Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress
1986, 1991
The book is centered on a International Conference on Relocation and Redress held in 1983 in Salt Lake City.
The book starts out with a chronology of Japanese American history along with the opening and closing dates and maximum population of the relocation camps. This part of the book puts a lot of the information together in a nicely concise fashion.
The Conference Keynote Address is next and is, by the time this book was published, outdated, since redress checks had been given out by the government.
Prewar Japanese America is the next topic to be covered. The first part is a personal story from one of the interned who was a student at Berkeley when everything started to go wrong. It's not a very pretty story, to say the least.
The second portion is from someone who lived in Seattle at the time and was interned at the Heart Mountain camp and how things changed after the internment was over.
Part 3 of the book is about life in the camps and consists of people recalling their personal experiences in the camps, along with professional people who were not of Japanese-American ancestry or relationship but who still worked in the camps.
The book sites a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, which allows our government, in a declared war with another country, to apprehend anyone fourteen years old or older as an enemy alien. It also notes that three internees were shot to death. One incident, involving two deaths, is somewhat shrouded in controversy. This section of the book deals with mistreatment of the detainees.
Reactions to the evacuation compose the next section of the book with chapter titles such as Racial Nativism and Origins of Japanese American relocation ( an extremely powerful chapter, especially with it's examination of FDR's blatant racist views) and Utah's Ambiguous Reception: The Relocated Japanese Americans along with material on reactions of other cities, like Seattle, and groups, like the Mormons, to Japanese relocation.
This book, as others, notes that there was no acts of sabotage done by Japanese-Americans for the entire war time, either in Hawaii or the continental U.S., even though this was one of the main reasons they were relocated in the first place; fear that they had been doing sabotage and would do sabotage.
The next major section of the book deals with Japanese immigrants who had settled in other countries in the Western Hemisphere and how those countries handled their own "Japanese problem" during the war. Brazil didn't both rounding theirs up; Canada did what the U.S. did; Peru shipped theirs to the U.S.; Mexico had theirs move to two particular cities and Cuba had the males resettle in Havana.
Some statistics on Hawaii are given. there were 421,000 civilians in Hawaii. Of these, 157,000 were of Japanese ancestry. This means they formed about 37% of Hawaii's population in relation to the Japanese-Americans in California forming around 2% of the population.
10,000 of these 157,000 were investigated. This led to 1,250 Japanese ancestry people being interned during the war which was less than 1% of the people living in Hawaii who had Japanese ancestry. There were various prohibitions the Japanese Americans and aliens had to follow:
Thee included turning in weapons, ammunition and explosives; registering as aliens; expanded curfews; reporting foreign military service; restrictions of entry into certain security areas; tighter than normal travel restrictions; restricted access to communications equipment; and a prohibition about writing or printing attacks against the government. In addition, no alien could engage in fishing activities and the Japanese fishing fleet was impounded. ...the Japanese were not prohibited from attending gatherings or meetings..."
A detention camp was set up, the Sand Island Detention Camp. The people who were considered most suspect were Shinto and Buddhist priests and people working at the Japanese consulate in Hawaii. People teaching Japanese language were also suspect and especially anyone who had actually been educated in Japan.
A small number of people were voluntarily sent to mainland U.S. camps, but they went primarily looking for relatives and to be with them.
The fourth part of the book deals with examining the effects of being in the internment camps. In examines the psychological effects of being detained and also the actual economic losses that the people who were detained suffered.
The last part of that section deals with some of the legal cases that arose from the relocation movement.
The fifth part of the book covers attempts at redress. The sixth part of the book covers negative reaction to the attempts at redress. The final part of the book deals with how redress was actually achieved.
This is a book which goes into details which many other books don't. At times it's a little overwhelming, at times a little boring, but still worth going through.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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