Prisoners Without Trial

Not Exactly Paradise: Japanese American Internment Camps

This is another book on the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. The book goes into the background leading up to the internment, the internment itself, and what happened afterwards.

As with my other reviews, I'll concentrate on things this book presents that I other books tend to miss entirely or gloss over. I'll put my comments on things in ( ) to distinguish them from what the author actually said.

The history leading up to the internment is one basically of anti-Oriental prejudice, starting with the anti-Chinese prejudice in this country, particularly on the West Coast. This prejudice was basically transferred over to the Japanese after the Chinese were barred from immigrating, and it was a prejudice that was felt by many people. The author notes that, in California, the Republicans, the Democrats, and a third political party, the Populist, along with the American Federation of Labor were all against Japanese immigration in 1900. The San Francisco Chronicle paper began a series of virulent attacks on the Japanese in America in 1905, matching some of the worst tabloid trash-type journalism that anyone has ever seen.

The result was to further inflame public opinion which the politicians were then more than willing to use to further their own purposes. The author adds that Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was elected President and was quite anti-Japanese.

A very interesting thing is a breakdown of the types of businesses persons of Japanese ancestry were involved in in the city of Seattle (which was probably fairly representative of the businesses they were involved in in other cities.)

They ran hotels, grocery stores, dry cleaners, market stands, produce houses, restaurants, barbershops, laundries or gardening services. A lot of them were also involved in farming in rural communities. (Note that none of these is in any way, shape or form involved with military things or would threaten the US in case of war.)

The author talks about the war in Europe and how fast Hitler's victories were. There was a belief in American government agencies that this happened because there was a vast fifth column of saboteurs and subversives that helped him, which was something that was totally untrue. (This same type of thinking, that the military of the good countries could not have lost so easily unless they were betrayed, was carried over into the attack on Pearl Harbor where, for a long while, the belief was that it was not our military's fault at all for not being ready; it was all due to a massive number of persons of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii that aided the attacking planes. That, also, was totally disproven later, but was useful to the politicians for inflaming public opinion against the Japanese Americans.)

There was a proposal to let the Japanese Americans stay on the West Coast and just keep them away from any sensitive areas, but the politicians and hate-mongers were against such a limited program, wanting the map problem to be dealt with once and for all.

Soon after Pearl Harbor the draft boards began classifying Japanese Americans as 4-C, which is a category reserved for enemy aliens.

The author also points out that, if it was so necessary for military reasons to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast then that would have been even more true for the Japanese Americans in Hawaii where they formed almost a third of the population. The persons of Japanese Ancestry in California, though, only formed 2% of the population. (So it should have been around 16 times as necessary to deal with the Japanese Americans in Hawaii than those on the West Coast if it was so powerfully militarily necessary.)

The author goes into the internment camp descriptions and breaks everything down into four phases (which I haven't seen anyone else do.)

Phase 1: Settling in (spring 1942-February 1943.)

Phase 2: Registration/segregation crisis (Feb. 1943-Jan. 1944)

Phase 3: Draft crisis (Jan. 1944-Nov. 1945)

Phase 4: Leaving camp (summer 1942-March 1946).

As far as students leaving the camps and going to college, the author points out that Princeton and MIT refused to admit Japanese Americans in 1942. Eventually around 4,300 students did find their way into colleges.

Some 600 of the evacuees eventually settled in Cincinnati with no trouble.

There's a very good chapter on whether or not such a thing could happen again, and the author points out relatively recent events in which people of one nationality or another were interrogated by the FBI or some preliminary moves to setting some kind of program or other were made.

There's also a section of some photos.



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