In 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. About two months after that, president Roosevelt signed an executive order to place all Japanese Americans on the west coast into internment camps. At that time, there were about 127,000 people that were on the west coast that were either Japanese or had Japanese ancestry. This decision was mainly made due to a racist attitude toward Japanese people. However, farmers on the west coast pushed harder to remove all Japanese American because they knew that if the Japanese were in camps, they couldn’t run their shops or farms. This meant that american farmers and shop owners would lose competition and could potentially sell their goods for a higher price. When the order was sent, Japanese Americans were instructed to just take all that they could carry and get in a bus that took them and their families to one of ten internment camps in the nation.
In 1943, the american government gave a survey to all of the people interned in the camps informally called the “loyalty questionnaire” among the people in the camp. This was infamously known for having questions asking the people forced out of their homes and into the camps if they would serve in the US military (this was asked to the younger second generation of Japanese Americans called Nisei) or that they would renounce their loyalty to the Japanese emperor and declare loyalty to the US (This was asked to the older first generation of Japanese immigrants called Issei).
In the 1940s, three Japanese Americans took cases to the Supreme Court about the unlawful incarceration of people of Japanese descent. These cases were: Hirabayashi vs. United States, Korematsu vs. United States, Endo vs. United States. Both Hirabayashi and Korematsu were unsuccessful with their court cases, but Endo was allowed to leave the camp. Later, the United States Government gave $20,000 to every person in the internment camps.
Your post was very informative, and I really liked your discussion of the conditions for the Japanese and their attempts at suing the government. Adding onto the court cases that you began to discuss, another relevant court case was Yasui v. United States. Minoru Yasui was the first Japanese American lawyer admitted to the Oregon Bar and began working for the Consulate General of Japan in Chicago in 1940. After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Yasui deliberately defied the curfew that it imposed and was arrested. During his trial at the Portland US District Court, the judge sentenced Yasui to a year in the local county jail--although he had violated the law, the judge believed that he was not a US citizen because he had worked for the Japanese Consulate. When his case appeared before the Supreme Court in 1943, the Court ruled that he was still a US citizen and that he had violated the curfew law; he was sent to an internment camp in Idaho. Although he was released in 1944, he wasn't exonerated until 40 years later, but he persistently fought for civil rights and engaged in activism on behalf of his fellow Japanese Americans.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thoughtco.com/supreme-court-cases-involving-japanese-internment-2834827
It is easy to draw a connection between the Japanese internment camps and the Jewish concentration camps. And while the concept of imprisoning a certain people is similar, they were fairly different. While the purpose of the American camps were to remove Japanese from war zones to prevent them from spying on the US and giving information to Japan, the German camps were designed to exterminate Jews by working and starving them to death. Japanese camps were much nicer in comparison, as there were no gas chambers, and inmates had leisure time as well. The most important similarity, however, is that both concentration and internment camps were built due to irrational, baseless racism.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.quora.com/What-are-the-similarities-between-the-Jewish-concentration-camps-made-by-Hitler-and-the-Japanese-relocation-camps-in-the-US