www.historylink.org/file/310.
8 Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 50.
9 John C. Davenport, The Internment of Japanese Americans During World War II: Detention of American Citizens (New York: Chelsea House, 2010), 2.
10 Charlotte Taylor and Deborah Kent, The Internment of Japanese Americans (New York: Enslow, 2016), 40.
11 Taylor and Kent, 40.
12 David K. Fremon, Japanese American Internment in American History (Springfield, New Jersey: Enslow, 1996), 26.
13 Fremon, 22; Taylor and Kent, 32-33.
14 Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and David Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Bantam Books, 7th printing, 1974), 5-6.
15 Perl, 42.
16 Those who had been arrested and were in custody by December 10 came from the following backgrounds: 857 were German, 147 were Italian, 924 were Japanese residents of the continental US, 367 were Japanese residents of Hawaii. (See Perl, 42.)
17 The 1940 census counted just under 127,000 Japanese residents of the continental US. Another 158,000 or so lived in Hawaii, which was not yet a state but a US territory. See Perl, 42-43; Alice Yang Murray ed., What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 8.
18 Eleanor Roosevelt’s column was distributed by United Feature Syndicate. It appeared on newspaper pages across the US, including the Cincinnati Post, December 16, 1941: 6.
19 “President Warns Against Persecution of Aliens,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1942: 18.
20 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 42-43.
21 A Pocket Guide to China (Washington, DC: War and Navy Departments, 1942), 66-67.
22 “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, December 22, 1941, 33.
23 “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1941, 81.
24 The 1900 US Census counted 24,326 Japanese people, with most on the nation’s West Coast. This count predates the admission of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona into the continental United States.
25 Richard Koichi Tanaka, America on Trial! Beginning of Japanese in America, Evacuation and Its Effects on Future Generations of Japanese Americans (New York: Carlton Press, 1987), 22-24.
26 David A. Neiwert, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005), 18.
27 “Naturalization Act of 1790,” 1 Stat. 103 (enacted March 26, 1790), accessed June 2025, available at https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1790naturalizationact.pdf.
28 Transcript of “Naturalization Act of 1870,” ImmigrationHistory.org, accessed June 2025, https://immigrationhistory.org/item/naturalization-act-of-1870/.
29 Text from the amendment is available here: “Constitution of the United States: Fourteenth Amendment,” Constitution Annotated, accessed June 2025, https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/.
30 “The Yellow Peril: How the Japanese Crowd Out the White Race,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 1905: 6.
31 Peter H. Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10-11.
32 Theodore Roosevelt, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 3, 1906, transcript provided by University of California – Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, accessed June 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/sixth-annual-message-4.
33 Shiho Imai, “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed June 2025, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Gentlemen%27s%20Agreement/.
34 The text from California’s 1913 law is available here: “Webb-Haney Alien Land Law,” In Time and Place, accessed June 2025, https://www.intimeandplace.org/Japanese%20Internment/reading/constitution/alienlandlaw.html.
35 The following is a list of western US states that passed pre-World War II laws or amendments banning non-citizen land ownership: Arizona (1921), New Mexico (1921), Washington (1921), Idaho (1923), Montana (1923). Oregon, whose legislators had voted in 1859 to prevent Chinese immigrants from owning land, passed a separate law in 1923 that mirrored California’s 1913 act.
36 John S. Chambers, “The Japanese Invasion,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1921: 26.
37 Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-born businessman who had been living in the United States for two decades, sought to challenge laws that barred Japanese immigrants from becoming US citizens. His case, which became known as Ozawa v. United States, reached the US Supreme Court in 1922. In a unanimous ruling, the court upheld the ban.
38 Irons, 19.
39 The 1940 US Census counted 131,669,275 people in the continental US. Estimates from that same year – and within the same boundaries – placed the number of Japanese Americans at 127,000. (See “Current Population Reports: Population Estimates,” Bureau of the Census, June 30, 1950, available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1950/demographics/P25-42.pdf. See also “Japanese American Relocation,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed June 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/japanese-american-relocation.)
40 “Guam in World War II,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/guamwwii.htm.
41 Glenn Barnett, “War on the West Coast,” WWII History, December 2020/January 2021, 56.
42 Henry McLemore, “Why Treat the Japs Well Here?” San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 1942: 9.
43 Richard H. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: New Press, 1999), 16, 140-44, 150, 153-54.
44 Seuss dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to a friend he had met during a postwar visit to Kyoto, Japan. One of the most quoted lines from the book is “a person’s a person no matter how small.” See Minear, 263; Donald E. Pease, Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93. In a 2019 interview, Minear said of the book, “[Seuss] doesn’t come out and explicitly say he’s recanting his earlier views, but it’s a very different take.” Fiona Macdonald, “The Surprisingly Radical Politics of Dr. Seuss,” BBC News online, March 2, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190301-the-surprisingly-radical-politics-of-dr-seuss.
45 Minear, 65, 145.
46 Kieran Robertson, “When Art Meets Army: The Dangerous Propaganda of World War II,” OhioHistory.org, June 8, 2017, https://www.ohiohistory.org/when-art-meets-army-the-dangerous-propaganda-of-world-war-ii/; Lucy Davidson, “5 Examples of Anti-Japanese Propaganda During World War Two,” History Hit, November 26, 2021, https://www.historyhit.com/examples-of-anti-japanese-propaganda-during-world-war-two/; “‘Jap Trap,’ World War II Propaganda Poster,” History Matters, accessed June 2025, https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/8332/.
47 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 33.
48 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 33.
49 R. B. Bermann, “Fires Set to Aid Enemy Planes: Flaming Arrows Planted by 5th Columnists to Guide Foe Toward Seattle,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 11, 1941: 1-2.
50 John Hersey, “A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions,” in John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 22.
51 Hersey, 22.
52 Dickerson, 62-63.
53 Geoffrey S. Smith, “Racial Nativism and Origins of Japanese American Relocation,” in Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano eds., Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 80.
54 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 120.
55 Hersey, 34.
56 Stetson Conn, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast,” in Kent Roberts Greenfield ed., Command Decisions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959), 94.
57 “Let’s Not Get Rattled,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1941: 1.
58 “Facing the Japanese Issue Here,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1942: 4.
59 W. H. Anderson, “The Question of Japanese-Americans,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1942: II-4.
60 Frank F. Chuman, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans (Del Mar, California: Publisher’s Inc., 1976), 157.
61 Hersey, 41.
62 Robinson, 105.
63 Conn, 104.
64 Daniel S. Davis, Behind Barbed Wire: The Imprisonment of Japanese Americans During World War II (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), 36-37.
65 Conn, 104. See also Chuman, 159.
66 The recommendation was later published as John L. DeWitt, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 34.
67 Walter Lippmann, “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1942: II-4.
68 Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Atlanta Constitution, February 16, 1942: 12.
69 Hersey, 44-46.
70 Irons, 61.
71 The text from Executive Order 9066 is available here: “Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese American Incarceration (1942),” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066.
72 National Defense Migration: Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (Part 29: San Francisco Hearings) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 11128.
73 Through the end of World War II and for more than a decade thereafter, Hawaii remained a US territory – not a state. It did not become a state until August 21, 1959, about 7½ months after Alaska’s admission.
74 According to the 1940 US Census, 423,330 people lived in Hawaii that year. Population: First Series, Number of Inhabitants – Hawaii (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 1. (See also “Japanese Americans and the Wartime Experience in Hawaii,” National World War II Museum, accessed June 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-americans-wartime-experience-hawaii.)
75 Perl, 41.
76 “Facts Force America to Stop Pussyfooting,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 1942: 12.
77 The poll was conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion. “Americans and the Holocaust,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed June 2025, https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/main/japanese-american-internment.
78 National Defense Migration…San Francisco Hearings, 11137.
79 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 79.
80 Robinson, 160.
81 Robinson, 142.
82 Perl, 48-50.
83 Davenport, 36.
84 Hersey, 54-55.
85 Hersey, 54-55.
86 Fremon, 8.
87 Michael Burgan, The Japanese American Internment: Civil Liberties Denied (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Compass Point Books, 2007), 36.
88 The penalties were encoded in what became known as Public Law 503. A copy of the act is available on InternmentArchives.com, accessed June 2025, https://www.internmentarchives.com/showdoc.php?docid=00104&search_id=9609.
89 Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1975), 54; Jennifer Ott, “Bainbridge Island’s Japanese American Residents, First to Be Incarcerated Under Executive Order 9066, Are Removed from Their Homes on March 30, 1942,” History Link, https://www.historylink.org/File/8277, September 12, 2007.
90 Given that the curfew applied to all enemy aliens within Military Area No. 1, Italian- and German-born noncitizens were technically subject to the restriction. However, as historian Roger Daniels later noted, the curfew was “not generally enforced or susceptible of enforcement against White people.” (See Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 85.)
91 Perl, 46.
92 Fremon, 39.
93 Fremon, 43.
94 A copy of the San Francisco Chronicle article, “S.F. Clear of All but 6 Sick Japs,” is available on the Museum of the City of San Francisco website, accessed June 2025, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist8/evac19.html.
95 For more on the trips to the Japanese American assembly centers, see Hersey, 6-7; Taylor and Kent, 10-11; Wakatsuki Houston and Houston, 14.
96 More descriptions of the assembly centers are available in Dickerson, 78; Fremon, 48-49; Perl, 52; Bryan J. Grapes (Ed.), Japanese American Internment Camps (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001), 21-22.
97 More descriptions of the trips to – and arrivals at – the WRA camps are available on Dickerson, 90; Irons, 73-74; Perl, 62; Taylor and Kent, 59.
98 The WRA’s “daily Relocation Center population reports” counted 111,999 arrivals between the opening of the camps and closure of assembly centers on October 30, 1942. (See Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943], 380.)
99 Fremon, 38.
100 Excerpts from the Supreme Court’s decision are available at “Ex parte Endo, 323 US 283 (1944),” Justia, accessed June 2025, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/283/.
101 “Civil Liberties Act,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://www.nps.gov/miin/learn/historyculture/civil-liberties-act.htm.
102 The redemption of deposits from US branches of Japanese banks came piecemeal. In 1957 the Office of Alien Property said accountholders would be able to convert their assets, but only using a postwar rate of “approximately 360 yen to the dollar, as opposed to the prewar rate (which [had been] in effect when the assets were seized) of approximately 4 yen to the dollar,” as noted in Mitchell T. Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana, IL:University of Illinois Press, 1999), 60-61. In early 1967 the federal government agreed to offer the prewar rate to those who had already submitted certificates for redemption. A US Supreme Court decision that April extended access to the prewar rate, to include Japanese accountholders who had not yet submitted. (See also “Minorities: A Wrong Partially Righted,” Time, April 21, 1967: 25.)
103 A copy of President Ford’s proclamation, entitled “An American Promise,” is available at Brooke Clement and Dr. Richard Weld, “Termination of Executive Order 9066,” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://ford.blogs.archives.gov/2024/05/02/termination-of-executive-order-9066/.
104 Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 1.
105 Personal Justice Denied, 18.
106 Personal Justice Denied, 18.
107 For Minoru Yasui, the dropping of charges came posthumously. Yasui died two years earlier, in 1986.
108 Korematsu received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Hirabayashi, who died in 2012, posthumously received the medal in 2012. Yasui received a posthumous medal in 2015. Mitsuye Endo died in 2006 and in 2024 received a posthumous Presidential Citizens Medal, the United States’ second-highest civilian award.
109 A transcript of Reagan’s remarks from August 10, 1988, is available at “Remarks on Signing the Bill Providing Restitution for the Wartime Internment of Japanese-American Civilians,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, accessed June 2025, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-signing-bill-providing-restitution-wartime-internment-japanese-american.
110 Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream, 125.
111 The US Office of Redress Administration distributed $20,000 payments to affected Japanese Americans who were still alive as of August 10, 1988. About 82,000 checks went out. (See “World War II Japanese American Incarceration: Researching an Individual or Family,” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://www.archives.gov/research/aapi/ww2/genealogy).
112 Hugo Kugiya, “Seattle Manager Hopes What He Does Highlights Who He Is,” New York Times, December 26, 2008: B12.
113 Don Wakamatsu played in 18 major-league games, all for the 1991 Chicago White Sox. He managed the Seattle Mariners from 2009 to 2010, and the Texas Rangers in 2018.
114 Vahe Gregorian, “History Hits Home for Wakamatsu,” Kansas City Star, July 5, 2015: B1.