The decision to send 120,000 Japanese to internment camps was not a simple one. Interestingly, this phenomenon only happened on the western coast of the United States, in not in the territory of Hawaii where one-third of the population was of Japanese ancestry. Certainly there were proponents of isolating people of Japanese origin. The plan of moving them all to a specific Hawaiian Island was proposed but then rejected. Many of the Japanese-Americans who served in the 442
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Regiment came from Hawaii, including Senator Inouye.
Clearly, the majority of people sent to the internment camps were loyal Americans who had done nothing to deserve incarceration. Due to earlier federal legislation which restricted Japanese from obtaining American citizenship, many Japanese immigrants were automatically classified as enemy aliens. Many of these Japanese, most not proficient in English, refused to give up their Japanese citizenship as they had no chance of becoming American citizens. Official Federal Bureau of Investigation reports indicated that seventy-five percent of the first generation Japanese immigrants and between ninety and ninety-eight percent of the second generation were loyal to America.
General DeWitt’s words and statements by many others creating government policy at the time were blatantly anti-Japanese. General DeWitt had even recalled and destroyed a report written as its terminology was so racist that it would have caused a backlash against the policies he was implementing. A copy of this original report was found and compared to the one reissued. These documents can be found online using a simple search with a web browser.
Using various documents from Presidents Ford, Reagan, and H. W. Bush and from the Commission of Wartime Relocation, the instructor should have students locate and identify the admission of the government’s culpability for its actions pertaining to the forced internment of Japanese-Americans. Students should also be given access to John J. McCloy’s letter to the United State’s Senate in 1984 explaining the motivations of the President and his policy makers. Depending on student ability, the instructor should have students discuss whether the points made by Mr. McCloy are valid when put into context of the Commission and the various Presidents. McCloy’s arguments vary from his discussion of the MAGIC intercepts to the fact that during wartime many suffered and were never offered compensation for their particular hardships.
Another controversy arisen from the forced Japanese relocation to internment camps is the use of the word “concentration camp.” President Roosevelt and many others at the time used the term concentration camp as another name for the internment camps. While an accurate description that many still use today to describe the Japan internment camps, after the Second World War this term has taken on a completely different meaning, due to its application to the death camps run by the Germans. As the term concentration camp has become synonymous with the Nazi death camps, many people believe it cannot be accurately used to describe the internment camps in which Japanese-Americans were forced to live. Students should be allowed to discuss the merits of this debate.
Once the issue has been adequately investigated, students should be asked if they believe this could ever happen again in America. This will provide the instructor with an excellent opportunity to discuss current events and at the time of the writing of this curriculum unit, the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Recent Supreme Court decisions can be compared to ones that pertained to the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War.