Japanese American Internment Camps

After the Japanese bombing on Pearl Harbor, the government feared that the Japanese would further attack the United States, and citizens feared that the Japanese Americans were committing sabotage in the mainland of Untied States. In response, the War Department of Untied States in 1942 demanded Japanese Americans to be evacuated from Hawaii. However, the military governor of Hawaii, General Delos Emmons, disobeyed War Department’s order because the island’s economy depended heavily on Japanese Americans who made up 38% of the island’s population. Unfortunately, he was forced to put one percent of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans in internment camps. As fear began to spread to the West Coast on the sizable group of Japanese Americans living there, President Roosevelt received advice from the military and took action for national security. He ordered to remove anyone of Japanese ancestry from the states along or near the West Coast such as California and Oregon. During the process, the government sent about 11,000 Japanese Americans to remote location center.

The policy against Japanese Americans raised controversies in the United States. Firstly, the internment camps consisted of about two-thirds of Nisei, or Japanese people born in the Untied States, and some even joined the armed forces. Secondly, Japanese Americans were not charged against any unpatriotic acts nor was any evidence of such acts discovered. However, Roosevelt justified his actions as a necessity to protect the national security. Unsatisfied, the Japanese Americans suggested injustice to the Congress and thecourts in the government’s actions towards the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war. In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that the evacuation of Japanese Americans was based on “military necessity.” Years later, the Japanese American Citizens League demanded government compensation to those who went to the camps and lost their property. The Congress in 1965 only passed a spending of $38 million to compensate but it was only less than a tenth of the group’s losses. The JACL pushed again for payment of reparations to each individual who was once in the camp. It was not only a decade later that President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that promised $20,000 to every Japanese Americans living who were sent to internment camps. Finally, President George Bush in 1990 admitted the mistakes that the government did to the Japanese Americans during World War II.

By Alvin