The Internment of Japanese Americans

Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to designate 'exclusion zones' from which any person could be removed. The order did not mention Japanese Americans by name, but its intent and application were unmistakable. Within months, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent — roughly two-thirds of them American citizens — were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and imprisoned in hastily constructed camps in remote inland areas.

The internees were given days, sometimes hours, to dispose of their property. Homes were sold at a fraction of their value. Businesses built over decades were abandoned. Families were transported to desolate locations in deserts and swamplands — places like Manzanar in California's Owens Valley, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, and Tule Lake on the California-Oregon border — surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

No Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage during the war. Not one. The FBI had already identified and detained the small number of individuals it considered genuine security risks in the days immediately following Pearl Harbor. The mass internment was driven not by evidence but by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and the political ambitions of West Coast politicians and military commanders who had long opposed Japanese immigration.

Life Behind Barbed Wire

The camps were not death camps — the comparison to Nazi concentration camps is both inaccurate and offensive to many Japanese Americans and Holocaust survivors. But they were prisons. Families lived in cramped barracks with no privacy. Meals were communal. Armed guards patrolled the perimeters. The psychological damage of being imprisoned by your own government solely because of your ancestry was profound and lasting.

Despite these conditions, internees built communities. They established schools, newspapers, sports leagues, and gardens. Some formed cooperative farms that eventually supplied food to other camps. Artists documented camp life in paintings and photographs that remain powerful historical records. The resilience was extraordinary, but it should not obscure the injustice.

Perhaps the most bitter irony was military service. Over 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the US Armed Forces during World War II. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed almost entirely of Japanese Americans (many of whose families were interned), became the most decorated unit in American military history for its size and length of service. They fought for a country that had imprisoned their families.

Reckoning and Redress

The long road to accountability began in 1980 when Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Its 1983 report, 'Personal Justice Denied,' concluded that internment was motivated by 'race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership' — not military necessity.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which formally apologized and provided $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee. The total cost was approximately $1.6 billion. For many Japanese Americans, the apology mattered more than the money. Fred Korematsu, whose case had been used to uphold internment, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. The internment stands as a permanent warning about what a democracy can do to its own citizens when fear overrides constitutional principle.