General Overview

Several sites provide a good overview of the entire relocation process, including the mechanics of mass incarceration. One possible starting place (for both student and instructor alike) is “A More Perfect Union,” at http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/experience/index.html. This traveling exhibit spent much of the 1990s crisscrossing the country, before becoming a permanent online exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution. Another good starting place is the Hirasaki National Resource Center (HNRC), the digital research center of the Japanese American National Museum (www.janm.org/nrc/resources.php). Novices will find several fact sheets linked to this page, while more advanced users can link to numerous primary documents and first-person narratives that can be used for classroom research projects.³

Another abundant source of internment-related information is the web page for the National Park Service's Manzanar National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/manz). At its peak, the Manzanar War Relocation Center held over 10,000 relocated individuals, more than any other War Relocation Authority (WRA) center. It was designated a national historic site in 1992. The web site contains much information, both past and present, about Manzanar, as well as about many other relocation centers, assembly centers, and other places associated with the relocation and internment of civilians. Of particular interest on the Manzanar site is the link to the full text (and most of the photos) of Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese Americans Relocation Sites (www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anthropology74/index.htm). This book was published by the National Park Service's Western Archeological and Conservation Center in 1999. Chapter three of this book discusses the relocation process in general, while other chapters describe the history of each of the 10 WRA camps, the 15 assembly centers operated by the Wartime Civilian Control Agency, and the various other facilities associated with the mass incarceration process. These chapters also discuss the extant anthropological artifacts and evidence of this period uncovered during a comprehensive physical exploration of these sites between 1994 and 1999. Field trips to visit the relocation centers are a possibility for those in close geographic proximity.

The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/japanese_internment/background.html) is another good place to visit early in your browsing. Novices should probably start with the chronology, but more advanced students will want to browse the links to digital copies of primary documents and photographs from the relocation camps.

Our final overview web site, on geocities.com is not connected with any institution or university. This site, www.geocities.com/athens/8420/main.html, authored by C. John Yu, began as an undergraduate history project and has been expanded and supplemented to become one of the most comprehensive and well-documented sources of information about the relocation process. It also contains links to numerous other web sites concerning the relocation experience.

Historical Context

It is helpful to remind students that anti-miscegenation laws, segregated schools and public facilities, and restrictions on property ownership were the norm and not the exception at the time our policy makers were weighing the need for mass incarceration. Otherwise, it would be much too easy to dismiss a claim of racial bias as the basis for these decisions as “too simplistic.” Fortunately, several sites on the Internet can help place the internment decision into proper historical context. The third chapter of Confinement and Ethnicity (www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anthropology74/ce3.htm), along with the Legalizing Racism (http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/non-flash/immigration_racism.html) and Resources (http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/resources/history.html) links of the Smithsonian's exhibit provide a passing note on the anti-Japanese, anti-Asian, and otherwise racist policies of the time.

More detailed information can be located elsewhere on the Internet. For example, KQED in San Francisco (www.kqed.org/w/baywindow/othercolors/changingtimes/) and the National Archives (www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1998/summer/women-and-naturalization-1.html) both have pages discussing, among other things, the 1922 Cable Act (also known as the Marriage Act or Married Women's Act). While sometimes noted as an important landmark in women's history, this legislation separated citizenship from marriage status. Whereas prior to 1922, a U.S. citizen who married an alien, or an alien woman who married a U.S. citizen automatically acquired the citizenship of her husband, after 1922 the woman retained her own citizenship. A woman who married a man ineligible for citizenship (which generally meant an Asian man) lost her U.S. citizenship. Further, even if her marriage were later dissolved either by death or divorce, an Asian woman who had lost her U.S. citizenship through marriage was not eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. By contrast, a Caucasian woman who had lost her U.S. citizenship through marriage to an alien ineligible for citizenship could apply to regain her U.S. citizenship after the dissolution of her marriage.

First-Person Accounts

Some people find it easier to grasp the implications and effects of large events by focusing on the experiences of individuals caught up in the forces of history. Many documentaries now available on video and/or DVD contain interviews with people who lived through the relocation process. Students can thus see people and places mentioned in their reading about relocation. Of particular interest is Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story and the accompanying materials available on PBS's Point of View (P.O.V.) archive (www.pbs.org/pov/pov2001/ofcivilwrongsandrights/). This work helps place a human face on an otherwise “larger-than-life” figure of Supreme Court litigation fame.

Members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee (an organization of internees who refused to be drafted into the U.S. armed services while they and their families' civil rights were being violated) are the focus of another PBS documentary, Conscience and the Constitution (www.pbs.org/itvs/conscience/). Some of the Fair Play Committee members interviewed in Conscience and the Constitution were also interviewed in a PBS P.O.V. program, Rabbit in the Moon (www.pbs.org/pov/pov1999/rabbitinthemoon/index.html). However, Rabbit in the Moon takes a broader view, and includes examples of resistance or protests that occurred at Tule Lake and Manzanar WRA camps. All three of the aforementioned documentaries dramatize the divisions within the Japanese American community when it came to what a “proper” response to relocation should be. Such disagreements over what actions constitute “patriotism” could be a launching point for class discussions on what it means to be patriotic, and can also be used as a starting point for an investigation of the Arab American community's contemporary efforts to discern an appropriate response in the War on Terror.

In stark contrast to these stories of open resistance is the story of those Japanese Americans who either volunteered for service or were drafted into the armed forces (often times from inside the barbed wire confines of relocation camps). Such is the focus of Beyond Barbed Wire (www.asianamericanmedia.org/apatv/archives/beyondbarbedwire.html), a documentary about the contributions made by persons of Japanese ancestry who served in either the European or the Pacific theaters of war. Beyond Barbed Wire utilizes interviews and contemporary footage, including newsreel “propaganda” about the “All-Japanese” unit.⁴

Those seeking a more extensive collection of oral histories should turn to the California Digital Library (www.oac.cdlib.org). The “Texts” tab (www.oac.cdlib.org/texts/) links to hundreds of primary documents from relocation centers, as well as transcripts from 67 oral histories that are part of the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA, http://jarda.cdlib.org/). Among those interviewed are first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese Americans, as well as camp administrators, guards, and townspeople from the area where the camps were located.

Additional oral histories, gathered through the “REgenerations Oral History Project, can be accessed via the collections guide of the previously-noted HNRC (www.janm.org/collections/guide/index.php), but you'll have to browse this page carefully to find that link. Also linked on this page are 25 oral history interviews transcribed under the Terminal Island Life History Project.

Oral histories from two individuals that played a role in the formation of the internment policy (Karl Bendetsen and Tom Clark) are also available via the Truman Presidential Library (www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/japanese_internment/related.php). In reading an oral history, the reader should keep in mind the motivations and imperfect recollection of the interviewee. For example, in this oral history, Bendetsen credits, among other things, the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska as motivating the need to “evacuate” persons of Japanese ancestry from the west coast. However, the Japanese did not invade those islands until early June, 1942, over three months after E.O. 9066 was issued and the decision to evacuate had been made. Further, it was known at the time of the invasion that the Aleutian campaign was a Japanese feint, intended to divert U.S. naval forces from Midway (Prange 1983).

Contemporaneous Views

Newspaper articles of that era that describe the incarceration can be found at the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco (www.sfmuseum.org/war/evactxt.html). Articles that appeared in the San Francisco News between March 2 and May 21, 1942, are linked. This site also contains a number of other links of interest, including a copy of “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast,” by Stetson Conn,⁵

Students with access to Lexis-Nexis (which, though not free, is available to many students via library subscriptions) can compare the post-Pearl Harbor coverage noted above with newspaper coverage of more recent events, such as the coram nobis cases of the 1980s, or the post-9/11 coverage of the War on Terror. Alternatively, students with library access (or personal online subscriptions) may also be able to search a number of major newspapers via their online editions, particularly for post-9/11 stories, and stories relating to the enemy combatant issue.

Photographs

The WRA and the Office of War Information employed several prominent photographers to document the internment. Although these camp photos were subject to censorship (for example, no barbed wire fences were to appear in these official photographs), they nonetheless do provide at least a sanitized view of life in the camps. The Library of Congress web site has digital exhibits committed to the work of Ansel Adams (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aamhtml/aamhome.html) and Dorothea Lange (www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html) as they pertain to Japanese relocation.⁶

The Library of Congress holds additional photos related to the Japanese American internment in the Farm Security Administration Open Files web site (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/manzhtml/manzrel.html).

Other photographs of the relocation period can be found on the previously-mentioned web site for the Manzanar National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/manz), which includes numerous links to photos of Manzanar and other camps, both then and now. Also available through the Manzanar NHS web site are the book, Confinement and Ethnicity (address noted previously, in the general overview section) and a “virtual tour” of the camp as it appears today (www.nps.gov/manz/virtualtour/tour/). Finally, the digital holdings of the National Archives also contain numerous photographs of the relocation era. They can be located by using the search engine of the National Archives, ARC (http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/basic_search.jsp). Searching on the names of the various camps, or terms such as “Japanese” and “internment” produces hundreds of photographs of the relocation and camp experience.

Judicial Review

One of the most relevant issues related to WWII internment for current students concerns the legal and constitutional principles of governmental “war powers.” In particular, are presidential and military decisions made under a claim of “military necessity” even subject to judicial review? If so, how strictly must courts scrutinize these claims? The ambitious student (particularly those with experience reading and interpreting court opinions) can access the full text of all Supreme Court opinions since 1893 and appellate court opinions since the mid-1990s (the specific cut-off date varies by circuit) via Findlaw.com's “Cases & Codes” link (www.findlaw.com/casecode/). The opinions can be browsed by year or party name.

With regard to World War II incarceration, the major Japanese American cases were decided in the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944, with Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, Mitsue Endo, and the previously-noted Fred Korematsu as the named litigants.⁷

The convictions of Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu were re-litigated in the early 1980s, after the convicts filed petitions for writ of error coram nobis. However, as these cases never rose back to the Supreme Court, and as the litigation was resolved in the district or appellate courts sufficiently long ago, most of this material is not available via free-access Internet sources. The lone exception is the posting of some of the briefs and petitions associated with Fred Korematsu's case via the National Archives ARC system (http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/basic_search.jsp).⁸

A related case, Ex parte Quirin (1942), involving would-be saboteurs who were delivered via German submarines on to the Atlantic coast of the United States, first established the category of “illegal” or “enemy” combatant that the Bush administration had relied upon to justify the indefinite detention of individuals (including U.S. citizens) without hearing or review. More recent legal precedent, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004, has now mandated a review, but not necessarily by a civilian court. In addition to the Supreme Court rulings in cases involving Hamdi, and Padilla v. Rumsfeld (also decided in 2004, but on jurisdictional rather than substantive grounds), the appellate court decisions of Hamdi and Padilla are available for review. The Padilla case arose out of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, while the Hamdi originated from the Fourth Circuit. Interested students can also search the legal news and opinions (editorials) of Findlaw for legal commentary and legal briefs on these and other cases.

Redress

After the World War II-era convictions of Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu were vacated, the pressure for a formal government apology grew. While we are not aware of any sites that are committed specifically to investigating the redress movement, a private site does include an analysis of the text of the apology letters sent by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to accompany the redress payments (www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/history_heritage/ikeda_internment_apology.asp). Images of each president's letter (without commentary) are also available; President Clinton's apology letter is included on the web site for the PBS-aired documentary, Children of the Camps (www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/clinton.html), while President Bush's letter (www.goethe-gymnasium.de/schuelerseiten/LK12/Manzanar/Apology/APOLOGY.HTM) can be viewed via a web site created by students from a school in Germany that read the novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. The movie of the same name (www.imdb.com/title/tt0120834/) itself is also a good way to introduce students to the complexity of racial tensions following WWII.

Apologists for Internment

While professional historians are generally in agreement that the World War II internment was a mistake, the decision is not without its defenders. Most apologists lack any formal training in law or history, but this has not prevented their work from attaining some level of notoriety. Recently, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin's work (2004), In Defense of Internment (www.michellemalkin.com/books.htm), has been in the news. Malkin argues that “political correctness” has prevented an “accurate” evaluation of the evidence surrounding mass incarceration, and argues that these false lessons of World War II prevent a fair consideration of appropriate modern-day responses in the War on Terror.

In evaluating the substance of Malkin's thesis, students would do well to ask themselves what burden of proof should be required before an individual is denied his/her personal liberty. Is guilt, in fact, individual, or is there such a thing as collective guilt? Also, to what extent can those depictions of persons of Japanese ancestry also have been made of persons of German or Italian ancestry? Students could also consider the circumstances surrounding the Quirin case in deciding the relative threat of Japanese invasion or espionage on the west coast versus German or Italian invasion or espionage on the east or gulf coasts. Further investigation of the difference between the way European and Asian immigrants were treated can be used to discuss de jure racism.

Students interested in specific rebuttals to Malkin can read portions of the blog, www.isthatlegal.org. The entire site can be searched using keywords, although most of the relevant material is located at www.isthatlegal.org/Muller_and_Robinson_on_Malkin.html. The homepage also links to the first chapter of Muller's history (2001) of Japanese American draft resisters, Free to Die for Their Country (www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/548228.html).

Conclusion

Internment and relocation are central components of the ongoing work to secure civil rights for all American citizens and civil liberties for all. The special circumstances of civil rights and liberties during time of war are of particular importance today. Students who fail to understand that racism is transient and invidious will too easily take away the lesson that the 1960s Civil Rights movement settled everything. Instead, the Japanese relocation experience can show that all people are capable of great injustice when they are frightened enough. Further, it is important in the classroom to consider the complexity of decision making: the ability for wrong decisions to be made by good people for all of the right reasons, and that the process of recognizing error after the fact is an important feature of a healthy democracy.

For example, a man known as a civil rights champion in the 1960s was a major proponent of the policies that stripped so many Japanese Americans of their civil rights in the 1940s. Was there a change in Earl Warren, or was it the difference in the positions he held which influenced his behavior? His behavior was very different as California attorney general, arguing for Japanese American relocation in 1942, than as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in building the unanimous decisions in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and 1955.

It is this process that government will never outgrow or eliminate: making mistakes, justifying mistakes, owning up to mistakes only after being pushed by concerned citizens, and apologizing for mistakes. Our students deserve to learn the conditions in which government errors are committed and resolved. Acknowledging error, making recompense, and asking forgiveness is important, for both individuals and nations. Apologizing is much more rare than making mistakes, and this is an important political phenomenon for informed citizens to understand.