The Relocation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II

This is an essay that was in a book entitled The Dispossession of the American Indian and Other Key Issues in American History. It shows an incredibly poor grasp of the history of what actually happened.

“Before the New Left, very little was heard about the World War II relocation of the Japanese-Americans.” This gives us an idea of where the person is coming from. The term “New Left” is a code word for Liberals, so it's obviously someone writing from the position of a conservative.

The author admits that, when he started his study of the removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, he knew basically nothing about the subject.

An example of this is shown when he lists some terms to know, including Issei and Nisei. He then writes : “I am uncertain about “Sansei.”, which, of course, anyone who has studied the subject much at all will tell you stands for the third-generation of persons of Japanese ancestry.

In relation to the assembly centers, the writer of the article says this:

“The assembly centers are criticized as having had "barbed wire and searchlights," overcrowding, lack of privacy, and inadequate medical care. But Bendetsen disputes virtually all of this, as we will see in my later discussion of whether the evacuees can properly be said to have been "interned."”

Again, for anyone who has studied this at all, there is no doubt whatsoever that the assembly centers were overcrowded and there was a lack of privacy, for example. In many cases, people were living in horse stalls or other one-room places. The walls were thing (and sometimes not even all the way up to the roof), and there was, indeed, a lack of privacy.

Later in the article, the writer basically says that the relocation centers were actually good places to be. If you liked the desert, maybe they were nice (or swamps and bugs, in a couple of cases.) If you liked living in tar-paper buildings with ultra-thin walls and one lightbulb, then they were heavenly. If you wanted to live your life behind barbed wire and guard towers, then this was the place for you.

The author notes the places had schools. Indeed they did. Schools which, for a good while, had no books and almost no other supplies whatever. There were stores, athletic events and newspapers, indeed, and all of them were made up by the residents themselves. This also does not include the very basic fact that these people had been removed from their homes without any charges being put against them, and without any chance for defending themselves legally, and they were shipped first to the assembly centers and then to the camps all because they were Japanese in ancestry.

In another part of the article, the writer quotes his source Bendetsen as saying that there were no guards at the relocation centers at all. From the photographs I have seen, there were most definitely guards at the camps.

The author of the article has a section examining “the nature of the military emergency.” In that section, he says:

“On February 23 a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field along the California coast.44 Two days later five unidentified planes were spotted and Los Angeles underwent a black-out.”

Again, if the writer would have studied the actual information on the events, he would have found out that there were no actual planes in the Battle of Los Angeles. Not one single enemy plane was involved.

The writer talks about the West Coast and how vulnerable it was to a Japanese attack, and that this was one of the reasons for the movement of persons of Japanese ancestry out of the area, yet ignores the fact that Hawaii had a much higher proportion of persons of Japanese ancestry than did California, and Hawaii was a lot closer to Japan than was California, and thus was under more direct possibility of invasion, yet the persons of Japanese ancestry there were never moved out in mass into internment camps. (It would have destroyed the Hawaiian economy, for one thing.)

The writer talks about how the Japanese community did not assimilate into American culture, and how “it was virtually impenetrable to efforts of the American government to sort out those whose loyalties were with Japan.”

If this was true, then why were various persons of Japanese ancestry arrested on December 7th and 8th, and later? They had been identified as leaders of the community, etc, and were quickly picked up by the authorities. If it was so impossible to determine who was loyal and who wasn't, then why was the government able to virtually immediately pick up Japanese leaders and others?

The author of the article talks about the loyalty questionnaire, but doesn't examine at all the linguistic and cultural difficulties with two of the questions and why that resulted in various problems.

He talks about those Japanese who sought repatriation, yet doesn't mention that many of them did so because of pressure from other Japanese, and, once the war was over, sought to have their repatriations canceled.

The author also makes use of unsupported generalities: “there were a sizeable number of Japanese-Americans who militantly supported Japan. If they had conducted even one massive act of sabotage, would the risk have been worth it? How many lives, say, was the risk worth? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Whose lives?.”

How many exactly? Also, the author doesn't point out the virtual total lack of actual sabotage by persons of Japanese ancestry during the war.

The writer then cites one of the most absurd pieces of reasoning ever:

“After the war began, authorities anticipated acts of sabotage on the West Coast -- but none occurred. Why? The critics of the evacuation argue that this is evidence that there were no disloyal persons of Japanese ancestry. A number of American officials at the time, however, including Earl Warren, drew diametrically the opposite inference: that there must be some who were willing to commit sabotage, but that for some reason they were being held back rather than being exposed.73 Warren and the others, including the columnist Walter Lippmann, considered it an ominous sign.”

In other words, the very fact that there had been no sabotage PROVED that there was GOING TO BE sabotage.

How strange can a person's reasoning become?

The writer then finally examines the Hawaii question, and says:

The point is sometimes made that the evacuation from the West Coast was” inconsistent with having left the Japanese-American population on Hawaii. The answer is that with the declaration of martial law and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in December 1941, Hawaii was placed under direct military control. It is said to have been "governed like a military camp for all its inhabitants." This was not done on the mainland.”

Just for arguments sake, let's assume this is really the reason why there was no internment, the use of a nice, strong, martial law movement. Then why wasn't the same thing done on the West Coast? If it was so tremendously successful in Hawaii, then it should have been successful on the West Coast (where the actual proportion of persons of Japanese ancestry was much smaller), and it would have done away with any “need” for internment at all.

Was racism involved in this? No, says the author:

“Throughout the war, one of the motivating factors in the policy of evacuation and resettlement was to protect the Japanese-Americans from public anger. It is easy today to say that that anger was "racist," but we have reason to be suspicious of attitudes taken under much more comfortable circumstances forty and even fifty years after the fact. To argue that the anger was vicious has, itself, a certain vicious quality about it. There were ample reasons for the evacuation that had nothing to do with racism.”

Obviously, the person writing the article had no knowledge of the literally decades-long struggle against persons of Japanese ancestry by persons who had strongly racist motives. (For proof of this, I suggest reading any of the multitude of anti-Japanese books published during the time, or reading some of the Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League.”

This is the kind of paper that results from a person who has simply not done their homework. The entire thing concerning the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry was something that was decades in the making, that had multiple causes (including racism and economic greed and jealousy), and that left behind solid data (as in photographs and film recordings that showed the nature of the camps and assembly centers.)

He has some 96 footnotes, but they are actually from only around a dozen sources, and at least one of those is from a virulently anti-Japanese writer. I have over a hundred book sources and I know I haven't come close to finishing my research.

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