The Japanese Americans And The Issue Of

Redress Essay, Research Paper

Introduction

In December 1982, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWIRC) concluded that the evacuation and incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II were the result of racism, war hysteria, and a failure of the nation s leadership . Six months later, the commission recommended that the U.S. government offer a national apology and payments of $20,000 to the surviving internees as a form of redress. On August 10, 1988, those recommendations became law when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. This paper will attempt to examine how and why redress passed, the most significant factors involved as well the arguments for and against the bills.

Wartime

On December 7, 1941, Japan s military dropped bombs on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day the United Stated declared war on Japan. The first month of the war was relatively calm. There were few cases of public panic or hysteria occurring, and Japanese Americans were treated no differently than they had been before war began. There have been newspaper accounts showing that there was a vast majority of American citizens that were sympathetic to the Japanese s plight of looking like the enemy but being loyal citizens. There were also some government officials that were advising the public not to blame the Japanese in America for the war. The sympathy was not persistent and it didn t last long. There was a majority of people that had always harbored a feeling of resentment and abhorrence towards the Japanese. With the advent of the war, they plunged into an all-out hate campaign. In some areas, a few cases of violence against the Japanese, including shootings and killings, occurred. These attacks on the Japanese were used as a justification for confining and relocating them: it was for their own good, to protect them against racist violence.

As the exclusion movement began to gain more force, Congressman John H. Tolan from California called for the creation of the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration of the House of Representatives. The purpose of the committee was to make an effort to determine the facts and the arguments for and against the proposed exclusion. On February 11, ten days before their first meeting, President Roosevelt had given Secretary of War Stimson his approval to start formulating plans for a mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.

Executive Order 9066 and its Repercussions

On February 12, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that set the stage for the forced evacuation of over 120,000 aliens and citizens from California, Oregon, Arizona, and Washington. The order declared, The successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises and national-defense utilities. The bill was signed amongst strong opposition from many high named officials such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He went on record stating that the demand for the removal of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast was not justified on national security grounds. He said the plan was not based on factual evidence, but on public and political pressure.

With the backing of Congress and the President, General John L. DeWitt issued a series of civilian exclusion orders and public proclamations that extended to travel restrictions, curfews, and contraband regulations to all Japanese Americans, regardless of citizenship. Eventually, his orders called for all persons of Japanese ancestry in California and parts of Arizona, Washington, and Oregon to turn themselves in at temporary detention centers near their homes. The evacuation took a total of eight months, from March 24 to November 3.

Constitutionality

Most of the Japanese Americans obeyed the military orders as a way of demonstrating their loyalty to the United States, but there were some individuals who challenged the constitutionality of the evacuation and internment orders. Fred Korematsu was charged with refusing evacuation, Minoru Yasui with violating curfew, and Gordon Hirabayashi with violating curfew and failing to report for detention. All three were convicted in the federal courts for disobeying military orders and appealed their cases to the U. S. Supreme Court. These three cases are considered to be criminal cases because they were direct violations of law. A fourth case by Mitsuye Endo was filed against the United States in 1942. As that she broke no laws and complied with the military orders, her case was considered a civil suit. She challenged the government s right to imprison an American citizen without charge or trial. A year later the decision denying her release was announced, and she appealed to the Supreme Court.

In landmark decisions in the cases of Hirabayashi v. United States, Yasui v. United States, and Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the Executive Order 9066 and the army s evacuation procedure stating that a group defined entirely by ancestry could constitutionally be placed under curfew and expelled from their homes, because Congress had declared war and the military had decided that it was impossible to separate the loyal from the disloyal . In late 1944, in th