Japanese American Internment (1942–1945): Executive Order 9066

Japanese American internment was the forced removal and confinement of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States during the Second World War. It followed Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, ten weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Most of those held were American citizens, none was charged with a crime, and in 1988 the US government formally apologised.

Background

People from Japan had settled in Hawaii and on the American West Coast since the late nineteenth century, working on farms, in fishing and in small businesses. They faced decades of discrimination. Immigrants born in Japan, known as Issei, were barred from becoming naturalised citizens, California and other states passed laws restricting their ownership of land, and the Immigration Act of 1924 halted further Japanese immigration. Their children born in the United States, the Nisei, were citizens by birth.

After Pearl Harbor the FBI arrested more than 2,000 Issei community leaders, such as priests, teachers and newspaper editors, as potential security risks. Fear of invasion and sabotage spread along the West Coast, fuelled by rumours, newspaper campaigns and long-standing racial hostility. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, argued that loyal and disloyal people of Japanese descent could not be told apart. Some officials, including Attorney General Francis Biddle, opposed mass removal, but they were overruled.

Executive Order 9066 and removal

Executive Order 9066 did not mention any ethnic group. It authorised the Secretary of War and military commanders to designate “military areas” from which any person might be excluded. DeWitt used this power to declare the western halves of Washington, Oregon and California and the southern part of Arizona an exclusion zone. On 18 March 1942 Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to manage the people removed.

Over the following months more than a hundred civilian exclusion orders were posted, giving families as little as a week to dispose of homes, farms, businesses and possessions. Many sold property at heavy losses. They were first taken to temporary “assembly centers”, often hastily converted racetracks and fairgrounds such as Santa Anita and Tanforan in California, where some families lived in horse stalls.

The camps

From mid-1942 people were moved to ten WRA camps in remote areas of the interior: Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Minidoka in Idaho, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Granada (Amache) in Colorado, Topaz in Utah, and Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. Each held thousands of people in rows of tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with armed guards.

Living conditions were harsh, with extreme heat and cold, dust storms, communal mess halls and latrines, and little privacy. Families tried to recreate normal life by organising schools, newspapers, churches, sports leagues and farms. Several people were killed by guards, including James Wakasa, shot at Topaz in April 1943. Some internees were allowed to leave to work on farms or to attend colleges away from the West Coast, and the WRA gradually encouraged resettlement in the Midwest and East.

Separately, the Justice Department held several thousand Japanese, German and Italian nationals and some family members in its own internment camps, such as Crystal City in Texas. In Hawaii, where people of Japanese descent made up over a third of the population and were vital to the economy, there was no mass removal; about 1,200 to 2,000 were detained there instead.

Loyalty, military service and resistance

In early 1943 the government issued a questionnaire to all adults in the camps. Two questions asked whether they would serve in the armed forces and whether they would renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Many found the questions insulting or confusing, especially Issei who were denied US citizenship. Those who answered “no” to both, or refused to answer, were sent to Tule Lake, which became a high-security segregation center.

At the same time thousands of Nisei served in the US Army. The 100th Infantry Battalion, formed from Hawaiian Nisei, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team fought in Italy, including at Monte Cassino, and in France; the 442nd became one of the most decorated units of its size in American history. Others served as translators and interpreters in the Military Intelligence Service in the Pacific. Some young men, notably at Heart Mountain, refused to be drafted while their families remained confined, and were imprisoned for draft resistance.

The court cases

Several Japanese Americans challenged the orders in court. In Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) the Supreme Court upheld a curfew conviction. In Korematsu v. United States, decided on 18 December 1944, it upheld by six votes to three the conviction of Fred Korematsu for remaining in a restricted area. On the same day, in Ex parte Endo, it ruled that the government could not continue to detain a citizen whom it accepted was loyal, a case brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo.

The day before those rulings, the army announced that the exclusion orders would be lifted from 2 January 1945. The camps closed over the following year; Tule Lake, the last, closed in March 1946. Many returnees found their homes and businesses gone and faced continued hostility.

Redress and legacy

In 1976 President Gerald Ford formally rescinded Executive Order 9066. In 1980 Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which heard testimony from more than 750 witnesses. Its report, Personal Justice Denied (1983), concluded that the removal had not been justified by military necessity and was caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership”.

In 1983 federal courts vacated the convictions of Korematsu and later of Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, after researchers found evidence that the government had suppressed intelligence reports contradicting claims of military necessity. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan on 10 August 1988, offered an official apology and 20,000 dollars to each surviving person affected; about 82,000 people received payment. In 2018 the Supreme Court stated that the Korematsu decision had been gravely wrong the day it was decided.

Manzanar became a National Historic Site in 1992, and several other camp sites are now preserved. Canada carried out a similar removal of about 22,000 Japanese Canadians from British Columbia from 1942, for which its government apologised in 1988.

Timeline

• 1941, 7 December: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; the FBI begins arresting Issei community leaders.
• 1942, 19 February: Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066.
• 1942, 18 March: The War Relocation Authority is created.
• 1942, March–October: People of Japanese ancestry are removed from the West Coast to assembly centers and then camps.
• 1943, February: The loyalty questionnaire is distributed in the camps.
• 1944, 18 December: The Supreme Court decides Korematsu and Ex parte Endo.
• 1945, 2 January: The West Coast exclusion orders are lifted.
• 1946, March: Tule Lake, the last camp, closes.
• 1983: The commission’s report and the vacating of Korematsu’s conviction.
• 1988, 10 August: The Civil Liberties Act provides an apology and compensation.

Why it matters

The confinement of Japanese Americans is widely regarded as one of the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history. It showed how fear and prejudice in wartime could override constitutional rights, and the later apology and redress set an example of a government acknowledging a past wrong. It remains a central reference point in debates about security, citizenship and equal treatment under the law.