Justice at War

This is a 1983 book on the legal aspects relating to the internment of the persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast during World War II. Since it's entire content deals with the legal aspects alone, then theirs room for the author to go into far greater detail than is present in other books that refer to only a few aspects of the legal issues.

A man named Edward Ennis has been instructed to work on “planning facilities to house enemies of aliens nationality if we got into the war.” On December 7th, that event happened, and Ennis drafted a document relating to “summary apprehension” of any Japanese alien by the Justice Department. He passed it on to FDR, and FDR signed it.

For a while things were fairly calm on the West Coast, but then a massive movement against the Japanese who lived there began to develop. One of the first people writing about internment camps was Los Angeles Congressman Leland Ford, who sent letters to Hoover (F.B.I.) and Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

The author points out that the arguments used as reasons to intern the persons of Japanese ancestry dated back to the time of the efforts made on Chinese exclusion on the West Coast.

The intelligence community had been keeping track of who they termed “suspicious aliens” for over a decade before the internment. This is why they were able to act so quickly in picking up leaders of various Japanese organizations, and other target individuals, within hours of the outbreak of the war.

An ABC list of dangerous aliens had been drawn up, divided into known dangerous aliens, potentially dangerous aliens, and one who worked with propaganda and/or had pro-Japanese views.

Then there's a section on DeWitt, along with various rumors of things that the Japanese had done. These included supposed Japanese planes over the West Coast (I think the author is referring to “The Battle of Los Angeles”), Japanese submarines shelling areas of the West Coast (which really did happen), and the sinking of some freighters out at sea.

DeWitt at first wanted all the Japanese aliens fourteen years of age or up picked up, but it later evolved into picking up all of the persons of Japanese ancestry, alien or American citizen.

Things really started to get back in February of 1942 with a number of search-and-seize raids on the West Coast and the gathering up of Japanese fisherman on Terminal Island. None of the searches turned up anything relating to sabotage.

There was a meeting with the West Coast congressional delegation on January 30th, and at that point the fate of the Japanese Americans was sealed.

It is interesting that some of the Justice Department lawyers were not in favor of the evacuation and tried to block it, unsuccessfully, of course.

A voluntary exodus failed since there weren't enough places willing to accept the West Coast Japanese (and there wasn't enough time to make proper preparations), so the movement of the entire group was decided upon. The attorney general of Idaho, for example, wanted them all placed in concentration camps.

Out of around 120,000 who were moved off the West Coast, there were actually only around a dozen legal challenges to the action. One of the reasons was that the initial roundup of Japanese involved many of the leaders of various organizations. Without any leaders, it was very hard to develop the sentiment among the Japanese for resistance of any kind.

One if the cases involved a person named Minoru Yasui who walked into a police station and asked to be arrested for curfew violation in Oregon.

A second case, one of the most known ones, involved Gordon Hirabayashi. He failed to comply with the exclusion order and was jailed.

The third case involved Fred Korematsu who tried to stay in the evacuated area. He carried a fake draft card, and had had some plastic surgery to try and conceal his racial identity.

A fourth case involved Mitsuye Endo. She went to the Tanforan Assembly Center as required, but filed a habeas corpus petition.

The book then goes into extensive detail about the forty lawyers involved in the four cases, and how there was a lot of disagreement between them. There was also some questionable stuff done on the part of at least one of the judges. Details of the hearings and trials are numerous.

One very interesting thing that is noted was that there are no transcripts of the Supreme Court hearings on the cases because, until 1955, stenographers were not regularly used.

The author discusses the initial hearings, trials, appeals, and ultimate Supreme Court hearings on the cases, noting that a later study basically concluded that the legal system had failed the people that had been charged.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page