A grave injustice in American history marks its 80th anniversary this December. The US Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case Korematsu v. United States on December 18, 1944. The decision helped ratify the federal government’s 1942 decision to remove roughly 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, most of whom were American citizens, from their homes in the western United States and imprison them in internment camps.[1]
Eighty years after the Korematsu decision is an appropriate time to remember the mass internment of Japanese Americans and the court cases that gave the internment legal authorization. The forces that made this injustice possible—racism, xenophobia, and a willingness to violate civil liberties in the name of national security—are sadly still very much with us today. We should not forget the terrible consequences the combination of these forces can have.
The Precarious Position of the Issei and Nisei
Japanese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1880s. Immigration from Japan continued until 1922, when the US Congress passed a dramatically restrictive immigration law that barred Japanese.[2]
By the time any further Japanese immigration was prohibited, more than 300,000 people of Japanese heritage lived on American soil. The majority, about 200,000, were in Hawaii; roughly 140,000 lived in the mainland United States, most of them on the West Coast.[3]
People of Japanese heritage in the western United States generally made their living through farming. By 1940, Japanese-descended farmers produced most of California’s spring and summer celery, fresh snap beans, and tomatoes.[4]
These residents of Japanese heritage faced obstacles to equal citizenship. First-generation Japanese immigrants, known as “Issei,” could not become American citizens: a 1790 law limited naturalization to white immigrants. This law was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1920, despite a challenge by an immigrant named Takao Ozawa.[5]
Second-generation immigrants, known as “Nisei,” were citizens since they were born in the United States. Nisei also faced discrimination and limited employment opportunities, though.[6]
As early as the 1920s, federal authorities were concerned about the loyalties of people of Japanese heritage in the event of war with Japan. The Army’s War Plans Division, when preparing for the defense of Hawaii’s island of Oahu, planned for “imposing martial law in Hawaii, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, instituting registration of Japanese ‘enemy aliens,’ and selectively interning those believed to be dangerous.”[7]
In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the head of the Navy that any person of Japanese heritage in Oahu who had suspicious contacts with Japan “should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”[8]
As American entry into World War II approached, the US government increased efforts to guard against potentially disloyal residents. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required all resident aliens in the United States to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Almost 5 million aliens were eventually registered, including 40,000 Japanese nationals.[9]
Meanwhile, the FBI, together with Army and Navy intelligence, investigated potential dangers from espionage or sabotage. In June 1940, the FBI created, under its Custodial Detention Program, a list of people to be arrested in a national emergency. By December 1941, this list included 2,000 people of Japanese heritage in Hawaii and the West Coast who were assessed as posing varying levels of threat. Those on the list included the heads of Japanese-American civic groups, Buddhist priests, and other community leaders.[10]
A notable feature of these pre-war measures is that while they reflected definite suspicions about people of Japanese heritage they were also relatively limited in scope. The authorities seemed to be envisioning security measures that would target specific people whom they had reasons to think disloyal. Wholesale imprisonment of people solely because of their race was not yet being considered.
A pre-war FBI report on Hawaii discouraged such widespread action. The report said that “the vast majority of local Japanese (except for a small, easily identifiable group which had not had time to assimilate) were American in their values and loyal to the United States.”[11]
Curtis Munson, a Chicago businessman whom Roosevelt charged with the mission of gathering information on people of Japanese heritage in the United States, similarly reported in November 1941 that “There will be no armed uprising of Japanese… We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war.”[12]
The Fevers of War
This relatively measured approach to potential threats initially continued after Pearl Harbor and Japan’s declaration of war on the United States. Almost 800 Japanese aliens on the FBI’s detention list were arrested the night of December 7, 1941. Over the following months, roughly 5,000 Japanese nationals (and smaller numbers of German and Italian nationals) in the United States were detained.[13]
However, the authorities’ approach toward people of Japanese heritage rapidly changed over the winter of 1941-42. The change appears to have been driven, at least partly, by attitudes among politicians and officials in the western United States.
Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles helped spread unsubstantiated claims that Japanese farmers and fishermen had been sending suspicious signals along the shoreline. General John DeWitt, the Army commander with responsibility for the western United States, similarly spread rumors that 20,000 Japanese Americans in San Francisco were going to stage an uprising and that Japanese submarines operating off the West Coast received signals from Japanese Americans on shore. No uprising ever took place and the claims of signaling by a fifth column were never proven, but a suspicious atmosphere nevertheless took shape.[14]
Intensifying this atmosphere was the report, issued January 25, 1942, of a commission set up to investigate the Pearl Habor attack. The report claimed people of Japanese heritage in Hawaii helped Japan’s attack on the United States. This claim turned out to be unfounded, but at the time the report seemed to confirm wartime fears.[15]
Attitudes toward people of Japanese heritage hardened. On January 2, 1942, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California legislature declared that the Japanese were “unassimilable” and that Japanese-language schools were teaching allegiance to the Japanese emperor.[16]
Speaking to federal and state officials on January 4, General DeWitt commented, “I have little confidence that the enemy aliens are law-abiding or loyal in any sense of the word. Some of them, yes; many, no. Particularly the Japanese. I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native born Japanese—117,000—and 42,000 in California alone.”[17]
California Governor Culbert Olson similarly commented in a February 4 radio address that it was “much easier” to discern if German or Italian aliens were loyal than if Japanese aliens or Americans of Japanese heritage were.[18]
The growing paranoia spurred calls for action. On January 14, California Congressman Leland M. Ford urged the Justice Department and War Department to put “all Japanese, whether citizens or not” in “inland concentration camps.”[19] Other members of Congress from the West Coast, along with Mayor Bowron, Governor Olson, and other officials, similarly called for all people of Japanese heritage to be removed from the region. Governor Olson said that the public “feel that they are living in the midst” of enemies.[20]
California Attorney General Earl Warren said that people of Japanese heritage “may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort…Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”[21] Echoing Warren were the attorney general of Washington, who called for removing all “citizens of Japanese extraction” and the attorney general of Idaho, who called for people of Japanese heritage to “be put in concentration camps, for the remainder of the war.”[22]
Civic groups such as the American Legion and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce also called for action against people of Japanese heritage.[23] The Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West argued that “had the legislation been enacted denying citizenship to offspring of all aliens ineligible to citizenship…had Japan been denied the privilege of using California as a breeding ground for dual-citizens…the treacherous Japs would not have attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, and this country would not today be at war with Japan.”[24]
Calls for anti-Japanese measures from regional business groups such as the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, the Western Growers Protective Association, and the California Farm Bureau Federation indicate that, along with racism and wartime fears, economic rivalry also played a role in this hysteria. The Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association bluntly acknowledged such a motive, stating in May 1942:
We’ve been charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over…If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows.”[25]
The media also encouraged the anti-Japanese hysteria. The Los Angeles Times declared “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”[26]
The San Diego Union said on January 20 that “Every Japanese…should be moved out of the coastal area and to a point of safety far enough inland to nullify any inclination they may have to tamper with our safety here.”[27] A columnist for the San Francisco Examiner advocated “the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast,” adding “Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”[28]
Commentators from outside the western United States (and various points on the political spectrum) added their voices to the campaign for action against people of Japanese heritage. Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most distinguished newspaper columnist in the country, wrote on February 12 that “The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone…Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”[29]
The columnist Westbrook Pegler endorsed Lippmann’s argument, calling for anti-Japanese measures in California and adding “to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”[30] For the left-wing newspaper PM, Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, drew a cartoon that was published on February 13, captioned “Waiting for the Signal From Home…” which depicted caricatured Japanese on the West Coast as secret saboteurs for Japan.[31]
By February, 1942, General DeWitt had also embraced the idea of forcible removal. He recommended such action to his superiors, commenting “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”[32]
The President’s Decision
Whether federal officials would heed the recommendations from DeWitt and others was not immediately clear. Attorney General Francis Biddle was initially opposed to forced removal and imprisonment of all people of Japanese heritage. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Biddle emphasized that there would be “no indiscriminate, large-scale raids.”[33]
Responding to pressure from the California congressional delegation, Biddle replied that Japanese-descended citizens of the United States could not be imprisoned “unless the writ of habeas corpus were suspended.” Meeting with War Department officials on February 1, Biddle refused to recommend suspension of habeas corpus.[34]
Biddle received improbable support from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Although hardly a champion of civil liberties or racial equality, Hoover argued that large-scale action against people of Japanese heritage was unnecessary. The FBI and other intelligence agencies had already effectively suppressed any Japanese espionage, Hoover maintained. The FBI director also commented that DeWitt was “getting a bit hysterical.”[35]
Further support for Biddle’s position came from two military officers, General Mark Clark and Admiral Harold Stark, who testified before Congress in February that the chances of a Japanese attack on the West Coast were “effectively nil” and that no “proven instance of espionage after Pearl Harbor among the Japanese population in either Hawaii or the continental United States has ever been disclosed.”[36]
Biddle made the case against mass imprisonment to President Roosevelt, emphasizing that the FBI and military authorities had found no evidence of sabotage to support such action. Meanwhile, DeWitt continued to press his opposing case.[37]
Roosevelt ultimately sided with DeWitt over his own attorney general. The president issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The order directed the secretary of war to designate military areas “with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.”[38]
Why Roosevelt made this decision remains unclear. The president apparently never consulted his chief military advisers on this issue nor was the issue discussed in depth by the cabinet.[39]
Biddle later commented, on Roosevelt’s likely motives, “What must be done to defend the country must be done…the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime President.”[40] Roosevelt biographer James Macgregor Burns concurred, writing “Only a strong civil-libertarian President could have faced down [the pressure for action against people of Japanese heritage], and Roosevelt was not a strong civil libertarian.”[41]
The memory of Pearl Habor was still fresh in early 1942 and Japan was making rapid military progress in the Pacific. Such circumstances could easily make drastic action seem necessary and justified. Also, as legal scholar Geoffrey R. Stone notes, Roosevelt would have been sensitive to public opinion, which was highly anti-Japanese.[42]
Macgregor Burns characterized the whole episode as a case of “a determined and vocal minority group of regional politicians and spokesman with a definite plan united against an array of federal officials who were divided, irresolute, and not committed against racism.”[43]
Mass Internment
Roughly two months after Roosevelt’s executive order, on April 30, 1942, the military under DeWitt’s command issued the order that “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated.”[44] The “evacuation” policy would be applied to people of Japanese heritage across California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, two-thirds of them American citizens.[45] Issei and Nisei residents were ordered to bring along clothes, bedding, personal hygiene items, and utensils.[46]
Takae Washizu recalled, “Several weeks before May, soldiers came around and posted notices on telephone poles…It was sad for me to leave the place where I had been living for such a long time. Staring at the ceiling in bed at night, I wondered who would take care of my cherry tree and my house after we moved out.”[47]
Because of the strict limitations on what they could bring with them, Americans of Japanese heritage had to sell many of their possessions. One recalled,
It is difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by all of us as we watched the Caucasians coming to look over our possessions and offering such nominal amounts knowing we had no recourse but to accept whatever they were offering because we did not know what the future held for us.”[48]
After being forced from their homes, the Issei and Nisei were taken by train to “assembly centers,” which were re-purposed stockyards, fairgrounds, and racetracks. People were housed in stables. Ted Nakashima described one such center:
The resettlement center is actually a penitentiary—armed guards in towers with spotlights and deadly tommy guns, fifteen feet of barbed-wire fences, everyone confined to quarters at nine, lights out at ten o’clock. The guards are ordered to shoot anyone who approaches within twenty feet of the fences. No one is allowed to take the two-block-long hike to the latrines after nine, under any circumstances…
The food and sanitation problems are the worst. We have had absolutely no fresh meat, vegetables or butter since we came here. Mealtime queues extend for blocks; standing in a rainswept line, feet in the mud, waiting for the scant portions of canned wieners and boiled potatoes, hash for breakfast…Milk only for the kids…
As I write, I can remember our little bathroom—light coral walls. My wife painting them, and the spilled paint in her hair. The open towel shelving and the pretty shower curtains which we put up the day before we left. How sanitary and clean we left it for the airline pilot and his young wife who are now enjoying the fruits of our labor.[49]
These assembly centers were way stations for the Issei and Nisei’s ultimate destinations: 10 internment camps in the western and central United States, run by a civilian agency known as the War Relocation Authority.[50] The camps were Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Minidoka in Idaho, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Topaz in Utah, Amache in Colorado, and Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas.[51]
The internment camps were typically located in deserts or swampland and conditions were little better than in the assembly centers.[52] One internee described the landscape around the camp: “No houses were in sight, no trees or anything green—only scrubby sagebrush and an occasional low cactus, and mostly dry, baked earth.”[53]
Monica Sone recalled, “We felt as if we were standing in a gigantic sand-mixing machine as the sixty-mile gale lifted the loose earth up into the sky, obliterating everything…Sand filled our mouths and nostrils and stung our faces and hands like a thousand darting needles.”[54]
A young Nisei man interned at Topaz commented, “The dust gets in our hair. Every place we go we cannot escape the dust. Inside of our houses, in the laundry, in the latrines, in the mess halls, dust and more dust, dust everywhere.”[55]
The imprisoned Issei and Nisei were housed in barracks divided into four or six rooms, each room typically 20 feet by 20 feet. A room contained a cot and blanket for each person housed there, a pot-bellied stove, and a single light. One of these rooms often housed an entire family of as many as seven people. Some internees made makeshift furniture out of scrap lumber.[56]
Meals were served in mess halls. The camps also had public toilets, showers, and a central laundry. Like the assembly centers, the camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers.[57]
While imprisoned, the Issei and Nisei tried to keep up the routines of normal life. The internees variously grew vegetables, prepared food in the mess halls, made furniture for the camps’ administration buildings, or worked as doctors, barbers, or in other occupations. Camp authorities managed and paid for internees’ work, with the typical wage being $16 a month, plus a small clothing allowance.[58]
A 1944 Fortune article on the camps observed
A doctor distinguished in his profession, who lived with grace and charm in a decently comfortable home before the war, is to day [sic] huddled in a small room with all his family. He practices his profession for $19 at the center hospital, serving under a Caucasian of lesser accomplishments, hired for considerably more money. A man who spent twenty years building up his own florist business or commission house, or who operated a large vegetable farm in one of California’s valleys, is merely “stoop labor” on the center’s acreage.[59]
Children went to school in the camps: 7,220 graduated high school. One child, the future actor and activist George Takei, later recalled, “I was too young to understand, but I remember soldiers carrying rifles, and I remember being afraid.”[60]
One paradox of this mass internment is that other people of Japanese heritage, whom one might have thought presented greater grounds for suspicion, were treated better during the war years than the Issei and Nisei from the western mainland United States.
Hawaii had a far larger population of Japanese-descended people than the mainland states and was the location of an actual Japanese attack. Yet no mass internment of these Issei and Nisei occurred.[61]
The different approach in Hawaii may have been partly because the territory was under direct martial law for much of the war, which could have allayed fears about security.[62] As on the mainland, economic concerns may have played a role in Hawaii, although with a different result: people of Japanese heritage were simply too important to Hawaii’s economy, so military and business interests resisted their removal.[63]
Meanwhile, the Japanese aliens and other aliens from Axis nations who were detained after war broke out received, at Attorney General Biddle’s insistence, formal hearings. As a result, many were gradually paroled or released over the following years.[64]
Resistance to Internment
Some people of Japanese heritage defied the authorities in various ways. Some did so from within the internment camps. Starting in February 1943, internees were required to fill out questionnaires that asked them if they would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America” and asked draft-age men if they were willing to serve in the armed forces.[65]
Of the 21,000 internees who were men eligible for military service, more than 4,000 refused to serve, or gave qualified answers to the relevant question, or did not answer the question at all. One man who refused to serve, Albert Nakai, commented “our legal rights were violated and I wanted to fight back.”[66]
Frank Emi, who was interned along with his wife and two children at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, recalled “The more I looked at [the questionnaire] the more disgusted I became. We were treated more like enemy aliens than American citizens. And now this.” Emi responded by posting a note on the mess hall door: “Under the present conditions and circumstances, I am unable to answer these questions.”[67]
Emi and others organized the Fair Play Committee within the camp and asserted that they would cooperate with the draft only if they were given back their rights as citizens. Ultimately 300 Nisei men would follow the Committee’s lead and refuse to cooperate with the draft. Emi and six other resistance leaders were arrested and convicted of conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act and counseling others to resist the draft. They were sentenced to four years in federal prison.[68]
Joseph Kurihara, a native-born American of Japanese heritage and a World War I veteran, was too old to face the draft but found other ways to resist. Imprisoned in the Manzanar camp in California, he led other internees in demanding fair wages for their work and trying to form a union.[69]
One unusual episode of resistance to internment was the case of Gordon Yamada. A conscientious objector, Yamada had been confined since even before the Pearl Harbor attack at a Civilian Public Service (CPS) camp in Oregon, where those who refused to participate in the military did alternative forms of service.[70]
Following the decision to intern people of Japanese descent, government authorities ordered Yamada transferred from the CPS camp to an internment camp. Yamada’s colleagues at the Oregon CPS protested the order and said they would engage in nonviolent resistance if Yamada were taken to an internment camp. On June 30, 1942, one camp protestor sent a letter to 40 other CPS camps declaring his and the other camp residents’ opposition to racism and advocating the cancellation of the internment order.[71]
The protests apparently worked. Yamada was eventually transferred to a different CPS camp but was never placed in an internment camp specifically for Americans of Japanese heritage.[72]
Going to the Supreme Court
Some chose to challenge internment by legal means, and four of these challenges made their way to the US Supreme Court.
In March 1942, prior to forced removal and internment, General DeWitt imposed a curfew on aliens from Axis nations and on Americans of Japanese heritage. Minoru Yasui, a lawyer from Portland, Oregon, decided to challenge the curfew. He was initially arrested for not obeying the curfew and then later detained by military police for refusing to relocate to an internment camp.[73]
Explaining his stance, Yasui commented,
It was my belief that no military authority has the right to subject any United States citizen to any requirement that does not equally apply to all other U.S. citizens. If we believe in America, if we believe in equality and democracy, if we believe in law and justice, then each of us, when we see or believe errors are being made, has an obligation to make every effort to correct them.[74]
Yasui was tried in June 1942 and sent to the Minidoka camp in Idaho while he awaited the verdict. In November, he was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. While in prison, he spent substantial time in solitary confinement.[75]
Another challenge to internment came from Gordon Hirabayashi of Washington. A pacifist, Hirabayashi said that “As an American citizen, I wanted to uphold the principles of the Constitution, and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them. It was not acceptable to me to be less than a full citizen in a white man’s country.”[76]
He refused to follow the curfew and later turned himself in to the FBI declaring he would not obey the removal order either. Hirabayashi was convicted in October 1942 and received a lighter sentence than Yasui of six months in prison.[77]
Appeals brought Yasui and Hirabayashi’s cases to the Supreme Court, which considered both cases in May 1943. The Court ruled against both men on June 21, 1943. The Court notably chose to focus exclusively on Yasui and Hirabayashi’s violation of the curfew order, sidestepping the question of the legality of the removal of people of Japanese heritage to internment camps.[78]
Chief Justice Harlan Fisk Stone, delivering the court’s opinion in the Hirabayashi case, wrote that
Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people….[But] it by no means follows that, in dealing with the perils of war, Congress and the Executive are wholly precluded from taking into account those facts and circumstances which are relevant to measures for our national defense…and which may in fact place citizens of one ancestry in a different category from others.[79]
The Court’s judgment on both cases was unanimous.[80] Justice Frank Murphy wanted to dissent on the Hirbayashi decision but was persuaded not to do so by his colleague Justice Felix Frankfurter. Before the verdict, Frankfurter wrote to Murphy, “[D]o you really think it is conducive to the things you care about, including the great reputation of this Court, to suggest that everybody is out of step except [you?]”[81]
Justice Murphy wrote a concurring opinion that nevertheless expressed doubts about the ruling. He commented,
While this Court sits, it has the inescapable duty of seeing that the mandates of the Constitution are obeyed. That duty exists in time of war as well as in time of peace, and in its performance we must not forget that few indeed have been the invasions upon essential liberties which have not been accompanied by pleas of urgent necessity.”[82]
Not long after the Court’s verdict, Yasui was “released” from prison back into the Minidoka internment camp.[83] Hirabayashi would end up spending a year in prison on the separate charge of refusing to cooperate with the wartime draft.[84]
The Supreme Court would consider two similar legal challenges the following year. One would become the most famous of these cases, perhaps because it dealt directly with the legality of internment rather than merely the curfew order.
One legal challenge arose from the case of Mitsuye Endo, a clerical worker with the California Department of Motor Vehicles who had been interned. She petitioned for a writ of habeas corpuson the grounds that she was a loyal American citizen and that her internment was therefore unlawful.[85]
The other challenge was by Fred Korematsu. A California shipyard welder, Korematsu had tried to conceal his heritage, even undergoing plastic surgery to look less Japanese. Although his family was interned, he did not report for internment. Korematsu was eventually picked up by the police and prosecuted for disobeying the order to “evacuate” people of Japanese heritage from the western United States.[86]
The Supreme Court ruled on the Endo and Korematsu cases on December 18, 1944. The Court upheld Fred Korematsu’s conviction by a lower court and, by extension, ratified the legality of the internment policy.[87]
Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black commented
We cannot reject as unfounded the judgment of the military authorities…that there were disloyal members of the [Japanese-American] population, whose number and strength could not be precisely and quickly ascertained…Like curfew, exclusion of those of Japanese origin was deemed necessary because of the presence of an unascertained number of disloyal members of the group…
[W[e are not unmindful of the hardships imposed…upon a large group of American citizens. But hardship are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure.[88]
Unlike the Yasui and Hirabayashi cases, the Court’s judgment on the Korematsu case was not unanimous. Three justices dissented.
Justice Owen Roberts wrote that it was unconstitutional for the government to impose “imprisonment in a concentration camp” on someone for “his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition toward the United States.” Justice Robert Jackson wrote that the Court should not “be asked to execute a military expedient that has no place in law under the Constitution.”[89]
Justice Murphy, who had wanted to dissent on the Hirabayashi case, dissented on Korematsu, writing
The judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so “immediate, imminent, and impending” as not to admit of delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 banishing from a prescribed area of the Pacific Coast “all persons of Japanese ancestry”…does not meet that test…
No adequate reason is given for the failure to treat these Japanese Americans on an individual basis by holding investigations and hearings to separate the loyal from the disloyal, as was done in the case of persons of German and Italian ancestry…It is asserted merely that the loyalties of this group “were unknown and time was of the essence”…
[T]here was no adequate proof that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military and naval intelligence services did not have the espionage and sabotage situation well in hand…
I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism.[90]
The final case considered by the Court, of Mitsuye Endo, was the outlier among the four. US authorities did not contest Endo’s assertion that she was a loyal American citizen and so the Court ruled that she was “entitled to an unconditional release.”[91]
Although legally significant, both the Korematsu and Endo decisions came at a time when the question of internment had become far less practically pressing. The day before the decisions, December 17, 1944, the Roosevelt administration announced it was ending the internment policy.[92]
The administration presumably decided to end internment because by late 1944 the prospect of Japan attacking the United States again was a distant one. Soon the tables would be decisively turned, and Japan would be the nation threatened by a possible invasion by the United States.
However, politics may have played a role in the timing of the policy change. Officials within the Roosevelt administration had been arguing for an end of internment for some time before December 1944. The previous December, Biddle argued loyal Japanese Americans should be released, and he was supported by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. By May 1944, they were joined by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who argued that internment could be ended “without danger to defense considerations.”[93]
Roosevelt deferred immediate action, though, commenting that “the whole problem, for the sake of internal quiet, should be handled gradually.” This delay may have been because Roosevelt wanted to wait on ending internment until after the November 1944 presidential election, so as not to upset voters in the western United States.[94]
The Aftermath: Regret and Reparations
After release from the internment camps, many internees returned to California. One notable exception was Joseph Kurihara, the veteran and labor organizer. Following his release from Manzanar, Kurihara decided to renounce his American citizenship.[95]
“America, the standard bearer of democracy had committed the most heinous crime in its history, imprinting in my mind…the dread that even democracy is a demon in time of war,” Kurihara commented. He “swore to become a Jap one hundred percent, and never do another day’s work to help this country fight this war.”[96]
In February 1946, Kurihara emigrated to Japan, despite never previously having been to that country. He did express a lingering hope for the country of his birth, though, commenting “It is my sincere desire to see this government of the United States some day repair the wrong in full.”[97]
Over the following decades, the US government did make slow progress toward fulfilling Kurihara’s wish. Congress made a modest effort, through the Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, to compensate internees for property losses. Ten years later, though, only about 26,000 former internees had received any compensation.[98]
Meanwhile, Congress in 1952 repealed the 1790 Naturalization Law that prevented non-white immigrants from becoming citizens. By 1965, 46,000 Japanese immigrants had become US citizens.[99]
Thirty years after the war, US President Gerald Ford called internment “wrong” and said Americans must “resolve that this kind of action never again be repeated.”[100] In 1980, Congress established a commission made up of former members of Congress, former Supreme Court justices, and others to review the internment policy. After reviewing hundreds of documents and hearing from hundreds of witnesses, the commission concluded in 1983 that internment was a product of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”[101]
In 1984, a federal judge set aside Fred Korematsu’s conviction. In 1987, the courts did the same to Gordon Hirabayashi’s conviction. The following year, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which officially condemned internment as a “grave injustice” that was “carried out without adequate security reasons.” The act offered an official presidential apology and payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee. Ten years later, 80,000 people had been paid $1.6 billion in reparations.[102]
Looking Forward
Eighty years after the Korematsu decision, with this unjust policy having been formally condemned by the US government, internment may now seem a distant, if unhappy, historical episode. The episode may still be relevant today, however.
Contemporary events in the United States carry echoes of the circumstances that brought about the internment policy. Anti-Asian hate crimes have risen in recent years, perhaps driven by a mixture of fears provoked by Covid-19 and increasing tensions between China and the United States.[103] Meanwhile, activists and the media have revealed how undocumented immigrants have been imprisoned in inhumane conditions.[104]
Moreover, the United States is currently awaiting the inauguration of a president-elect, Donald Trump, with a long-standing pattern of pandering to racism and xenophobia.[105] Trump has promised, in his next administration, to use the military to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.[106]
Some mixture of international tensions, fear of immigrants, and a willingness to resort to militarized solutions could produce a situation like the internment of people of Japanese heritage eight decades ago. Americans must be on their guard about preserving civil liberties.
Gordon Hirabayashi, whose defiance of the government’s policies took him all the way to the Supreme Court, offered a simple but sound reflection on his case decades later: “Injustice took place, and the nation [eventually] said, ‘They made an error.’ There’s nothing much you can do beyond that except to take that to heart and try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”[107]
Notes
[1] Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 287.
[2] Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little Brown, 2000), 150.
[3] Ibid., 141, 149.
[4] Ibid., 149.
[5] Ibid., 112, 150.
[6] Ibid., 151-152.
[7] Stone, Perilous Times, 287-288.
[8] Takaki, Double Victory, 148.
[9] Stone, Perilous Times, 283-284.
[10] Ibid., 285, 288-289.
[11] Ibid., 288.
[12] Takaki, Double Victory, 144.
[13] Stone, Perilous Times, 285, 288-289.
[14] Ibid., 290.
[15] Ibid., 291-292.
[16] Ibid., 291.
[17] Takaki, Double Victory, 145-146.
[18] Stone, Perilous Times, 292.
[19] Ibid., 291.
[20] Stone, Perilous Times, 292; Takaki, Double Victory, 147.
[21] Takaki, Double Victory, 147.
[22] Stone, Perilous Times, 294.
[23] Ibid., 294.
[24] Takaki, Double Victory, 146.
[25] Ibid., 146-147.
[26] Ibid., 146.
[27] Ibid., 146.
[28] Stone, Perilous Times, 292.
[29] Quoted in Editors of Time-Life Books, This Fabulous Century: Volume 5: 1940-1950 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969), 203.
[30] James Macgregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom: 1940-1945 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), 216.
[31] Richard H. Minear, “Dr. Seuss, 1940-47, and 2017,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 15, 2017, https://apjjf.org/2017/16/minear.
[32] Takaki, Double Victory, 147.
[33] Stone, Perilous Times, 290.
[34] Ibid., 293.
[35] Stone, Perilous Times, 289, 293; Takaki, Double Victory, 145.
[36] Stone, Perilous Times, 295.
[37] Ibid., 294.
[38] Takaki, Double Victory, 148.
[39] Stone, Perilous Times, 294.
[40] Ibid., 296.
[41] Macgregor Burns, Roosevelt, 216.
[42] Stone, Perilous Times, 296.
[43] Macgregor Burns, Roosevelt, 215.
[44] Takaki, Double Victory, 153.
[45] Stone, Perilous Times, 287.
[46] Takaki, Double Victory, 153.
[47] Ibid., 153.
[48] Ibid., 154.
[49] Ted Nakashima, “Concentration Camp: U.S. Style,” The New Republic, June 15, 1942, reprinted in Reporting World War II: American Journalism, 1938-1946 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2001), 162-163.
[50] The Editors of Fortune, “Issei, Nisei, Kibei,” Fortune, April 1944, reprinted in Reporting World War II, 426.
[51] Takaki, Double Victory, 155.
[52] Stone, Perilous Times, 287; Takaki, Double Victory, 155.
[53] Takaki, Double Victory, 155
[54] Ibid., 155-156.
[55] Editors of Time-Life Books, This Fabulous Century, 205.
[56] Editors of Fortune, “Issei, Nisei, Kibei,” 428; Takaki, Double Victory, 156.
[57] Editors of Fortune, “Issei, Nisei, Kibei,” 429; Takaki, Double Victory, 156.
[58] Editors of Fortune, “Issei, Nisei, Kibei,” 430.
[59] Ibid., 430-431.
[60] Editors of Time-Life Books, This Fabulous Century, 206; Takaki, Double Victory, 156.
[61] Stone, Perilous Times, 295.
[62] See “Martial Law in Hawaii,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 17, 2024, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Martial_law_in_Hawaii/.
[63] Takaki, Double Victory, 137-140.
[64] Stone, Perilous Times, 285-286.
[65] Takaki, Double Victory, 157.
[66] Ibid., 157.
[67] Ibid., 157-158.
[68] Ibid., 158.
[69] Ibid., 160.
[70] “Conscientious Objectors,” The Suyama Project, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, accessed December 17, 2024, https://www.aasc.ucla.edu/storybooks/suyama/ca_conscientiousobjectors.aspx
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid.
[73] “Yasui v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 17, 2024, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Yasui_v._United_States/.
[74] Takaki, Double Victory, 153-154.
[75] “Yasui v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia.
[76] “Hirabayashi v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 17, 2024, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Hirabayashi_v._United_States/; Stone, Perilous Times, 297-298; Takaki, Double Victory, 154.
[77] “Hirabayashi v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia; Stone, Perilous Times, 297-298.
[78] “Hirabayashi v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia; “Yasui v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia.
[79] Stone, Perilous Times, 298.
[80] “Hirabayashi v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia; “Yasui v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia.
[81] Stone, Perilous Times, 298-299.
[82] Ibid., 298-299.
[83] “Yasui v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia.
[84] “Gordon Hirabayashi,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 17, 2024, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Gordon_Hirabayashi/.
[85] Stone, Perilous Times, 302.
[86] Ibid., 299.
[87] Ibid., 299.
[88] Ibid., 300.
[89] Ibid., 300.
[90] Ibid., 301-302.
[91] Ibid., 302.
[92] Ibid., 302.
[93] Ibid., 302.
[94] Ibid., 302-303.
[95] Takaki, Double Victory, 161.
[96] Ibid., 161.
[97] Ibid., 161.
[98] Stone, Perilous Times, 303.
[99] Takaki, Double Victory, 220-221.
[100] Stone, Perilous Times, 305.
[101] Ibid., 305-306
[102] Stone, Perilous Times, 306-307; Takaki, Double Victory, 229.
[103] See “A Cause of Prejudice at Home? The Dangers of Anti-China Attitudes,” “A Cold War Comes Home? Anti-Asian Racism in Light of US-China Hostility,” and “Sickness is the Health of the State? Civil Liberties and Conflict during a Pandemic.”
[104] Emily Baumgaertner, “Federal Records Show Increasing Use of Solitary Confinement for Immigrants,” New York Times, February 6, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/health/solitary-confinement-immigrants-us.html.
[105] For some highlights of Trump’s record in this area, see ABC News, “What Donald Trump Has Said About Mexico and Vice Versa,” August 31, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-mexico-vice-versa/story?id=41767704; David J. Bier, “A Dozen Times Trump Equated his Travel Ban with a Muslim Ban,” Cato Institute, August 14, 2017, https://www.cato.org/blog/dozen-times-trump-equated-travel-ban-muslim-ban; Andrew Howard, “Trump Says He Will Remove TPS and Deport Haitian Migrants in Springfield,” Politico, October 3, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/03/trump-haitian-migrants-deport-00182328; Merlyn Thomas & Mike Wendling, “Trump Repeats Baseless Claim about Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets,” BBC, September 15, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko.
[106] Charlie Savage and Michael Gold, “Trump Confirms Plans to Use the Military to Assist in Mass Deportations,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/us/politics/trump-military-mass-deportation.html.
[107] Gordon Hirabayashi interview, Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 17, 2024, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-denshovh-hgordon-05-0015-1/.
© 2024 John Whitehead. All rights reserved.
Peacemaking for Life 
Great topic, and explanation!
Thank you! I really appreciate it.