American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese-American Disloyalty in World War II

Many other books on the internment go into how the persons of Japanese Ancestry were either arrested right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or were gathered up from the West Coast and put into assembly centers and then into internment camps away from the West Coast.

This book goes into the greatest detail of that process of any book I have read on the subject. It starts out with how the Japanese were looked at before the war and then moves onto the various presumptions of loyalty or disloyalty and attempts were made to come up with some kind of system that would make it easy to tell who was which way.

It was a process that was almost impossible from the start and a process that led to major problems in the camps and even violence at Tule Lake. A whole chapter is given to the infamous questionnaire and questions 27 and 28. That was one problem that could have easily been prevented if the people making up the questionnaire would have bothered to learn something about Japanese culture.

The book goes into the various groups that tried to determine loyalty including the Japanese American Joint Board, the Provost Marshall General Office, the War Relocation Authority and the Western Defense Command, along with the various arguments between the four groups.

This also led up to some interesting questions. If the persons of Japanese ancestry were presumed to be disloyal and put into internment camps then why were the very same persons released later to resettle in other places in the United States? Why were these potentially dangerous persons allowed to leave the camps to harvest crops? Why were they asked to join the American military? Why were they drafted to join the military? The whole thing does not make any sense at all.

The book also goes into various trials and then explores the history of the United States and how things like this (but never to this degree) had occurred previously.

This is a very detailed and very necessary book to read if you want to learn what was going on behind the decisions being made about internment.

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