Japanese American internment was the forcible relocation and
internment by the
United States government in 1942 of approximately 120,000
Japanese Americans and
Japanese residing in the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps," in the wake of
Imperial Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor.
[1][2] The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. Japanese Americans residing on the
West Coast of the United States were all interned, whereas in
Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans composed nearly a third of that
territory's population, only 1,200
[3] to 1,800 Japanese Americans were interned.
[4] Of those interned, 62 percent were
United States citizens.
[5][6]President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.[7] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders,[8] while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings.[9]
In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".[10] About $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to every surviving internee.[11]
In the first half of the 20th century, California experienced a wave of anti-Japanese prejudice, in part because of the concentration there of new immigrants. This was distinct from the Japanese American experience in the broader United States. Over 90% of Japanese immigrants to the USA settled in California, where labor and farm competition fed into general anti-Japanese sentiment.[12] In 1905, California's anti-miscegenation law was amended to prohibit marriages between Caucasians and "Mongolians" (an umbrella term which, at the time, was used in reference to the Japanese, among other ethnicities of East Asian ancestry).[12] In October 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to segregate their schools based on race. It ordered ninety-three Japanese students in the district to a segregated school in Chinatown.[13] Twenty-five of the students were American citizens. That anti-Japanese sentiment was maintained beyond this period is evidenced by the 1924 "Oriental Exclusion Law," which blocked Japanese immigrants from attaining citizenship.[12]
