On December 7, 1941, Japanese naval and air forces launched a surprise air attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In the months leading up to and following the attack, American merchant ships steaming between the Hawaiian Island and the American west coast were being attacked and sunk by Japanese naval vessels. Japanese forces attacked the marine garrisons on both Wake Island and Guam in the Pacific. Japanese forces invaded the British colonies at Malaya and Hong Kong. Japanese forces then bombed the Marine garrison on Midway Island and Invaded the American-held Philippines. Over the next several months, with the exception of Midway Island, the Americans and British armed forced were soundly routed. Many Americans feared that a Japanese invasion of the American mainland was imminent.
On February 19, 1942, just over two months after hostilities began; Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to split up the United States into various military zones and gave them the power to exclude certain people from these zones at their own discretion.
In April 1942, General John DeWitt, in charge of the Western Defense Command, began to place curfews and restrictions on people of Japanese decent and some German and Italian aliens.
On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt ordered all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, to report to assembly centers for relocation. German and Italian aliens are also rounded up.
On June 21, 1943, the United States Supreme Court became involved in the issues concerning the treatment and internment of Japanese-Americans in the form of Hirabayashi v. the United States. Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, a student at the University of Washington, had refused to heed the evacuation order and was convicted of violating a curfew imposed by the Western Defense Command on Japanese-Americans. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued on Hirbayashi’s behalf that the Western Defense Command decrees ordering people of Japanese ancestry to obey specific curfews were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court sided with the government on grounds that during wartime, emergency measures were necessary and the rights of the few must bow to the safety of the many. In this ruling, the Supreme Court did not directly deal with the issue of the legality of the internment camps.
In December 1944, the Supreme Court again was faced with the issue of the legality of the detainment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Fred Korematsu had been a ship welder in San Francisco until he was fired because of his Japanese ancestry. He attempted to evade the order for evacuation so that he could remain with his fiancé of European ancestry. Korematsu even went so far as to have his eyes surgically altered so that he might “look less Japanese.” The Supreme Court declared that during times of war, it was legal to remove people from a specific area on the basis of race. In this ruling, the Supreme Court again avoided directly dealing with the legality of the internment camps themselves. The Court also explained that any law passed by the government must be met with strict scrutiny against racism.
Also in December 1944, the Supreme Court delivered a verdict concerning a young woman named Mitsuye Endo. Ms. Endo and her lawyers had argued for a writ of habeas corpus. Ms. Endo had been fired from her job working for the State of California on trumped up charges that had no basis in fact. She had been fired for being of Japanese ancestry. Due to her detention, she had been unable to answer the charges laid against her when she was fired. The Supreme Court sided with Ms. Endo, explaining her detention should only have lasted as long as it would reasonably take to ascertain her loyalty to America. The Court ordered her to be set free.
The day before the Supreme Court published its decision, the War Department announced the revocation of the West Coast mass exclusion orders that had forced people of Japanese descent out of General DeWitt’s Western Coast Command Region. It is likely they knew what the ruling would be from the Supreme Court. The very next day the War Relocation Authority announced that all internment camps would be closed before the end of 1945 and the entire War Relocation Authority would be discontinued by June of 1946.
On February 1976, on the anniversary of the original order signed by President Roosevelt authorizing Executive Order 9066, President Gerald Ford officially rescinded this order with Executive Order 2714. President Ford admitted that the relocation of the Japanese and their placement in the internment camps was wrong and fundamentally against “American Principles.”
In June 1983, the Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians delivered a scathing report that the exclusion, expulsion and incarceration was entirely based up prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leaders. John J. McCloy, an influential advisor to President Roosevelt during the Second World War wrote a letter shortly after the Commission presented its findings arguing that racism did not play a major role in the decision to place Japanese in the internment camps. He further claimed that the MAGIC intercepts were the major factor in President Roosevelt’s decision to issue executive order 9066.
That same year, the case of Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was revisited as lawyers uncovered documents that showed the United States government withheld information that would have influenced the decision of the Supreme Court. Hirbayashi’s case was retried and in 1987 his conviction was overturned. Fred Korematsu’s conviction against evading internment was voided by the Federal District Court of Northern California because of evidence that the government submitted false information which influenced the decision of the Supreme Court.
In May 1944, despite being forced to move to the internment camps, 1500 Americans of Japanese ancestry formed part of the 442
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Regimental Combat Team and were sent to the European theater of war. This regiment fought in both North Africa and Europe with great distinction. In 2000, after the reexamination of the files of some of the Japanese-American soldiers, an additional twenty Medals of Honor were award to men of the 442
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. Fourteen of these medals were posthumously awarded. Senator Daniel Inouye whose right arm had been lost during action was one of the recipients.
In 1948, the Evacuation Claims Act was passed. This gave Japanese-Americans the chance to file claims against loss of property due to the relocation to the internment camps. As the Internal Revenue Service had destroyed the tax records for the years in question and because much of the ownership information was lost in the hurried process of Japanese-American removal, only thirty-one million dollars was paid out by the government, estimated at less than ten percent of the total amount lost.
In August 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act that granted reparations to Japanese-Americans and their heirs in the form of twenty thousand dollars per person who had been interned during the war. The bill stated that the motives of the United States forty-six years before, were based upon racism, war hysteria and lack of competent political leadership. Several years later, President George H. W. Bush offered another formal apology and signed another amendment passed by Congress appropriating an additional amount of money to ensure that all Japanese-Americans affected by the forced relocation would receive their payments.