Japanese Internment

Japanese internments camps in the US during WW2

Japanese internment refers to a development during the Second World War when the government of the United States interred between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States in internment camps. These people were generally interned for three and a half years or so, from February 1942 onwards until the end of the war with the Empire of Japan in the autumn of 1945. The purpose of the internment was to prevent these Japanese-Americans from emerging as a potential fifth-column that would undermine the United States from within in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the outbreak of war between the United States and the Empire of Japan. The internment severely dented Japanese migration into the United States for many years after the Second World War, although surprisingly few of those who were so interned actually chose to leave America after the war.

Japanese internment chronology of events

Japanese migration to the United States began around the 1860s as Japan opened itself to the world after two centuries and more of isolation. With this, thousands of Japanese people set sail across the Pacific Ocean in the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Many of these arrived to California as that state successively experienced a gold rush, an oil boom and the advent of the film industry between the 1850s and the 1920s. Others settled in large numbers in the Kingdom of Hawaii which was annexed as a US overseas territory at the end of the 1890s. By the 1920s tens of thousands of Japanese had entered the United States, though the growth of the Japanese-American community was curbed from 1924 onwards when the Immigration Act of that year effectively prohibited Japanese migration. What this meant was that by the early 1940s the 100,000+ Japanese-American community largely consisted of people who had either been born in the United States or had been living there for many years, at least prior to 1924.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

Despite the loyalty which long-term residence in America might have engendered in these Japanese people towards the United States, the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the view in December 1941 that they could not risk allowing these people to enjoy full liberty following the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on the 7th of December 1941. In February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which began the process of creating military zones which the Japanese-American community were to be relocated into for the duration of the conflict. Over the next three and more years the vast majority of the country’s 125,000 or so Japanese-Americans were forcibly moved into 75 internment camps, nearly all of which were located on the West Coast of America or further inland in more thinly populated states like Montana, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

Life and conditions in the internment camps were certainly nowhere as bad as some war-time camps in Europe or indeed the camps run by the Empire of Japan in the Far East. For instance, there were educational facilities provided for children and efforts to provide adequate diets, but they were not pleasant at the same time. They were often extremely over-crowded and washing and plumbing facilities were mediocre or even non-existent in some instances. Disease outbreaks were common and people’s health deteriorated over time in the camps.

Eventually the camps were emptied in the course of 1945 in part owing to appeals to the US Supreme Court on the legality of the internment program and in part because the wars in Europe and the Pacific were coming to an end and the danger which any potential Japanese fifth column in America could pose had greatly diminished. The last of the camps were closed in the spring of 1946. The US government, it must be said, did immediately move to provide compensation to those who had been interned once the war emergency had passed and the Japanese-American Claims Act entered law in 1948. Yet it was not until 1988 when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of that year into law that an official apology was offered to those who had suffered from internment.

Extent of migration associated with Japanese internment

The immediate migration which was involved in Japanese internment involved the movement of virtually the entirety of the Japanese-American community of 125,000 people, most whom lived in Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington State, to internment camps which were spread across the American West as far afield as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California north through other states like Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. From 1945 onwards, as these people were released, the migration was often directly back to where they had come from.

Demographic impact of Japanese internment

The long-term demographic impact was more subtle. It perhaps stymied Japanese migration into the United States for some time to come after the Second World War, though eventually it recovered and by the 1960s and 1970s there were tens of thousands of Japanese arriving to America. Furthermore, very few of the 120,000 or so people who were interned during the war felt the need to leave America after the conflict, despite their poor treatment between 1942 and 1945. Consequently, there are at least three-quarters of a million people of Japanese ancestry in the United States today, though this rate of increase is far below the general growth of the wider Asian-American community in America over the last several decades.

See also

• United States
• Second World War
• United States Federal Census: 1940

Explore more about Japanese Internment

• Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II 1942-1946 record collection on MyHeritage
• 1940 United States Federal Census record collection on MyHeritage
• Japanese American Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinar

References

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