Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War (1987)

This is a very detailed book on the topic of how the US and Japan exchanged prisoners during the war and, as usual, I will point out a few highlights.

The group in charge of all the problems related to this is called the Special Division. It's task was to try to get Americans repatriated from the war zones. In 1941 one of the representatives of the department was given the task of researching the person of Japanese ancestry in the US to determine if they were a threat to the country. His report concluded that “there is no Japanese problem.” The report said that the vast majority of Issei would be neutral in any Japanese-American conflict, and the Nisei would be loyal to the US. Since this wasn't what some people wanted to hear, the report was discounted, which helped lead to the internment of the Japanese Americans.

In October of 1941 the decision was made that the Justice department would be responsible for any interned aliens for the short term, but the Army would take over if internment was for the duration of the war.

Right after the attack on Pearl Harbor those termed “dangerous individuals” were rounded up, along with Japanese diplomats. As early as Dec. 10, 1941, the Treasury Department recommended the relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry living on the US West Coast.

On Dec. 15th, the Secretary of the Navy said that, in his opinion, the Hawaiian Japanese had helped in preparing the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this was true.

The Attorney General of California, Earl Warren (who later headed the Supreme Court of the United States), said that all Japanese were potential threats to America, even if they were citizens of the US. This view was backed by the American Legion and other groups.

While all this was going on the governments of Canada and Mexico had begun to take their own actions against persons of Japanese ancestry living in their countries. It is possible that reports from what those two countries did helped influence the later US decision to intern the Japanese-Americans in camps.

In February of 1941 there was yet another call for all Japanese in Hawaii to be removed to the mainland. In early 1942 the political pressure built enough to cause the issuance of Executive Order 9066, calling for West Coast to be declared a military zone and removing persons of Japanese ancestry from the area.

The book notes that at least five different agencies were involved in detaining PJA (persons of Japanese ancestry). Some of the PJA had been labeled by the FBI as being potentially dangerous. They were taken and held until a hearing could determine their status. Some were put into internment camps, others were put into jails and local prisons. Doing this ran counter to the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1929 Geneva accords.

In January of 1944, the Japanese protested when their hospital ship, the Buenos Aires Maru, was sunk by an American submarine. In May, 1945, another American submarine sunk another hospital ship, the Awa Maru. That ship had been carrying Red Cross relief supplies to Japanese POWs in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. The US government refused to apologize of that incident.

The Spanish embassy was the go-between for the US and Japan, and it investigated claims about problems with the American internment camps. At Ft. Missoula, Montana, they determined that there was not enough meat and vegetables in the daily diet, and that there was not an adequate supply of medicines.

The Spanish would report problems to the US first, to give them time to fix the problems, before reporting them to Japan, to help decrease any anger the Japanese might have.

In November of 1943, the Spanish warned the State Department that internees at Santa Fe internees were upset over a reunification of families, and that a general strike was possible.

The Japanese government protested the internment camps on August 3, 1942, for the first time. They said that the US was eradicating “all Japanese communities” and were denying Japanese nationals their “very basis of living”. They wanted any living quarters provided to be decent and ones that could allow the people to engage in their normal occupations, be protected from violence, and providing assistance to families with women and children.

The US view was that the centers “had to be located on lands available to the federal government which could e taken over or converted as relocation projects with a minimum of friction with the white population of the Western states,” meaning that the camps got built in very bad places.

Around 2800 of the internees wanted to be sent back to Japan. The book explains that this consisted of three subgroups. One was very old people who wanted to die in Japan. Another group was the kibei, those born in the US but educated in Japan. The last group was younger boys and girls who were pro-American, did not want to go back to Japan, but had to because their parents wanted to.

The book then describes some of the troubles at the Tule Lake camp.



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