After World War II, the US military denazified Germany, forcing Germans to watch eerie footage from Nazi concentration camps. However, similar events in their own country were hushed up by the Americans for decades. We are talking about the detention of tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese, forcibly evicted from their homes in 1942.
About the "yellow danger", or "yellow threat", in the United States started talking at the end of the 19th century, when a large Japanese diaspora arose in the country. The first generation of immigrants to the United States in the 1880s and 1890s was called the Issei. They strove for assimilation, adopted Christianity, and their children (nisei) already knew English well. Soon, however, American newspapers began to publish articles by the so-called restrictionists - politicians who declared the undesirability of a Japanese presence. And it wasn't just racism. Unlike other racial minorities (blacks and Indians), enterprising and hardworking Japanese created significant economic competition for whites. A convenient reason for restricting the rights of immigrants was the political expansion of the Land of the Rising Sun in East Asia. Americans were convincedthat the next target for the Japanese could be the coastal Pacific states - Oregon, Washington and especially California, where there were the most immigrants.
After a 20-year struggle, the restrictionists succeeded in obtaining a ban on Japanese entry in 1924. American hostility prompted a backlash in the form of Japanese nationalism. The third generation of immigrants sought to return to Japan, which was then claiming great power status. Thus, by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, relations between white Americans and Japanese Americans were already noticeably undermined.
In violation of the Constitution
The day after the outbreak of the war, December 8, 1941, the Franklin Roosevelt administration declared the state of California a "high risk zone." Arrests of Japanese community leaders followed. The immigrants were accused of spying for Japan. The naval department already in December proposed to evict all Japanese from California, including those who had American citizenship. Lieutenant General John De Witt, commander of the Western Military District, called the Japanese a "dangerous element" whose loyalty was impossible to determine. However, the government started to implement these plans only next year.
In late January 1942, Roosevelt approved a plan to deport the Japanese from the West Coast, proposed by US Attorney General Francis Biddle. The legal basis for the action was the Law on Hostile Foreigners, adopted back in 1798. At the same time, as the modern researcher Gordon Hirabayashi believed, the authorities violated the amendments to the American Constitution (the famous "Bill of Rights").
Unlike the Stalinist regime, the American government did not have an NKVD apparatus that would allow the deportation of entire peoples in a matter of days. By the end of winter, a third of the Japanese had been evicted from California. The rest were taken to the camps until June 1942. The internment procedure was developed by Major Karl Bendetsen, an employee of the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor. In total, 120,000 ethnic Japanese were forced to leave their homes, of which 62% were US citizens. Some didn’t even look Mongoloid, as they had only one Japanese ancestor several generations ago. It is noteworthy that, being Jewish by birth, Bendetsen acted almost
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Children swear an oath of allegiance to the US flag before internment as brutally as the Germans did during the Holocaust. On his order, orphans were taken out of children's institutions "with at least a drop of Japanese blood." Many of these babies died without medical assistance.
Conditions of detention
The internees were housed in 10 concentration camps, which were officially called "military accommodation centers." They were located primarily in the Rocky Mountains - in eastern California and in the states of Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado and Montana. The authorities used desert areas to settle the Japanese, often on the territories of Indian reservations.
The deportees were left practically without property, they were allowed to take with them only suitcases and sacks that could be carried away in their hands. The exiled Japanese also had to say goodbye to the comforts of home. There was a case when the local authorities used … a stable for a temporary camp for transitory. In the end, however, the Japanese were housed in hastily constructed barracks without running water. The living quarters were large, gloomy buildings. Inside were long rows of bunks with fabric partitions between them.
“It was a small room, measuring 20 by 25 feet, with army beds and mattresses stuffed with hay,” American Sue Kunitomi-Embry, 19 at the time of the deportation, described the setting of one of the camps.
Families with children and elderly people found themselves in virtual barracks conditions. A particular inconvenience for people accustomed to American comfort was provided by shared toilets on the street and showers without partitions. The internees were ill due to unsanitary conditions and cold. In the Rocky Mountains in winter there are severe frosts, and in the barracks there was a blow from all the cracks. It was especially difficult for those who, in the confusion, did not have time to grab their winter clothes. The Japanese were given mandatory vaccinations, after which many of them also felt worse. The inhabitants of the camps also suffered because of the poor nutrition - only 45 cents per person per day were allocated for the maintenance of the internees. A total of 1,800 people died in the camps.
Homecoming
Not all Japanese people shared the principle of "shikata ga nai" ("nothing can be done"). Already in the summer of 1942, the prisoners of the camps, who had not resigned themselves to their fate, began to arrange unrest. The instigators of the riots were mostly less Americanized kibei and issei.
The most massive riot took place on December 5-6, 1942 in the Californian camp Manzanar near the city of Lone Pine. Protesting against the beating of respected Japanese Fred Tayama by guards, a crowd of 3-4 thousand people refused to obey the Americans. In response, the military first fired tear gas and then opened fire on unarmed people. Two Japanese were killed - a 17-year-old and a 21-year-old boy. 10 people were injured, including one American corporal. In April 1943, a similar drama took place at Camp Topaz in Utah. The guard shot and killed an elderly Japanese man, suspecting him of trying to escape. The riot that followed this also ended in vain. One of the forms of Japanese resistance was the massive renunciation of American citizenship - for example, 5,000 people did this in the Tulle Lake camp.
Over time, American attitudes toward internees began to change. They began to be released from the camps, using them in agricultural work. As Jeanne Wakatsuki-Houston, author of the famous book of memoirs “Farewell to Manzanar,” recalled, the camp became like an American town - it had a school, dance groups and even the camp newspaper Manzanar Free Press. There are photographs of the Japanese in the camps doing physical exercise and playing baseball.
In 1944, amid victories in the Pacific, the US Supreme Court overturned Roosevelt's war zone decree. The Japanese gradually began to return home, this process ended in 1945. Three years later, Congress officially declared the internees "innocent." After the war, Japan and the United States became allies, and restrictionism became a thing of the past.
The site of the Manzanar camp is now home to the National History Museum, which is regularly visited by descendants of Japanese immigrants. Finds related to those events happen to this day. For example, on October 7, 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times, the skeleton of the Japanese Jichi Matsumura was found in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. In the last days of World War II, he was released from the Manzanar camp to paint, and he died in an accident.