The Japanese American Internment How Wartime Internment Affected the Japanese American Community Name: Sophie Berger Student number: 10440208 Email: [email protected] Institution: University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Master Thesis Thesis Supervisor: Professor R. Janssens Date: 17 October 2014 Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2 Chapter 1. Being Japanese-American in pre-war United States .............................................. 13 1.1 Introduction to Japanese immigration to the US ............................................................ 13 1.2 Public sentiment, prejudice and discrimination ............................................................. 14 1.3 The Japanese-American experience ............................................................................... 17 1.3.1 Issei .......................................................................................................................... 18 1.3.2 Nisei ......................................................................................................................... 20 1.3.3 Kibei ........................................................................................................................ 22 1.4. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 23 2.1 Public reactions and government actions following Pearl Harbor ................................. 24 2.2 Japanese American reactions to evacuation ................................................................... 28 2.2.1 Japanese American Citizen League ......................................................................... 29 2.2.2. Organized and individual resistance to evacuation. ............................................... 32 2.3 Attitudes in Internment Camps: Friction within the community ................................... 33 2.3.1 Conditions in the camps .......................................................................................... 33 2.3.1 Americanization/Japanization ................................................................................. 35 2.3.2 Japanese American Citizen League in the camps .................................................... 36 2.3.3 Geographical tension ............................................................................................... 37 2.3.4 Loyalty Questionnaire ............................................................................................. 38 2.3.5. Segregating the camps: the loyal camps ................................................................. 41 2.3.6. Segregating the camps: Tule Lake.......................................................................... 44 2.4. Closing of the camps ..................................................................................................... 48 2.5. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 49 Chapter 3. Postwar attitudes and the reintegration of Japanese Americans ........................... 51 3.1. Postwar attitudes of the American public ..................................................................... 51 3.1.1. Geographical difference in reception of Japanese Americans ............................... 53 3.2. Experience of living in postwar America ...................................................................... 55 3.3 Sense of Belonging........................................................................................................ 58 3.4 JACL efforts in postwar years ........................................................................................ 59 3.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 61 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 62 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 65 1 Introduction Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, mass hysteria broke out on the West Coast. Many Americans living there accused Japanese Americans of conspiring with the Japanese enemy by helping them with another attack on American soil. Although these suspicions were highly irrational and unfounded, anti-Japanese sentiment grew within American society during this period. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 granting the military to establish “military exclusion zones” from which people of Japanese ancestry were banned, for fear of their disloyalty towards the United States. The original policy of the exclusion zones evolved in the months that followed the evacuation, or rather relocation, of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast.1 Two-thirds of these relocated people were second generation Japanese Americans, or Nisei, thus holding official American citizenship. Several camps were hastily set up in remote areas east of the West Coast, some of them serving as temporary relocation centers, others as detention centers where many Japanese Americans were to remain until the end of the war. Although life in these camps is by no means comparable with other concentration- or detention centers that were set up around the world during World War Two, these camps did serve as temporary prisons where the internees were housed in rows of barracks in camp fields surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, while their loyalty was being questioned. Some Japanese Americans were given the opportunity to leave the camps, either to work in the labor force, to serve in the US army or to study. The majority of internees however, spent years in the camps until they were closed at the end of the war. After the war, this minority group had to reestablish itself in American society. How they did this, varied between the two generations, who both found different ways to cope with their new situation. War hysteria in society after a foreign attack is not uncommon, but why was the loyalty of this particular minority group called into question much more than that of Italian- or German Americans? This has much to do with public opinion held at that time and the historical perception of Asians in the United States. It is worthwhile to analyze where this 1 Numbers of Japanese American evacuees vary between 110.000 and 120.000, depending on the source. For this work I will work with the estimate of 120.000, consistent to numbers used in WRA’s official report Personal Justice Denied and the Densho Archive. 2 perception came from and how the Japanese Americans reacted to this before, during and after the war. How did the Americans determine whether someone was loyal to the United States or not? And how did public opinion and anti-Japanese sentiment shape the actual sense of loyalty held by the Japanese Americans? Being treated like an enemy in your own country and by the government might lead to a detachment from your country, but how did the Japanese internees react to this situation? And how did they deal with their position in society after the war was over? But most importantly, in what ways did American society enable or disable the Japanese Americans to integrate in society? The key element in my research is the use, meaning and value of the term loyalty. The American government and many of its citizens feared and distrusted the entire group of Japanese American living on the West Coast. Many felt that being of Japanese ancestry meant being loyal to Japan. The internment camps served a dual purpose: getting rid of the supposed threat this minority group posed, and giving this group a chance to prove their loyalty towards the United States. In this work I will focus on the problematic use of the word loyalty and will argue that the Unites States government employed a term for its wartime policy that could never be proved and was therefore never valid. The United States government used the term loyalty to base its entire evacuation and internment policy on, while loyalty could neither be measured nor proven, putting the Japanese Americans in an impossible position, during and after World War Two. Since no one could ever truly prove its loyalty, Japanese Americans had virtually no way to put accusations, assumptions and prejudice behind them and show the American public they too, were and felt American, which caused their problematic position in America’s West Coast society. While many scholars have analyzed the Japanese American internment and the many aspects surrounding the topic, no scholars so far have addressed the problematic use of the word loyalty in the government’s wartime internment policy and its implications for the Japanese American community. A recent Dutch study has addressed the use of the word loyalty quite extensively in a report Identification with the Netherlands written by the WRR (Scientific Council for Government Policy). This report argues that the process of identification is much more dynamic and flexible that commonly understood. The WRR recognizes that people can identify themselves through three different ways and defines these forms as: functional, normative and emotional identification. The first is related to how people identify themselves according to their function