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The concept of race in the United States has been seen as a parallel to loyalty. We’ve used the excuse of race and ethnicity to deprive citizens and resident aliens of human rights and this behavior continue to this day. What happens when the government decides an entire ethnicity was a threat to national security and devised a way to legally strip them of their rights and intern them in effectively concentration camps? The United States government displayed contradictory behavior regarding wartime incarceration against Japanese Americans and resident aliens through systemically abolishing the rights of citizens while expecting them to fight.
The contradictory behavior of the United States against Japanese Americans and resident aliens has a long history, dating back to the influx of Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush. During this period, many of the Asian immigrants were Chinese men that were looking to make it rich in the States to then return to China as rich men. According to Roger Daniels, “a great many of the nearly 250,000 Chinese who came to the United States before 1880 eventually returned to China” (Daniels, 2004, 5). The immigrants who decided to stay in America were met with intense prejudice and racism from the United States governments and from smaller state legislation, inhibiting their prosperity and livelihoods. In 1850, California passed its first legal code which prohibited Black people, Native Americans, and later Chinese immigrants from testifying in court against white people, (Daniels, 2004, 6), thereby creating a loophole in the law that allowed essentially free reign to steal from Chinese migrants. Despite discriminatory laws written into California’s state legislature, Chinese immigrants continued to make the trip across the Pacific in search of their fortune. Their work, both as laborers and businessmen, helped expand the American West’s economical prowess. Some 10,000 Chinese railroad workers built the Western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad, 3 only to be fired when it was completed in May of 1869. The increased presence of Chinese workers in San Francisco and their expansion eastward struck fear into White working men and this fear materialized in 1882 with President Chester A. Arthur’s signing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants for 10 years. Then in 1902, the ban became permanent.
While Chinese laborers were a heavy contributor of California’s economic growth, the discriminatory nature of the United States government effectively made it impossible for Chinese people to emigrate to the United States post-1882, which allowed a new group to shape the West Coast’s future. Japanese immigrants were few and far between in the West before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with only about 3,000 immigrants from Japan residing in the US before 1890. When the Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892, the Japanese population exploded nine-fold in the decade between 1891 and 1900. (Daniels, 2004, 8). If the federal government wanted to pass a ban on Japanese immigrants, they could have easily done so, but Theodore Roosevelt had observed Japan’s meteoritic rise from a Third World country to a First World County, and well on its way to a global superpower and “Thus. . . Japan’s power served to protect the status of its emigrants. Tokyo, in collaboration with Washington, was able to frustrate the anti-Japanese movement for two decades.” (Daniels 2004, 9). Although Japan turned a blind eye to the contradictory nature of Roosevelt’s discriminatory actions against Japanese immigrants, America had written into its Constitution that ‘white persons’, and after the Civil War ‘persons of American descent’ could become naturalized citizens. However, heavy and organized opposition against making Chinese immigrants naturalized halted any hope that Japanese immigrants could have the same naturalization process. Thanks to the 14th 4 Amendment, however, any offspring of immigrants of any race would automatically be naturalized American citizens. This specification in the Constitution offered a path for Japanese immigrants to become landholders and contribute a significant portion of California’s agricultural output.
The circumstances around California’s anti-alien land law of 1913 were contradictory in the fact that they outright banned immigrants from owning land, except in instances of leasing from white landowners. The reasoning behind the law was out of fear of Japanese farmers becoming prosperous while white farmers fell behind. The practice of leasing land to Japanese immigrants would have potentially thwarted any chance of prosperity for the Japanese lessee, but Japanese farmers were soon able to find a loophole that white lawmakers wouldn’t be able to legislate against. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment allowed for any person born in the United States to be automatically given the right of citizenship. For Japanese immigrants who had settled down and had children in America, this offered a legal loophole for them to own their own land without white renters. “[Japanese farmers] could put their land in their children’s names, even if the children were infants, and, as legal guardians of their children, they would retain control of the land” (Daniels, 2004, 14). In a last-ditch effort to curb Japanese prosperity in America, the contradictory aspects of the Immigration Act of 1924 effectively cut any chance of more Japanese migrants from arriving on the shores of California. The Act implemented a quota for all nations, capping immigrants based on their population during the 1890 census. This alone would have limited immigrants from Japan to only 100 persons a year, but a decision from President Calvin Coolidge contradicted this quota and he “amended the bill to bar all ‘aliens ineligible to citizenship’” (Daniels, 2004, 15). This effectively dropped the quota of 5 Japanese down to zero, thereby hindering anymore Japanese immigration onto the West Coast. Although immigration from Japan essentially froze, the growth of the Japanese community only continued to prosper, due to, in large part, to the second generation of Japanese immigrants, the Nisei, who were American citizens by law. It wasn’t long before the government legislated against all Japanese to legally intern them without due process after an attack from their homeland.
The attacks on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Japanese Air Force effectively fast tracked the contradictory aspects of Japanese internment by, unintentionally on Japan’s part, fostering a deep hatred and fear for Japanese Americans and their migrant parents in the minds of white Americans. This fear manifested in political cartoons depicting Japanese as enemy operatives in the US and eventually Executive Order 9066 cemented this fear into law. The Executive Order didn’t inherently mention any specific ethnic community, and it only allowed military personnel to designate military areas where evacuations may happen within that area. However, shortly after being signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, “the press was given guidance by military…so that the American public was immediately informed that the Japanese, because they posed a threat to national security, were going to be removed from California and put somewhere else under guard” (Daniels, 2004, 46). It’s important to note that the evacuation and detention of Japanese citizens were not equal, and we can look to the island of Hawaii for examples of this contradictory behavior. The military claimed that removing Japanese from the West Coast was a matter of national security, but the Japanese who resided in Hawaii had much greater population numbers than Japanese on the West Coast. “In California, Japanese of all generations constituted some 2 percent of the population, whereas in Hawaii every third 6 person was of Japanese ethnicity” (Daniels, 2004, 47-48). The military had purposely excluded Hawaiian Japanese from incarceration because their labor was crucial to the economy of Hawaii, working low-paying jobs in service of the whites on the island.
The contradictory nature of how Japanese internment was presented to the American public is best exemplified in the documentary Rabbit in the Moon by filmmaker Emiko Omori where she uses American propaganda footage to contradict the government’s actual treatment of interned Japanese. At first, she plays the original propaganda film produced by the American government to ‘advertise’ the ‘opportunities’ available at these internment camps for Japanese prisoners. This advertisement intercuts the footage of Japanese evacuees in the camps with the flattering narration of ‘taming the desert’ and ‘accompanied with the latest appliances’ (Rabbit in the Moon, Omori, 1999). Shortly after, Omori includes the same propaganda footage only this time with a narration of survivor testimony highlighting the actual conditions of the camps, which includes references of dead bodies arriving at the camps with the resident RA performing medical treatment by flashlight.
The testimony from the survivors offers a very different glimpse into the conditions of the camps and that truth is drastically different than the fantasy that propaganda films spoonfed to unsuspecting white Americans. The government even shied away from using the term ‘concentration camps’ after the discovery of Nazi death camps in Europe, but this shift in terminology only highlights the contradictory thoughts on the camps’ conditions by the US government. Testimony from Ernest Uno in the essay collection Only What We Could Carry demonstrates the squalor conditions the American government had prepared for Japanese evacuees. “The stables just reeked. There was nothing you could do. The amount of lye they 7 threw on it. . . it didn’t help. It still just reeked of urine and horse manure. . . It’s almost as if you’re not talking about the way Americans treated Americans” (Uchida, 2000, 70). The food at these camps were far from the saving grace of poor living conditions. The logistics of cooking for thousands of people were not considered and internees had to assign jobs to people with no experience in the job they were assigned. Cooks were not the only profession in short order in the camps. Mabel Ota’s testimony in Only What We Could Carry describes the horrifying ordeal of having a child while interned. “There was only one obstetrician in that camp of ten thousand people. . . I had a very long labor, almost twenty-eight hours. . . [The Doctor] informed me that, yes, they were going to have to use forceps to pull the baby out because they couldn’t perform an operation because there was no anesthesiologist in the camp” (Ota, 2000, 174-175). Ota’s father had been given a medical misdiagnosis from camp faculty and later died as a result. “I always considered myself loyal all through those years, and so it a was a real shock that a loyal American citizen could be incarcerated like that and treated like a criminal” (Ota, 2000, 177). Ota’s story is one of thousands detailing the human rights abuses in the camps, but rather confront the hellish conditions in their own camps, the United States government needed soldiers and its interned citizens were the answer.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Japanese internment in the United States was the implementation of the so-called ‘loyalty questionnaire’ to gauge the loyalty of the interned Japanese. The questionnaire was scored on a points system and subjects who had traditional Japanese traits, like being able to speak Japanese, had points deducted. Two questions that stood out the most were questions 27 and 28 that asked if the subject would serve in the military and if they swore total allegiance to America. Answering these questions would have 8 major ramifications to both Issei and Nisei internees, most notable of which being if the older Issei were to swear allegiance to America, they would effectively be stateless. The government that had interned over 120,000 people wanted those same people to pledge allegiance to the US and to fight in their war. Minoru Kiyota’s essay details the contradiction he encountered after being interned and then asked to serve in segregated ranks. “America misleads people with its clever words about freedom, only to persecute them in the end. America preaches equality as its loftiest ideal, smiling as it leads people to their destruction” (Kiyota, 2000, 296). This quote encapsulates the shady and contradictory history America that preaches while interning her own citizens in camps against their will.
The United States’ abolishment of rights while expecting military service of interned Japanese highlights the contradictory nature and animosity that exists between Japanese citizens and the United States government. We’ve established America’s disdain for Chinese and Japanese immigrants and the legislation introduced solely implemented to hinder their growth. Yet despite this, immigrants contributed substantially to the economic development of the West, who were then interned and deemed a ‘national security threat’.
Works Cited:
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Inada, Lawson Fusao, ed. Only What We Could Carry. San Fransisco, CA: Heyday Books, 2000.
Rabbit in the Moon. Public Broadcasting Corporation, 2000. https://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/rabbitinthemoon/video-rabbit-in-the-moon/.
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