Essay On Japanese American Internment

Japanese American internment in the United States during World War II affected thousands of lives for generations yet it remains hidden in historical memory. There have been surges of public interest since the release of the internees, such as during the Civil Rights movement and the campaign for redress, which led to renewed interest in scholarship investigating the internment. Once redress was achieved in 1988, public interest waned again as did published analysis of the internment.

Japanese immigration to the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century had been minimal with only small numbers of laborers migrating to the West coast. In 1868 the first group of Japanese workers migrated to Hawaii seeking employment as farm laborers. When they arrived they found only three Japanese living in Honolulu. These newly arrived immigrant laborers were required to sign long labor contracts. When their contracts finally expired, Hawaii has become a territory of the United

States and a number of Japanese-born farm laborers left the Islands for California, Washington, and Oregon where they faced growing public opposition.
After the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, tensions between the United States and Japan had increased.

Although President Theodore Roosevelt had tried to maintain cordial relations with Japan, western state governors and their legislatures began to enact measures that threatened good relations. Japanese, like other Asian immigrants, had long been denied citizenship in the United States and western states began to pass alien land laws forbidding land ownership of any persons not eligible for citizenship. California’s Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 and anti-Japanese land laws in other western states aroused indignation in Japan. The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 prohibiting Asian immigration virtually ruptured U.S. foreign relations with Japan. In addition to overt acts taken by western states and the denial of further immigration, the governments of Japan and the United States, with conflicting territorial and trade interests in Asia, appeared on a collision

course
As Japan began to expand interests in Asia in the 1930s, the United States became more concerned about the Philippines and trading interests in China. Working through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. began to compile lists of names persons that were members of Japanese political or social associations including organizers of martial arts leagues and religious leaders active in local Buddhist Temples. When the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the FBI sent agents to arrest suspected Japanese aliens in the United States. Within days, hundreds of Japanese were arrested and held without trial. Although there was no evidence of espionage, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Within months over 110,000 Japanese, two-thirds of whom were native born citizens of the United States, were forced to move from the west coast to “relocation” camps, which are what we know today as the Japanese Internment camps.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, American pride and displays of homeland loyalty created a unique event in American history. In the country’s outrage, people whose appearance was labeled as Arab were cast overnight as villains or cohorts. This was hauntingly familiar to Japanese Americans who experienced similar treatment during the days following the imminent Japanese attack upon the Pearl Harbor. These similarities affirm the findings of authors who have written on the economic, political and social environment of pre-World War II United States, internment, and the effects of internment on ideas about citizenship, loyalty, and immigration. Yet public knowledge and discourse on the causes, events and results of interning American citizens remains minimal.
Between 1861 and 1940, approximately 275,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawaii and the mainland United States. Japanese Americans settled in ethnic neighborhoods and established their own schools, houses of worship, and economic and cultural institutions. Ethnic concentration was increased because many real estate agents would not sell properties to Japanese Americans outside of existing Japanese neighborhoods. In 1913, the California Assembly passed an act that restricted land ownership. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the government to deny U.S. citizenship to Japanese immigrants. Jealousy over economic success, distrust over cultural separateness, and long-standing anti-Asian racism turned into disaster when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Congress and the President were convinced to remove persons of Japanese descent from the west coast, both foreign-born and American citizens. The U.S. Army carried out the task of relocating Japanese immigrants and citizens. The West Coast was divided into military zones, and on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing exclusion. Congress then implemented the order on March 21, 1942, by passing Public Law 503. After encouraging voluntary evacuation of the areas, the Western Defense Command began forced removal and detention of West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry.
In the next 6 months, approximately 122,000 men, women, and children were moved to assembly centers. They were then evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers, known as internment camps. Japanese-Americans were sent to one of sixteen WRA Assembly Centers that dotted the exclusion zone and then dispersed to one of ten WRA Relocation Centers located outside of the exclusion zone. The government constructed two of the camps in the Delta region of Arkansas, in two rural towns named Jerome and Rohwer. Upon arrival at the camps, internee families were assigned living facilities. Because these facilities were built in such a hurry, many of them were unfinished. In turn they were poorly isolated and without plumbing or electricity. As a direct consequence many of the detainees fell seriously ill and there were reported cases of internees that died from the sheer cold and intense heat alone. When arriving at one Arkansas camp, an internee described the horrifying experience of seeing tall watchtowers manned by American soldiers with guns pointing inside the camp, and barbed wire surrounding the camp. Searchlights stationed at the watchtowers circled the camp grounds after dark which made the camps similarity to prisons even clearer. The bigger camps consisted of more than 100 barracks that were between 120 and 220 square feet.
Due to being hastily constructed, the floor in the barracks was in places both rough and uneven, with single- instead of the standard double flooring. Internees described that, as a result of the poorly constructed floors, garter snakes made their way in through the cracks. There was no furniture in the units, only army cots to sleep on, blankets and a single light bulb that hung from the ceiling in the middle of every room. Apartments had neither cooking facilities nor a lavatory. In an attempt at making life more bearable, families took to building furniture and making necessary household items that they had been unable to bring with them when the evacuation took place.
Due to camps being over populated, families were often forced to share their small apartments with other families, who up until then had been total strangers. As a result, the little privacy that the internees had was reduced even further. Residents had to find their own way of dividing the already small room in two so as to acquire some resemblance of privacy. As the obtained information demonstrates, most camps’ internees had access to a dining hall, which included a kitchen and storage area, and an ill equipped recreation hall used for communal events. Additionally, detainees had to share toilet and laundry facilities that were so scarce that women had to wake up in the middle of the night in order to wash dirty laundry.
There were hospitals associated with the camps that were built and manned by internees with the exception of a Caucasian administrator. The hospitals were under equipped and understaffed, and due to the fact that they were manned by internees there was serious lack of qualified doctors and nurses. There were also schools associated with the camps, built by detainees and run by the War Relocation Authority, that were in dire need of teachers. The schools were manned by detainees as well as Caucasian teachers who came from outside the camps, but there was also a shortage of teachers since most of them were too afraid of the Japanese Americans to enter the camps. Furthermore, textbooks and essential teaching equipment were unavailable.
The Southeast region of Arkansas (where Judson and Rohwer are situated) was one of the poorest regions in the United States during the early 1940’s. Poverty ran rampant among the heavily segregated population. The Great Depression hit the region exceptionally hard, not only due to the harsh economic conditions, but due to agricultural famine that impacted the largely agrarian population. The worst drought of the twentieth century occurred in 1930 to 1931, devastating crops across the entire state. At the height of the Great Depression, one in four families in Arkansas received food aid from the American Red Cross, and one can only speculate (at this time, as research has not validated this point) that the percentage was much higher in this particular region. Most homes were devoid of electricity and indoor plumbing and access to resources like health care and education were scarce. The population of both towns hovered around the 100 to 150 mark at the time that the camps began construction and the Japanese-Americans came to reside there.
Thanks to the enactment of Executive Order 9102 and the creation of these two WRA Relocation Centers, the populations of each area increased tenfold with a captive population of Japanese-Americans. The established white population did not take kindly to the internees or the apparent resources the camps provided them, and at times violence erupted out of the anger. The African-American populations of Jerome and Rohwer lived in a constant state of fear of reactionary racial violence. The white supremacist mentality prevalent in the area relegated the black population to the fringes of society.
Race riots were not uncommon to the Delta; in 1919, the single deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and one of the deadliest in United States history occurred in the town of Elaine, 100 miles to the north of Jerome and Rohwer. Violence against non-whites spilled into the communities surrounding the two internment camps. Three distinct instances of violence are crucial. In November 1942 Private Louis Furushiro, a Nisei member of the armed forces, was singled out and shot at by W.M. Wood, a local, who was determined to harm the next Japanese he saw. Four days after the incident in Dermott, three Rohwer residents were shot at by tenant farmer M.C. Brown who allegedly thought the men were escaping. On December 4, 1942, two Nisei women in the Jerome internment camp were propositioned by Nebo Mac Person, an African-American construction worker, and he allegedly tore the coat off one and exposed himself to both.
Extreme racial tensions resulted from the internment of Japanese Americans in War Relocation Authority (WRA) Relocation Centers outside of the two rural towns of Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas as an either an expression of white supremacy or ethnic fear. The Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes on the West Coast, shipped across the country on trains, and imprisoned behind barbed wire fences, guarded by soldiers with guns. They lost their autonomy as an individual because of the actions of ethnically similar individuals against American forces in Hawaii and abroad. Racial tensions between African-Americans and whites were already volatile. The white population was impoverished and had little access to resources such as quality health care, education, job training, or food. The tensions that resulted from the internment ran beyond color lines, yet the root of the tensions could possibly be tied to the white supremacist movement that was so heavily entrenched in the Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi.