I am yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese-American. Although it's occasionally irritating to be asked if I speak Japanese (I don't, though I took a year of it in college), or if I've ever been to Japan (I have, for a week in 8th grade on a sister-city exchange program – I've also been to most of the countries in western Europe but no one seems to ask about that), for most of my life, being Japanese-American wasn’t something I thought very much about. By the time your family has been here for four generations, it seems pretty natural that most people are going to consider themselves more American than anything else.More recently, I have begun to find a new appreciation for the ways in which my heritage has enriched my life. There is, however, one aspect of my heritage that has always been important to me, in part because it is something that is terrifyingly unique to the Japanese-American community.
America's Concentration Camps
Between 1941 and 1945, after the bombing of Pearl harbor, the United States government forcibly removed over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the Pacific coast and placed the majority in 10 concentration camps in the western interior of the country*. Over two-thirds of these prisoners where American citizens (that number would have been even higher if laws did not prevent the first-generation, Japanese-born Issei from becoming naturalized citizens the way that many Europeans were). Most were forced to sell their homes, businesses and possessions at great loss, if they were fortunate enough to receive any compensation at all.* A note to those who object to the use of the term concentration camp because of the connection to the Nazi death camps: I do not mean to imply that the U.S. government ever subjected Japanese-Americans to anything like the horrors of the death camps. However, a concentration camp is, by definition, a camp where prisoners of war or political prisoners are detained, and this is what these camps were. The American government generally used the term 'relocation centers' to minimize the horrible reality that these were indeed prisons; many Issei and Nisei today still refer to 'camp', as if it were a child's summer getaway. The government often used such euphemisms to avoid the reality of their actions. In another example, American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry were referred to as 'non-aliens', as if the government could deny their citizenship simply by avoiding the word. As stated in a fact sheet at the Japanese American National Museum, "This extensive and persistent use of euphemisms not only worked to sidetrack legal and constitutional challenges but, more insidiously, functioned to gain the cooperation of its victims as well as deceive the American and worldwide public."Under the pretext of Japanese Americans being a threat to national security, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the War Department the authority to establish areas from which any and all persons could be excluded. Although Executive Order 9066 did not specifically refer to persons of Japanese ancestry, the Japanese American community was the only distinguishable group affected by the order.To me, it is important to point out that the Japanese-American relocation would not have happened if not for the racism of the government and the majority of Americans at that time. Although the stated reasons of the time were 'military necessity' and the war with Japan, the United States was also at war with Germany and Italy and although there were some Germans and Italians who were interned for short periods of time, they were not, as a group, incarcerated indiscriminately. The Japanese-American community would not have been imprisoned if they had not already been subject to anti-Asian and anti-Japanese sentiment since the turn of the century and had they not been easily distinguished, physically, from their white neighbors. As for national defense, during World War II there were 10 people convicted of spying for Japan; they were all white. And yet, Lieutenant General J.L. DeWitt, in the most twisted bit of logic ever, stated, "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." That such sentiments were taken seriously is an indication of the strong anti-Asian feelings that already existed.
One of the great ironies of the internment experience is that although the Japanese-American community was supposedly imprisoned for national security reasons, American-born Nisei were later allowed to join the army. Their unit, the 100th Battalian/442nd Regimental Combat Team (to which my maternal grandfather belonged), became one of the most decorated units in history. For more info, see Katonk.com. The 442nd has recently been 'immortalized' with a commemorative Special Collection G.I.Joe doll!
In 1982, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded, "Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity. The broad historical causes... were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." On August 10, 1988 President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law providing for an official government apology and $20,000 for surviving inmates alive on the day the bill was signed.
My paternal grandfather received his redress payment in 1990. He did not keep any of the money but gave part to his children and grandchildren, and the rest to charity. Along with the money he sent to me, he sent a copy of the letter from then-President Bush and also this letter (in part):
"You are given part of the money I’ve received from the U.S. government to redress its mistake committed in the spring of 1942. Joyce (my aunt) was 4 years and 8 months old when we were forcibly evacuated; Connie (another aunt) was barely 3 years old; Denis (my father) was only 10 months old. Your grandmother Yuri was 30 years old; and I, 35.If this is the first you've heard about this horrifying episode of our country's history, please find out more. The links below are a good place to start. There are also lots of autobiographical books that tell the story of the internment from a much more personal point of view. As Yoshiko Uchida says in the epilogue of Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family, "...the story of the wartime incarceration of the Japanese Americans, as painful as it may be to hear, needs to be told and retold and never forgotten by succeeding generations of Americans."The "mistake" perpetrated by the government was, I think, due to its unawareness of the distinction between "culture" and "politics". But that was our - Japanese Americans - mistake, also. We did not know the difference between "culture" and "politics". But we had the gumption - called GAMBARU in Japanese - to come through the war years with flying colors.
I hope that you will also retain the Japanese virtue of GAMBARU throughout your life."
Japanese American National Museum, National Resource Center
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Last revised November 1, 2000