AMERICA'S SHAME: THE INTERNING OF JAPANESE-AMERICANS DURING WW2
Under the guise of national security, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most American citizens, were sent to internment camps.
On December 7th, 1941, a 21-year-old young man named Fred Korematsu was spending a quiet Sunday morning in the hills above Oakland, California with his girlfriend, Ida Boitano, listening to the car radio.
"All of a sudden, the music stopped and they announced that Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese airplanes," he would recall later. "At first I thought it was a dream. I said to Ida, 'We better get back home.'"
The next day, the United States declared war on Japan.
Fred T. Korematsu
photo credit: Japanese American National Museum
In 1941, about 120,000 people of Japanese heritage lived in the U.S., mostly in the West. With America suddenly plunged into war with the Japanese Empire, they were instantly seen as potential spies and saboteurs. Anti-Japanese racism was not new. Immigrants were forbidden to become naturalized U.S. citizens. California banned them from buying or leasing farm land. Quotas initiated in 1924 ended Asian immigration. With war, those sentiments intensified.
In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing military officials to bar anyone from the designated military zones which covered much of the West Coast. In theory, that meant any civilian. In practice, it applied only to people of Japanese heritage.
Korematsu lived in the city of San Leandro, east of Oakland, which was within Military Area No. 1. But he wouldn’t leave.
In May, a 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was imposed on all "enemy aliens" and Japanese-Americans. Next they were ordered to report to assembly centers for removal to what became known as internment camps. Really, they were concentration camps.
Korematsu, who was Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American, born in Oakland, California, had registered for the draft and tried unsuccessfully to enlist in the Navy. After Pearl Harbor, he lost his job as a welder. But he found other work and was determined to remain in the Bay Area. He changed his name and tried to pass himself off as being of Spanish and Hawaiian descent.
On May 30th, 1942, a police officer stopped him on the street and he was arrested “on suspicion of being Japanese."*
Korematsu was taken to the county jail where he remained for several weeks. From there, he was transferred for processing at the racetrack south of San Francisco that was temporarily serving as an assembly center for Japanese-Americans. His parents were already there. From there, he was sent to a camp in Utah.
Fred Korematsu and his family
photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Years later, Korematsu would say, "To be pushed into evacuation, threatened with punishment because you look like the enemy is wrong. I felt that as an American citizen I had as much right as anyone else. I thought it wasn't fair. I thought it was wrong."
More than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, were placed in ten camps in the West, Colorado and Arkansas. They were purposefully located in remote, rural areas where it was brutally hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. The barracks-like quarters were at best basic; at worst, awful. The camps were surrounded by fencing and watched over by armed guards. Two-thirds of the people there were American citizens whose only offense was being of Japanese ancestry.
Manzanar Camp, 1942
photo credit: Japanese American National Museum
In early May 1942, a University of Washington undergraduate named Gordon Hirabayashi, an American citizen of Japanese descent, walked in the FBI office in Seattle and told them he had no intention of obeying the curfew or reporting for transfer to an internment camp. He was arrested.
Hirabayashi would spend five months in jail awaiting trial. In October 1942, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona where he languished while he appealed his conviction.
The next year, his appeal reached before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943. The high court unanimously upheld his conviction (as well as that of a Portland, Oregon man, Minoru Yasui, who had also defied the curfew and appealed his conviction.)
The Supreme Court heard Korematsu's case in late 1944. He, too, lost.
In the majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States, Justice Hugo Black, who would later become one of the liberal titans of the Earl Warren court, upheld the conviction, writing that "the right of the military to decide that "the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily."
Three justices dissented. Justice Frank Murphy penned a searing rebuttal.
"Such exclusion goes over the very brink of constitutional power and falls into the ugly abyss of racism," Murphy wrote. "I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatsoever in our democratic way of life."
The same day, December 18, 1944, the same Supreme Court ruled 6-to-3 in a case involving a Sacramento woman, Mitsuye Endo, that people of Japanese descent who were deemed loyal could not, in fact, be kept in the camps. In 1945, the government began releasing the Japanese-American detainees. Fred Korematsu went to Detroit. He married, became a structural draftsman and moved back to California. He and his wife had two children.
After the war ended, many of the now-former detainees returned to the West Coast but many no longer had homes or businesses.
“The speed of the (1942) evacuation forced many homeowners and businessmen to sell out quickly; total property loss is estimated at $1.3 billion, and net income loss at $2.7 billion (in 1983 dollars)," according to the National Archives.
People awaiting buses to assembly center, Los Angeles
photo credit: Japanese American National Museum
Gary Moriwaki, a New York City lawyer, says that when the war began his American-born mother, Hana Uyeno, was living in Seattle with her parents, a sister and a brother. They were all sent to the Tule Lake camp in California.
When the family was released in 1944, they returned to Seattle but their nursery and dry cleaning business were gone. They had to start all over. Moriwaki's mother moved to New York.
Moriwaki's father, who was from Southern California, had ended up in a camp in Colorado. After his release, he went to New York. There he met Hana and they married.
Moriwaki says his father was largely unaffected by his experience. But his mother became consumed with an unquenchable rage.
"(She) never talked about it. Totally bitter," he said. "Bitter to the day she died. She was a woman without a country. She said to me, 'Never trust white people.'"
Hana Uyeno at Tule Lake camp
photo credit: J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
There is a photo of his mother at the Tule Lake camp where she was assigned as a job as a clerk.
"She is smiling," says Moriwaki, "But she was not smiling inside."
After he was released, Gordon Hirabayashi returned to Seattle, earned a doctorate at the University of Washington and taught sociology for many years at a Canadian university. Many years later, he said, "The Constitution doesn’t mean anything unless it can stand up in a time of crisis. In 1943, the whole system of government failed us."
When Korematsu's daughter, Karen, was 16, she was in social studies class during a discussion about the detention of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. She had never heard about this before. A classmate mentioned the Korematsu Supreme Court case, but Karen didn't immediately connect it to her father.
"After class, I asked her what's this about," Karen told me. "She said, 'It's about your dad.' I said, 'No way.' When I came home, I told [my father] what I had learned. He said it happened a long time ago and what he did he thought was right and the government was wrong. It was like someone socked me in the stomach. I could see the hurt on his face. We didn't talk about it again until his case was reopened in 1983."
Armed with newly discovered evidence that Japanese-Americans were never a national security threat during the war, lawyers for Korematsu went to court. Forty-one years after he was found guilty of defying the military's orders, his conviction was vacated by a federal judge.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
That same year, Moriwaki's mom died. In the 1980s, the Japanese-Americans who had been placed in camps during the war were each awarded $20,000 in government compensation. She had put the money in the bank but she never touched it.
"Blood money," Moriwaki calls it.
Hirabayashi's conviction was overturned in 1987. He died in 2012 at the age of 93, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom a few months later by President Barack Obama.
Fred Korematsu wears Presidential Medal of Freedom
Photo credit: Fred T. Korematsu Institute
Korematsu died in 2005. He was 86. This week, on his birthday, January 30th, New Jersey became the sixth state to mark what is officially called Fred Korematsu Day for Civil Liberties and the Constitution.
Karen Korematsu, who now heads the Fred T. Korematsu Institute in California [https://korematsuinstitute.org], said, "He so believed in civil liberties and the Constitution. That's what we hope people remember."
(cover photo credit: Japanese American National Museum
*Smithsonian Institution magazine
Thank you for this story.
Interesting to read Justice Frank Murphy’s opinion. I don’t remember learning anything about him. Well-said!
I've talked about this with my Japanese friend Jeff who I play tennis with. His family was interned. We made the intersection between jazz and the internment as his uncle (interned as a boy), turned into a huge Coltrane fan. The blues, go figure...