World War Ii Japanese American Internment Reports

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

The internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II is one of the most shameful episodes in American history. This history and reference guide will help students and other interested readers to understand the history of this action and its reinterpretation in recent years, but it will also help readers to understand the Japanese American wartime experience through the words of those who were interned. Why did the U.S. government take this extraordinary action? How was the evacuation and resettlement handled? How did Japanese Americans feel on being asked to leave their homes and live in what amounted to concentration camps? How did they respond, and did they resist? What developments have taken place in the last twenty years that have reevaluated this wartime action? A variety of materials is provided to assist readers in understanding the internment experience. Six interpretive essays examine key aspects of the event and provide new interpretations based on the most recent scholarship. Essays include: - A short narrative history of the Japanese in America before World War II - The evacuation - Life within barbed wire-the assembly and relocation centers - The question of loyalty-Japanese Americans in the military and draft resisters - Legal challenges to the evacuation and internment - After the war-resettlement and redress A chronology of events, 26 biographical profiles of important figures, the text of 10 key primary documents--from Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment camps, to first-person accounts of the internment experience--a glossary of terms, and an annotative bibliography of recommended print sources and web sites provide ready reference value. Every library should update its resources on World War II with this history and reference guide.

This is a unique federal report on the relocation sites used in the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. This report provides an overview of the tangible remains currently left at the sites of the Japanese American internment during World War II. The main focus is on the War Relocation Authority's relocation centers, but Department of Justice and U.S. Army facilities where Japanese Americans were interned are also considered. The goal of the study has been to provide information for the National Landmark Theme Study called for in the Manzanar National Historic Site enabling legislation. Archival research, field visits, and interviews with former internees provide preliminary documentation about the architectural remnants, the archeological features, and the artifacts remaining at the sites. The degree of preservation varies tremendously. At some locations, modern development has obscured many traces of the World War II-era buildings and features. At a few sites, relocation center buildings still stand, and some are still in use. Overall the physical remains at all the sites are evocative of this very significant, if shameful, episode in U.S. history, and all appear to merit National Register of Historic Places or National Historic Landmark status. Chapter 1 - Sites of Shame: An Introduction * Chapter 2 - To Undo a Mistake is Always Harder Than Not to Create One Originally by Eleanor Roosevelt * Chapter 3 - A Brief History of Japanese American Relocation During World War II * Chapter 4 - Gila River Relocation Center, Arizona * Chapter 5 - Granada Relocation Center, Colorado * Chapter 6 - Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming * Chapter 7 - Jerome Relocation Center, Arkansas * Chapter 8 - Manzanar Relocation Center, California * Chapter 9 - Minidoka Relocation Center, Idaho * Chapter 10 - Poston Relocation Center, Arizona * Chapter 11 - Rohwer Relocation Center, Arkansas * Chapter 12 - Topaz Relocation Center, Utah * Chapter 13 - Tule Lake Relocation Center, California * Chapter 14 - Citizen Isolation Centers * Moab, Utah * Leupp, Arizona * Chapter 15 - Additional War Relocation Authority Facilities * Antelope Springs, Utah * Cow Creek, Death Valley, California * Tulelake, California * Chapter 16 - Assembly Centers * Fresno, California * Marysville, California * Mayer, Arizona * Merced, California * Pinedale, California * Pomona, California * Portland, Oregon * Puyallup, Washington * Sacramento, California * Salinas, California * Santa Anita, California * Stockton, California * Tanforan, California * Tulare, California * Turlock, California * Chapter 17 - Department of Justice and U.S. Army Facilities * Temporary Detention Stations * Department of Justice Internment Camps * Crystal City Internment Center, Texas * Kenedy Internment Center, Texas * Kooskia Work Camp, Idaho * Fort Lincoln, North Dakota * Fort Missoula, Montana * Fort Stanton, New Mexico * Santa Fe, New Mexico * Segoville, Texas * U.S. Army Facilities * Camp Lordsburg, New Mexico * Fort Sill, Oklahoma * Stringtown, Oklahoma * Alaska and Hawaii * Other U.S. Army Sites * Chapter 18 - Federal Bureau of Prisons * Catalina Federal Honor Camp, Arizona * Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, Kansas * McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Washington

This is the complete official version of the Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, issued in December 1982, along with the Commission's recommendations, issued in June 1983. The Commission studied the causes and consequences of the relocation and internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II. The Commission recommended the establishment of a fund to compensate the relocated individuals; President Reagan would later sign such a bill into law. The Commission found: This policy of exclusion, removal and detention was executed against 120,000 people without individual review, and exclusion was continued virtually without regard for their demonstrated loyalty to the United States. Congress was fully aware of and supported the policy of removal and detention; it sanctioned the exclusion by enacting a statute which made criminal the violation of orders issued pursuant to Executive Order 9066. The United States Supreme Court held the exclusion constitutionally permissible in the context of war, but struck down the incarceration of admittedly loyal American citizens on the ground that it was not based on statutory authority. All this was done despite the fact that not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast. No mass exclusion or detention, in any part of the country, was ordered against American citizens of German or Italian descent. Official actions against enemy aliens of other nationalities were much more individualized and selective than those imposed on the ethnic Japanese. The history of the relocation camps and the assembly centers that preceded them is one of suffering and deprivation visited on people against whom no charges were, or could have been, brought. The Commission hearing record is full of poignant, searing testimony that recounts the economic and personal losses and injury caused by the exclusion and the deprivations of detention. No summary can do this testimony justice.

Confinement and Ethnicity documents in unprecedented detail the various facilities in which persons of Japanese descent living in the western United States were confined during World War II: the fifteen “assembly centers” run by the U.S. Army’s Wartime Civil Control Administration, the ten “relocation centers” created by the War Relocation Authority, and the internment camps, penitentiaries, and other sites under the jurisdiction of the Justice and War Departments. Originally published as a report of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center of the National Park Service, it is now reissued in a corrected edition, with a new Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington. Based on archival research, field visits, and interviews with former residents, Confinement and Ethnicity provides an overview of the architectural remnants, archeological features, and artifacts remaining at the various sites. Included are numerous maps, diagrams, charts, and photographs. Historic images of the sites and their inhabitants -- including several by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams -- are combined with photographs of present-day settings, showing concrete foundations, fence posts, inmate-constructed drainage ditches, and foundations and parts of buildings, as well as inscriptions in Japanese and English written or scratched on walls and rocks. The result is a unique and poignant treasure house of information for former residents and their descendants, for Asian American and World War II historians, and for anyone interested in the facts about what the authors call these “sites of shame.”

This is the complete official version of the famous DeWitt report on the World War II Japanese Internment program. The military, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, called the relocation and internment program an evacuation. This report is controversial because it states the rationale and justifications offered by the American government for the program. The Foreword by Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, states: "This volume constitutes a comprehensive report on the evacuation from West Coast areas of persons of Japanese ancestry carried out by the Army in the interests of military security during the spring of 1942. The considerations which led to evacuation as well as the mechanics by which it was achieved, are set forth in detail. Great credit, in my opinion, is due General DeWitt and the Army for the humane yet efficient manner in which this difficult task was handled. It was unfortunate that the exigencies of the military situation were such as to require the same treatment for all persons of Japanese ancestry, regardless of their individual loyalty to the United States. But in emergencies, where the safety of the Nation is involved, consideration of the rights of individuals must be subordinated to the common security." CHAPTER I - Action Under Alien Enemy Proclamations * CHAPTER II - Need for Military Control and for Evacuation * CHAPTER III - Establishment of Military Control - Executive Order No. 9066 * CHAPTER IV - The Emergence of Controlled Evacuation * CHAPTER V - Separation of Jurisdiction Over Evacuation and Relocation * CHAPTER VI - The Evacuation Method * CHAPTER VII - Organization and Functions of Civil Affairs Division, General Staff, and Wartime Civil Control Administration and Other Agencies * CHAPTER VIII - Development and Execution of the Evacuation Plan * CHAPTER X - Operation of Civil Control Stations Protection of Evacuees and Their Families * CHAPTER XI - Protection of Property of the Evacuees * CHAPTER XII - Deferments and Exemptions From Evacuation * CHAPTER XIII - Assembly Center Location, Construction and Equipment * CHAPTER XIV - Housing, Feeding and Clothing * CHAPTER XV - Medical Care and Sanitation CHAPTER XIV - Housing, Feeding and Clothing * CHAPTER XVI - Employment of Evacuees in Assembly Centers * CHAPTER XVII - Education, Recreation, Religion and Assembly Center Newspapers * CHAPTER XVIII - Assembly Center Security * CHAPTER XIX - Administration of Assembly Centers * CHAPTER XX - War Relocation Authority * CHAPTER XXI - The Construction and Equipment of Relocation Centers * CHAPTER XXII - Transfer of Evacuees From Assembly to Relocation Centers * CHAPTER XXIII - Curfew and Travel Control * CHAPTER XXIV - Repatriation of Japanese * CHAPTER XXV - Public Relations Summary * CHAPTER XXVI - Inspection of Wartime Civil Control Administration Operations * CHAPTER XXVII - Fiscal Summary * CHAPTER XXVIII - Statistical Summary "The report comprises nine Parts and reference matter. In Part I, I have traced the developments which led to the issuance by the President of Executive Order No. 9066, establishing military control over the Pacific Coast. The military necessity for the specific action reported is outlined in Chapter II. Part II, Chapters IV to VI, inclusive, presents a resume of the evacuation method. In these chapters the means provided to protect the persons, the property and the health of evacuees are described. In succeeding Parts a more detailed account of each phase of the operation is found. Part III describes the military organization established to accomplish the evacuation. Part IV, Chapters VIII to XII cover evacuation operations.

Part II (p.315-359) concerns the removal of Aleuts to camps in southeastern Alaska and their subsequent resettlement at war's end.