Somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about 80,000
Nisei (second generation) and
Sansei (third generation) were U.S. citizens. The rest were
Issei (first generation) who were subject to internment under the
Alien Enemies Act; many of these "resident aliens" had been inhabitants of the United States for decades, but had been deprived by law of being able to become naturalized citizens. Also part of the West Coast removal were
101 orphaned children of Japanese descent taken from orphanages and foster homes within the exclusion zone. Detainees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers", where most awaited transfer to more permanent relocation centers being constructed by the newly formed
War Relocation Authority (WRA). Some of those who reported to the civilian assembly centers were not sent to relocation centers, but were released under the condition that they remain outside the prohibited zone until the military orders were modified or lifted. Almost 120,000 Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were formally compensated. The Native American councils disputed the amounts negotiated in absentia by US government authorities. They later sued to gain relief and additional compensation for some items of dispute. Under the National Student Council Relocation Program (supported primarily by the
American Friends Service Committee), students of college age were permitted to leave the camps to attend institutions willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. Although the program initially granted leave permits to a very small number of students, this eventually included 2,263 students by December 31, 1943.
Conditions in the camps In 1943, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes wrote "the situation in at least some of the Japanese internment camps is bad and is becoming worse rapidly." The quality of life in the camps was heavily influenced by which government entity was responsible for them. INS Camps were regulated by international treaty. The legal difference between "interned" and relocated had significant effects on those who were imprisoned. According to a 1943
War Relocation Authority report, inmates were housed in "
tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind". The spartan facilities met international laws, but left much to be desired. Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. Throughout many camps, twenty-five people were forced to live in space built to contain four, leaving no room for privacy. There are many testimonies that meal times, in particular, caused families to separate. Thousands of internees were even placed in horse stables which reeked of horse manure, with unclean surrounding and zero privacy among the people crowded into swiftly altered tiny spaces.. Many of those incarcerated were children, and some historical sources describe long-term psychological effects, including fear, shame, and trauma. The
Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations. War Relocation Center Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers. Inmates were typically allowed to stay with their families. There are documented instances of guards shooting inmates who reportedly attempted to walk outside the fences. One such shooting, that of James Wakasa at Topaz, led to a re-evaluation of the security measures in the camps. Some camp administrations eventually allowed relatively free movement outside the marked boundaries of the camps. Nearly a quarter of the inmates left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone. Eventually, some were authorized to return to their hometowns in the exclusion zone under supervision of a sponsoring American family or agency whose loyalty had been assured. The phrase "
shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") was commonly used to summarize the incarcerated families' resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions. This was noticed by their children, as mentioned in the well-known memoir
Farewell to Manzanar by
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and
James D. Houston. Further, it is noted that parents may have internalized these emotions to withhold their disappointment and anguish from affecting their children. Nevertheless, some reports indicate that children still were cognizant of this emotional repression.
Medical care Before the war, 87 physicians and surgeons, 137 nurses, 105 dentists, 132 pharmacists, 35 optometrists, and 92 lab technicians provided healthcare to the Japanese American population, with most practicing in urban centers like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. As the eviction from the West Coast was carried out, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration worked with the
United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and many of these professionals to establish infirmaries within the temporary assembly centers. An Issei doctor was appointed to manage each facility, and additional healthcare staff worked under his supervision, although the USPHS recommendation of one physician for every 1,000 inmates and one nurse to 200 inmates was not met. Overcrowded and unsanitary conditions forced assembly center infirmaries to prioritize inoculations over general care, obstetrics, and surgeries; at Manzanar, for example, hospital staff performed over 40,000 immunizations against typhoid and smallpox. Food poisoning was common and also demanded significant attention. Those who were detained in Topaz, Minidoka, and Jerome experienced outbreaks of
dysentery. The war had caused a shortage of healthcare professionals across the country, and the camps often lost potential recruits to outside hospitals that offered better pay and living conditions. When the WRA began to allow some Japanese Americans to leave camp, many
Nikkei medical professionals resettled outside the camp. Those who remained had little authority in the administration of the hospitals. Combined with the inequitable payment of salaries between white and Japanese American employees, conflicts arose at several hospitals, and there were two Japanese American walk-outs at Heart Mountain in 1943. Most were school-age children, so educational facilities were set up in the camps. The government had not adequately planned for the camps, and no real budget or plan was set aside for the new camp educational facilities. Camp schoolhouses were crowded and had insufficient materials, books, notebooks, and desks for students. Books were only issued a month after the opening. In the Southwest, the schoolhouses were extremely hot in summertime. The student to teacher ratio in the camps was 48:1 in elementary schools and 35:1 for secondary schools, compared to the national average of 28:1. There was a general teacher shortage in the US at the time, and the teachers were required to live in the camps themselves. The camp's jazz band, The Starlight Serenaders, played music for over three hundred students spanning from grammar school graduates to those obtaining university degrees.
Ruth Watanabe, a student in musicology at USC before the evacuation, organized much of Santa Anita’s music education programming, including coordinating a “record-loan” system with friends outside the camp to provide students with a variety of European classical musicians. During the incarceration at permanent relocation camps, often times those with experience in classical Japanese song and dance were employed directly by the WRA. Bando Misa, an inmate at Tule Lake and an instructor of Japanese classical dance, earned a salary of nineteen dollars a month through the camp’s Recreation Department. Class sizes varied across camps; generally, enrollment was in the double digits but could reach as many as 140 students in one class. The ages of students extended beyond the typical classroom demographics of young Nisei and Sansei; the inclusion of Issei adults and seniors was not unheard of. In January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued what came to be known as the "Green Light Letter" to MLB Commissioner
Kenesaw Mountain Landis, which urged him to continue playing
Major League Baseball games despite the ongoing war. In it Roosevelt said that "baseball provides a recreation", and this was true for Japanese American incarcerees as well. Over 100 baseball teams were formed in the Manzanar camp so that Japanese Americans could have some recreation, and some of the team names were carry-overs from teams formed before the incarceration. Both men and women participated in the sports. In some cases, the Japanese American baseball teams from the camps traveled to outside communities to play other teams. Incarcerees from Idaho competed in the state tournament in 1943, and there were games between the prison guards and the Japanese American teams.
Branch Rickey, who would be responsible for bringing
Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball in 1947, sent a letter to all of the WRA camps expressing interest in
scouting some of the Nisei players. In the fall of 1943, three players tried out for the
Brooklyn Dodgers in front of MLB scout
George Sisler, but none of them made the team. The agricultural program was a way for inmates to be employed while at the center, as well as a way for some to learn farming skills. A 4-H program was established to pave a way for children to help the agricultural process at the center. Most Nisei college students followed their families into camp, but a small number arranged for transfers to schools outside the exclusion zone. Their initial efforts expanded as sympathetic college administrators and the
American Friends Service Committee began to coordinate a larger student relocation program. The Friends petitioned WRA Director
Milton Eisenhower to place college students in Eastern and Midwestern academic institutions. The National Japanese American Student Relocation Council was formed on May 29, 1942, and the AFSC administered the program. 39 percent of the Nisei students were women. At
Park College in Missouri, Dr. William Lindsay Young attempted to get Nisei students enrolled despite backlash from the greater Parkville city. At
Oberlin College, about 40 evacuated Nisei students were enrolled. One of them, Kenji Okuda, was elected as student council president. Three Nisei students were enrolled at
Mount Holyoke College during World War 2. In total, over 500 institutions east of the exclusion zone opened their doors to more than 3,000 college-age youth who had been placed behind barbed wire, many of whom were enrolled in West Coast schools prior to their removal. These included a variety of schools, from small liberal arts colleges to large public universities. It issued posthumous degrees to the students whose educations were cut short or illegitimated, having already issued degrees to those surviving. In early 1943, War Relocation Authority officials, working with the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence, circulated a questionnaire in an attempt to determine the loyalty of incarcerated Nisei men they hoped to recruit into military service. The "Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry" was initially given only to Nisei who were eligible for service (or would have been, but for the 4-C classification imposed on them at the start of the war). Authorities soon revised the questionnaire and required all adults in camp to complete the form. Most of the 28 questions were designed to assess the "Americanness" of the respondent — had they been educated in Japan or the U.S.? were they Buddhist or Christian? did they practice
judo or play on a baseball team? — gave negative or qualified replies out of confusion, fear or anger at the wording and implications of the questionnaire. In regard to Question 27, many worried that expressing a willingness to serve would be equated with volunteering for combat, while others felt insulted at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them and their families. An affirmative answer to Question 28 brought up other issues. Some believed that renouncing their loyalty to Japan would suggest that they had at some point been loyal to Japan and disloyal to the United States. Many believed they were to be deported to Japan no matter how they answered, they feared an explicit disavowal of the Emperor would become known and make such resettlement extremely difficult. On July 15, 1943, Tule Lake, the site with the highest number of "no" responses to the questionnaire, was designated to house inmates whose answers suggested they were "disloyal". A total of 5,589 detainees opted to do so; 5,461 of these were sent to Tule Lake. Of those who renounced US citizenship, 1,327 were repatriated to Japan. Many historians have dismissed the latter argument, for its failure to consider that the small number of individuals in question had been mistreated and persecuted by their own government at the time of the "renunciation": [T]he renunciations had little to do with "loyalty" or "disloyalty" to the United States, but were instead the result of a series of complex conditions and factors that were beyond the control of those involved. Prior to discarding citizenship, most or all of the renunciants had experienced the following misfortunes: forced removal from homes; loss of jobs; government and public assumption of disloyalty to the land of their birth based on race alone; and incarceration in a "segregation center" for "disloyal" ISSEI or NISEI... Civil rights attorney
Wayne M. Collins successfully challenged most of these renunciations as invalid, owing to the conditions of duress and intimidation under which the government obtained them. Many of the deportees were
Issei (first generation) or Kibei, who often had difficulty with English and often did not understand the questions they were asked. Even among those Issei who had a clear understanding, Question 28 posed an awkward dilemma: Japanese immigrants were denied U.S. citizenship at the time, so when asked to renounce their Japanese citizenship, answering "Yes" would have made them
stateless persons. When the government began seeking army volunteers from among the camps, only 6% of military-aged male inmates volunteered to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Most of those who refused tempered that refusal with statements of willingness to fight if they were restored their rights as American citizens. Eventually 33,000 Japanese American men and many Japanese American women served in the U.S. military during World War II, of which 20,000 served in the U.S. Army. /
442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was composed primarily of
Japanese Americans, served with uncommon distinction in the
European Theatre of World War II. Many of the soldiers from the continental U.S. serving in the units had families who were held in
concentration camps in the United States while they fought abroad. The
100th Infantry Battalion, which was formed in June 1942 with 1,432 men of Japanese descent from the
Hawaii National Guard, was sent to Camps McCoy and Shelby for advanced training. Because of the 100th's superior training record, the War Department authorized the formation of the
442nd Regimental Combat Team. When the call was made, 10,000 young men from Hawaii volunteered with eventually 2,686 being chosen along with 1,500 from the continental U.S. The 100th Infantry Battalion landed in Salerno, Italy in September 1943 and became known as the Purple Heart Battalion. This legendary outfit was joined by the 442nd RCT in June 1944, and this combined unit became the most highly decorated U.S. military unit of its size and duration in
U.S. military history. The 442nd's
Nisei segregated field artillery battalion, then on detached service within the U.S. Army in Bavaria,
liberated at least one of the satellite labor camps of the Nazis' original
Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, and only days later, on May 2, halted
a death march in southern Bavaria.
Proving commitment to the United States Many Nisei worked to prove themselves as loyal American citizens. Of the 20,000 Japanese Americans who served in the Army during
World War II, and they were "proving with their blood, their limbs, and their bodies that they were truly American". Some one hundred Nisei women volunteered for the WAC (
Women's Army Corps), where, after undergoing rigorous basic training, they had assignments as typists, clerks, and drivers. Satoshi Ito, an incarceration camp inmate, reinforces the idea of the immigrants' children striving to demonstrate their patriotism to the United States. He notes that his mother would tell him, you're here in the United States, you need to do well in school, you need to prepare yourself to get a good job when you get out into the larger society. He said she would tell him, don't be a dumb farmer like me, like us to encourage Ito to successfully assimilate into American society. As a result, he worked exceptionally hard to excel in school and later became a professor at the
College of William & Mary. His story, along with the countless Japanese Americans willing to risk their lives in war, demonstrate the lengths many in their community went to prove their American patriotism.
Other concentration camps As early as September 1931, after the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria, US officials began to compile lists of individuals, lists which were particularly focused on the Issei. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt authorized his attorney general to put into motion a plan for the arrest of thousands of individuals whose names were on the potential enemy alien lists. Most of these individuals were Japanese American community leaders. Armed with a blanket arrest warrant, the FBI seized these men on the eve of December 8, 1941. These men were held in municipal jails and prisons until they were moved to Department of Justice detention camps, these camps were separate from the camps which were operated by the Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps were operated under far more stringent conditions and they were also patrolled by heightened criminal-style guards, despite the absence of criminal proceedings. and Toru Matsumoto.
Crystal City, Texas, was one such camp where Japanese Americans,
German Americans, and
Italian Americans were interned along with a large number of
Axis-descended nationals who were seized from several Latin-American countries by the U.S.
Hawaii Although
Japanese Americans in Hawaii comprised more than one-third of Hawaii's entire population, businessmen prevented their incarceration or deportation to the concentration camps which were located on the mainland because they recognized their contributions to Hawaii's economy. In the hysteria of the time, some mainland Congressmen (Hawaii was only an
incorporated U.S. territory at the time, and despite being fully part of the U.S., did not have a voting representative or senator in Congress) promoted that all
Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants should be removed from Hawaii but were unsuccessful. An estimated 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese nationals and American-born Japanese from Hawaii were interned or incarcerated, either in five camps on the islands or in one of the mainland concentration camps, but this represented well-under two percent of the total Japanese American residents in the islands. "No serious explanations were offered as to why ... the internment of individuals of Japanese descent was necessary on the mainland, but not in Hawaii, where the large Japanese-Hawaiian population went largely unmolested." The vast majority of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents in Hawaii were not incarcerated because the government had already declared
martial law in Hawaii, a legal measure which allowed it to significantly reduce the supposed risks of espionage and sabotage by residents of Hawaii who had Japanese ancestry. Also, Japanese Americans comprised over 35% of the territory's entire population: they numbered 157,905 out of a total population of 423,330 at the time of the 1940 census, making them the largest ethnic group at that time; detaining so many people would have been enormously challenging in terms of logistics. Additionally, the whole of Hawaiian society was dependent on their productivity. According to intelligence reports which were published at the time, "the Japanese, through a concentration of effort in select industries, had achieved a virtual stranglehold on several key sectors of the economy in Hawaii," and they "had access to virtually all jobs in the economy, including high-status, high-paying jobs (e.g., professional and managerial jobs)". To imprison such a large percentage of the islands' work force would have crippled the Hawaiian economy. Thus, the unfounded fear of Japanese Americans turning against the United States was overcome by the reality-based fear of massive economic loss. Despite the financial and logistical obstacles, President Roosevelt persisted for quite some time in urging incarceration of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. As late as February 26, 1942, he informed Secretary of the Navy Knox that he had "long felt that most of the Japanese should be removed from Oahu to one of the other Islands." While Roosevelt conceded that such an undertaking involved "much planning, much temporary construction, and careful supervision of them when they get to the new location," he did not "worry about the constitutional question—first, because of my recent order and, second, because Hawaii is under martial law." He called for Knox to work with Stimson and "go ahead and do it as a military project." Eventually, he too gave up the project. Lieutenant General
Delos C. Emmons, the commander of the Hawaii Department, promised that the local Japanese American community would be treated fairly as long as it remained loyal to the United States. He succeeded in blocking efforts to relocate it to the outer islands or the mainland by pointing out the logistical difficulties of such a move. Among the small number incarcerated were community leaders and prominent politicians, including territorial legislators
Thomas Sakakihara and
Sanji Abe. Five concentration camps were operated in the territory of Hawaii, referred to as the "Hawaiian Island Detention Camps". One camp was located on
Sand Island, at the mouth of
Honolulu Harbor. This camp was constructed before the outbreak of the war. All of the prisoners who were held there were "detained under military custody... because of the imposition of martial law throughout the Islands". It was replaced by the
Honouliuli Internment Camp, near Ewa, on the southwestern shore of Oahu in 1943. Another was located in
Haiku,
Maui, in addition to the
Kilauea Detention Center on
Hawaii and Camp Kalaheo on
Kauai.
Japanese Latin Americans During World War II, over 2,200 Japanese from Latin America were held in concentration camps run by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice. Beginning in 1942, Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and transported to American concentration camps run by the INS and the U.S. Justice Department. Most of these internees, approximately 1,800, came from Peru. An additional 250 were from Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The first group of Japanese Latin Americans arrived in San Francisco on April 20, 1942, on board the
Etolin along with 360 ethnic Germans and 14 ethnic Italians from Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The 151 men — ten from Ecuador, the rest from Peru — had volunteered for deportation believing they were to be repatriated to Japan. They were denied visas by U.S. Immigration authorities and then detained on the grounds they had tried to enter the country illegally, without a visa or passport. The United States originally intended to trade these Latin American internees as part of a hostage exchange program with Japan and other Axis nations; at least one trade occurred. After two more stops in South America to take on additional Japanese nationals, the passenger manifest reached 1,340. "Native" Peruvians expressed extreme animosity toward their Japanese citizens and
expatriates, and Peru refused to accept the post-war return of Japanese Peruvians from the US. Although a small number asserting special circumstances, such as marriage to a non-Japanese Peruvian, helping them obtain "parole" relocation to the labor-starved
Seabrook Farms in New Jersey. He started a legal battle that was not resolved until 1953, when, after working as undocumented immigrants for almost ten years, those Japanese Peruvians remaining in the U.S. were finally offered citizenship. == Survivors of the Camp ==