On Wednesday night, a standing-room-only crowd gathered to mull that possibility and other, sometimes dire scenarios, past and present, at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. The frame topic for the Zócalo/UCLA event, presented in partnership with the Japanese American National Museum, was “What Does the Japanese American Experience Tell Us About the Proposed Muslim Registry?”

And although the panel discussion touched on the many ways in which America’s social and political landscape in 2017 is vastly more diverse and open than it was 75 years ago, the three panelists also noted that the government’s powers of surveillance also have grown exponentially in the post-Sept. 11 world, in ways that should set off civil liberties alarms. Today, multiple government agencies collaborate, and sometimes compete, to vacuum up as much information as possible.

“I would bet dimes to donuts that there are already plenty of ‘registries’ looking at people coming in, looking at people from Middle Eastern countries,” said Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, a sociocultural anthropologist in UCLA’s Department of Asian American Studies, where he is also the inaugural chair in Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.

Just as troubling, Hirabayashi suggested, is that much of this name-compiling isn’t being revealed to the public. “I think the citizenry can’t have a debate about what’s going on because we’re not being told what’s going on,” he said.

Yet a national debate has been in full force for months, intensified after then-candidate Trump revealed his plans to impose a freeze on Muslim immigrants to the United States and by a subsequent proposal to launch a registry of Muslim American citizens.

Nowhere has that debate resonated more deeply than in coastal California. The Golden State was home to many of the Japanese Americans who were deported, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order, to concentration camps during World War II, the panelists noted. Today it is a liberal bastion, with several cities whose mayors have vowed to resist a possible Trump administration crackdown on undocumented workers or other sweeping actions targeting particular ethnic or religious groups.

“On the one hand you think you’re in a bubble, but on the other hand you’re at the epicenter,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA School of Law scholar of immigration and citizenship law.

Indeed, Motomura pointed out, California has been at the epicenter of previous, heated debates surrounding immigration and citizenship rights, including the violent reprisals against migrant Chinese workers in the 1800s and the Prop 187 movement in the early 1990s.

Discussion moderator Ann Burroughs, the museum’s interim president and CEO, noted that it was “no accident” that the evening’s program was taking place in Little Tokyo, a spot from where some Japanese Americans had been rounded up and turned into exiles and non-citizens in their own country.

“We’re here on the site of the museum which stands as a sentinel,” she said, citing “war hysteria, prejudice and poor political leadership” as the main factors that led to an episode that most Americans later came to view as a national disgrace, and for which President Ronald Reagan eventually formally apologized.

“We’re facing the specter of that terrible, tragic episode in American history being repeated,” Burroughs said.

Ironically, the panelists said, one common feature both of World War II registries and of registries (known and suspected) that have been compiled since the Sept. 11 attacks is that none has been demonstrably effective in identifying criminal suspects or potential criminal actors, leading to their arrest or deportation.

“These programs have no meaning in terms of actual national security,” said panelist Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum and author of the forthcoming book There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration.

But despite the inefficiency and inefficacy of such registries, a violent terrorist incident still could be used by President Trump to justify extreme measures.

“He [Trump] is very likely to use that moment and that tragedy to polarize the country,” and many Americans might well support such a move, Noorani said. “I think the majority of Americans are supportive of immigrants and immigration, but they’re also scared. And we have to acknowledge that fear.”

So what is to be done? Several audience members posed questions asking whether or how individuals or organized groups could check an extremist effort to scapegoat targeted Americans. Patricia Takayama of the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) asked the panel how citizens might influence what sort of information government agencies are allowed to stockpile.

Motomura replied that although there’s sometimes a firewall between agencies, the public’s best ally in this effort is to enforce greater transparency, which puts pressure on the information collectors and destroys the “myths” that those agencies may be disseminating.

Noorani said that forming common cause around issues such as religious freedom can help build alliances among groups as diverse as Southern Baptist mega-churches and the American Civil Liberties Union, safeguarding the rights of more Americans.

He said that if “we can move the needle a bit on these cultural values, there’s a little more space for a policy and political debate” in the event of a trigger moment.

“I’m not sure we’ve done that,” Noorani said.

The post Could a “Trigger Moment” Imperil Civil Liberties? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was not a foregone conclusion: The draconian mass removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans had been justified as a military necessity—and continued to be enforced. Two-thirds of those incarcerated were American-born Nisei, second-generation citizens; one-third were Issei, Japan-born immigrants, prohibited by law from applying for naturalization.

In the event of an invasion by Japan, the argument went, Japanese Americans were so culturally unknowable that there could be no reliable way to determine the loyal from the potentially disloyal. There were no charges, no trials, no convictions—of espionage, of sabotage, or of anything else smacking of disloyalty. The process of forced removal and incarceration took most of the entire year, 1942.

Given these presumptions and these actions, recruiting Japanese Americans—or JAs—into the military and arming them defied all logic. When the announcement for JA enlistment was issued, only 1,200 Nisei from the camps volunteered while about 10,000 Nisei from Hawai`i, where relatively few JAs had been incarcerated, answered the call. There were equal numbers of eligible Nisei on both fronts.

The tribulations undergone by the mainland JAs had taken their toll on enthusiasm to enter military service. A small fraction (perhaps 10-15 percent) answered the questionnaire in ways that either protested their incarceration or cast doubt on their loyalty, or both.

Moreover, when the draft was actually imposed on Nisei incarcerated behind barbed wire, several hundred became draft resisters, defying orders to appear for induction and facing federal courts in several states. Their motives varied from individual concerns for ill parents in camps to those who had forsaken any semblance of loyalty to the United States to those who vehemently articulated their stance as upholding principles of their Constitutional rights.

Yet eventually the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most highly decorated unit for its size and length of service during World War II, perhaps in all of American military history. All told, 21 men were awarded Medals of Honor, an incredible record for a regiment of approximately 3,000 soldiers. Including their replacements, some 14,000 men served in the regiment during the war, nearly all of them Japanese American. Their commissioned officers, at least in the beginning, were all white. The history of the team sheds light on a 20th century American tragedy that still has resonance today.

The first day of the trial of the 63 Heart Mountain draft resisters in Federal District Court, Cheyenne, Wyoming, June 12, 1944. Courtesy of Frank Abe.

The 442nd only came to be after difficult deliberations within FDR’s wartime administration. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the draft had already been imposed and hundreds of Japanese Americans were serving in the military. Immediately thereafter, many were discharged or forced to turn in their weapons and consigned to labor duties. Senior military and civilian officials demanded that Hawaii’s JA population be removed to mainland concentration camps.

FDR himself had been calling for that drastic step but the JA community, about 160,000 strong, comprised over one-third of the Territory of Hawaii’s population. Cooler heads—including the local police, the FBI, and the Military Governor in charge of Martial Law in the Islands—prevailed by arguing that the JAs were crucial to the war effort in the Pacific.

In Hawai`i, more than 1,400 JAs were in training at Schofield Barracks, close to Pearl Harbor, when their commanders learned of a major naval battle approaching near the Midway Islands, about 1,000 miles northwest of Hawai`i.

The confrontation between the two major aircraft carrier groups, Japan with four and the U.S. with three, took place June 4-6, 1942. On June 5, the Hawai`i JA draftees, not yet part of any organized army unit and deemed racially unreliable, were shipped to San Francisco, in the event the battle ended badly. However, on June 6, the Battle of Midway concluded with American aircraft sinking all four Japanese carriers and with them, Japan’s ability to attack the West Coast or Hawai`i. It was a decisive victory, turning the tide of the war dramatically against Japan.

But while the destiny of the war had now shifted, albeit with years of gruesome warfare ahead, prejudice and racism directed against JAs continued unabated both in the military and the federal government. In the military, the War Department order issued on January 5, 1942, declaring all JAs “4-C”—that is, aliens ineligible to serve—continued in effect throughout the year. At the same time, the forced removal and incarceration of JAs on the West Coast continued unabated, even after the Midway turning point and well into the fall.

Nonetheless, the U.S. was forced to reconsider its policies, for several reasons. The government needed to open a path to eventual release of JAs incarcerated at dozens of sites, and it needed manpower to replace growing casualties in the two-front war. Protests and lawsuits from the JA communities were escalating; and a few influential individuals and groups called for an end to racist policies; among them were the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, a few civil rights advocates, university presidents, and the Quakers. In the war itself, propaganda played an important role and the Axis powers had been quick to exploit America’s anti-Japanese American racism to counter its claims to moral superiority.

In January 1943 the administration devised a questionnaire intended to determine presumptive loyalty and thus allow for incarcerated JAs to leave their camps and simultaneously enable Nisei to volunteer for military service. On February 1, 1943, FDR issued a statement that prepared the retreat from hard-line policies of the previous year:

“No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”

Those who passed the so-called loyalty tests joined the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, as well as other units. Thousands of JAs formed the core of the Military Intelligence Service, which provided crucial Japanese language translation and interpretation; this information was vital to the prosecution of the war in the Pacific, largely because the unsuspecting Japanese military never considered the Nisei capable of “disloyalty” to the homeland of their Issei parents.

Others served in the Counter Intelligence Corps, the Women’s Army Corps, and the 1399th Engineer Construction Battalion. The battlefield heroics and military valor of these Nisei may be understood through their WWII awards, an amazing record: in addition to the 21 Medals of Honor, some 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, more than 4,000 Bronze Stars, and over 4,000 Purple Hearts.

But the record also includes Nisei who suffered doubts about loyalty to a country that had betrayed them or who had misgivings about sacrifice in general. Some Nisei who protested discriminatory treatment were shunted into the 1800th Engineer Service Battalion and relegated to hard labor—grunt work to facilitate training maneuvers.

The major postwar narrative fashioned by leaders in the JA community and mainstream media left out the more troublesome notes. The popular story featured an ethnic group beset by discrimination and racism before WWII, demonized by association with an enemy Japan after Pearl Harbor, and yet ultimately transcending unendurable conditions during the war through heroic stoicism and gallantry.

Over time, that record made JAs America’s “model minority,” a community honored for bootstrap progress through quiet, dedicated, and unobtrusive diligence; this perception was built in deliberate contrast to African Americans whose struggles for civil rights involved actions designed to disrupt the status quo.

This JA narrative ends, it is said, with a suitable reward: On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed H.R. 442 (note the number), a bill apologizing for the unconstitutional treatment of JAs and providing checks in the amount of $20,000 to each of over 60,000 individuals still alive on that date.

But the story is not over—far from it. After Reagan’s apology, a sea of historic markers, exhibitions, art collections, websites, documentaries, articles, videos, books, museums, monuments, and memorials has appeared. Nearly all of these markers now spread a new gospel: the racist, dehumanizing, and unconstitutional experience of Japanese Americans during WWII must never serve as justification for scapegoating any group in the name of national security.

The post How a Segregated Regiment of Japanese Americans Became One of WWII’s Most Decorated appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That reality could be upon us shortly—any time after Donald Trump is inaugurated into the White House. Following the November 2015 Paris attacks, Mr. Trump had called for the registering and tracking of American Muslims. Just after his election in November, the press and internet exploded with news that his transition team was seriously considering a Muslim registry. Then, members of his camp began to cite Japanese internment as precedent for a Muslim registry.

Carl Higbie, a prominent Trump supporter, gave an interview with the New York Times in which he conceded that the internment camps were “horrific,” but insisted that Korematsu serves as “historical, factual precedent to do things that are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.” For many Americans familiar with Korematsu and the history of Japanese internment, such statements were shocking.

The Korematsu decision has long been widely discounted as precedent in legal circles and taught as a tragic failure of American values in history classes. By now, it is evident that the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans—three-quarters of whom were U.S. citizens, the rest immigrants who were not permitted to become citizens, and all of whom were interned without due process—was based on fear, panic, and racism.

Korematsu is widely acknowledged as a civil rights disaster. Earl Warren, who as Attorney General of California had been a leading proponent of internment, came to deeply regret his role. Scalia—commonly remembered as one of the most influential conservative justices to sit on the nation’s highest court—ranked Korematsu among the most egregious decisions in Supreme Court history, along with Dred Scott, while Justice Stephen Breyer has written that Korematsu has been so thoroughly discredited that it is hard to conceive of any future court referring to it favorably or relying on it.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing an apology and compensation as redress for the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans. And in 2011, the Department of Justice—finally—officially conceded that it committed grave error in the Korematsu case 67 years prior when the government submitted false and incomplete evidence, and suppressed the fact that FBI and military investigations refuted claims of Japanese American disloyalty. This concession obliterated any lingering doubt over Korematsu’s utter lack of value as legal precedent for interning American citizens.

Korematsu, in other words, is a lesson of what not to do.

This is not simply a case of hindsight. When the Korematsu Court decided to uphold the government’s decision to intern Japanese Americans as a “military necessity,” it did so even as the government was dismantling the internment policy. The rounding up and internment of Japanese Americans had begun in May 1942, but before the end of the year, many young Japanese Americans were released from the camps to attend colleges in the Midwest and the East, while others were released to provide much-needed labor, especially in the fields.

Never mind that the government never interned Japanese Americans en masse in Hawaii, which had the highest concentration of Japanese Americans in the country, and which was the physical location of the Pearl Harbor attack that triggered the mass incarceration. Concerned that the removal and exclusion of Japanese residents would cause economic ruin for the territory, officials rejected the idea of wholesale internment on the islands.

Then in early 1943, the government circulated the infamous “Loyalty Questionnaire,” with the hope of recruiting interned Japanese Americans into the military. The irony was not lost on the interned, who had been forced behind wire fences based on racialized notions of ancestry and disloyalty—in other words, suspected as persons incapable of ever fully becoming Americans—and then were asked to fight for the U.S. On February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt announced his decision to let Japanese Americans enlist, and more than 26,000 served in the U.S. Army during the war. On December 17, 1944, Roosevelt issued Public Proclamation No. 21, ordering the internment camps to be closed and all remaining Japanese Americans to be released.

The very next day—December 18, 1944—the Supreme Court released its Korematsu decision, upholding the constitutionality of the government’s internment policy and affirming the conviction of Fred Korematsu, 23-year-old Japanese American welder from San Leandro, California who had defied the government order to move to an internment camp. But that was not all.

On the same day, the Court also released its decision on another lesser-known but arguably more important case dealing with internment: Ex Parte Endo. Mitsuye Endo had lived in the California capital of Sacramento, worked for the California Department of Motor vehicles, was a practicing Christian, could neither speak nor read Japanese, and had a brother in the U.S. Army. Nonetheless she’d been subjected to the extreme discrimination all Japanese Americans were made to endure at the time, and had been forced into an internment camp.

In the Endo case, the Court unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States. It stressed that “[a] citizen who is concededly loyal presents no problem of espionage or sabotage. Loyalty is a matter of the heart and mind, not of race, creed, or color. He who is loyal is, by definition, not a spy or a saboteur.” The Court found that as a loyal citizen, Endo was entitled to unconditional release from the internment camp.

It has never been clear to me why the case of Endo—the case which legally brought the internment camps to a close—has been so overshadowed by Korematsu. But if we are to call upon history to help us make decisions today, we need to look at the whole picture, and not rely upon selective memories. By the time the Supreme Court rendered its decisions, the government’s decision to intern Japanese Americans based on assertions of “military necessity” and wartime exigencies were directly undercut by its own actions.

Indeed, the same Court that seemingly upheld the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu affirmed in Endo the right of those very same Japanese Americans to not be detained and interned. One could distinguish the niceties of the different constitutional or legal bases underlying the two cases and varying outcomes, but the very need to make such fine jurisprudential distinctions, I would argue, points to the practical inconsistencies. The history that some are invoking as support for a Muslim registry is not at all what they think it is.

If the next administration tries to pass a Muslim registry, it will test our core values as a nation and as a people. Admittedly, historians have been a bit more wary of narratives about American exceptionalism, but one thing that historians—from the most conservative to the most liberal—have not backed away from is the Constitution, and the idea that America should live up to its foundational ideals. Fear, prejudice, racial and religious antipathy should never be the basis for government policy, at least not in a republic that has worked so hard for nearly two and a half centuries to protect and promote a Constitution cherished for its democratic values and commitment to freedom.

Inter arma enim silent leges. This was the ancient saying that Scalia frequently invoked to explain how bad history could still repeat itself. “In times of war, the law may fall silent.” But we, the people, can’t. Nunquam iterum–never again.

The post The Supreme Court Ruled Wrong, Then Right, on Japanese American Internment appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Coincidentally, this February 19 marks the 75th anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 setting up the camps. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in upstate New York is devoting an entire exhibit to FDR’s internment decision and its impact on the lives of internees for the first time in the library’s illustrious history.

The exhibit, “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans In World War II,” will be ready for public viewing February 19, and will run through Dec. 31, 2017. In the meantime, it is worth reflecting on President Roosevelt’s role in and his reasons for setting up the internment camps. Trump, after all, described Roosevelt as a revered leader who was nonetheless responsible for setting up the internment camps. The then-presidential candidate suggested that if one of America’s greatest presidents could take such a step to defend lives, then Trump reasonably could crack down on Muslim Americans for the sake of security if he were to win the White House.

The internment decision represents one of the great paradoxes of FDR’s three-plus terms as president. Roosevelt was not just an architect of the New Deal but also a champion of human rights and individual liberties here at home and around the world as the crisis of World War II encroached on the United States.

Faced with the growing power of fascist militarism, Roosevelt declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms address that “the mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for.” Indeed, he then cited “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as one of these fundamental democratic values that was worthy of national sacrifice.

The puzzle of his presidency is how a man so responsible for defending freedom against the totalitarian menace—whose wartime addresses stirred millions of people to defend the cause of liberty—could simultaneously authorize and implement one of the greatest civil liberties abuses in American history.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the political pressures on Roosevelt to take drastic action against Japanese Americans on the West Coast metastasized. Popular fears of imminent air raids, widespread espionage and land invasion combined with entrenched anti-Japanese racism, especially in California, Oregon, and Washington state, into a combustible mix in the uncertainty that defined the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Railing against any American officials who had the temerity to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, the Los Angeles Times denounced all people of Japanese origin as “snakes” who posed imminent dangers to communities on the Pacific coast. Anti-Japanese voices grew louder as concerns soared that cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle—would come under enemy attack. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron warned residents that, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid … We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.”

A group of Army officers, fearing that invasion was imminent and under pressure from nativists in the Western United States, pressed the White House to remove and incarcerate Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Roosevelt was kept abreast of the fast-moving debate about the fate of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the voices in support of internment proved far louder and politically and militarily more potent than the arguments made by interment’s opponents.

A member of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Harley Kilgore (D-WV), sent Roosevelt letters from Americans protesting the ongoing presence of Japanese people within the United States as a grave threat. “I am enclosing herewith a few samples of the types of protests which I am receiving from persons very distant from the Pacific Coast with reference to the dangers of Japanese and other inhabitants of that vicinity,” Kilgore wrote the president. “It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast should be declared a military area which will give authority to put [residents] … under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas.”

The most vigorous dissent to incarcerating Japanese Americans came from Attorney General Francis Biddle and Assistant to the Attorney General, James H. Rowe, Jr. But even as they argued admirably against evacuation and incarceration, the Justice Department’s leaders conveyed to the president some sense of the popular racism, war hysteria, and economic motivations that would ultimately overwhelm the debate and set in motion FDR’s executive order. Biddle wrote Roosevelt:

“A great many of the West Coast people distrust the Japanese, various special interests would welcome their removal from good farm land and the elimination of their competition, some of the local California radio and press have demanded evacuation, the West Coast congressional delegation are asking the same thing and finally Walter Lippman and Westbrook Pegler recently have taken up the evacuation cry on the ground that attack on the West Coast and widespread sabotage is imminent.”

When Biddle and other Justice Department officials were assured by the Army that the military and not Justice would be responsible for implementing and running the camps, they withdrew their opposition to Roosevelt’s executive order. That order, numbered 9066 and signed on February 19, 1942, did not explicitly mention the Japanese, but there was no question that it targeted people of Japanese ancestry for removal rather than people of German and Italian origins.

The decision was hardly motivated by legitimate threats to the national security of the United States. Almost all historians have concluded that there was no evidence in the early 1940s—and that no evidence has emerged in the seven-plus decades since—showing that Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were acting as spies or that they were part of a larger plot aiding the Emperor’s war effort. The notion that national security considerations justified the camps is simply contradicted by the voluminous historical evidence to the contrary..

“There is no evidence that [the Japanese government] had any success” recruiting spies in the United States to advance its war aims, historian Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, has pointed out. “The American occupation authorities in Japan after the war who studied captured Japanese documents found no evidence of any giant spy rings among American citizens of Japanese ancestry.”

Roosevelt, a product of his times, regarded the Japanese with the racist suspicion shared by countless of his fellow Americans. A close student of public opinion, and attuned to the military, political, and popular pressures to incarcerate Japanese Americans and suspend their rights as citizens, he issued the executive order without much apparent forethought or agonizing about the fraught moral questions and human costs of his action. Roosevelt subscribed to decades of anti-Japanese racism that pervaded early 20th century American culture. Just as the nation’s 19th century political leaders could speak eloquently for democracy and sing the praises of individual freedom while also defending the institution of slavery, Roosevelt gave hope to the world’s victims of fascist militarism and rallied millions of Americans to defend democracy while simultaneously authorizing the complete suspension of rights of an entire group of people based on their race. One historian has rightly called the internment camps “the most tragic act of his administration.”

During the 1980s, a committee established by the U.S. Congress to investigate the history of the internment camps concluded that they amounted to “a grave injustice” born out of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.” The most glaring abdication was the failure of Franklin Roosevelt to defend the rights and liberties of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens as he was pulled along by the tides of hysteria and racism 75 years ago this February.

The post Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Act of Infamy Against Japanese Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1941, at the beginning of the war, roughly 10 percent of the adult “alien” men (Japan-born persons being ineligible for citizenship) were picked up by the FBI as potentially dangerous and interned by the Justice Department, effectively robbing the community of leadership. We had been under surveillance for quite a while, and these men were singled out. My father, who was an alien, was not picked up, though many of our friends were. None ever were convicted of a crime or act of sabotage, though many were held for years in captivity.

I was a citizen by birth but the distinction meant nothing at the time. My entire family—my parents, two sisters, and I—were sent to Poston in southwestern Arizona, geographically the largest of the ten camps where American Japanese were held. At the time, I had just turned 12. By the time we were permitted to leave, I was 15.

We, along with 120,000 others, spent the better part of four years in desolate areas where we were monitored, our movements restricted. We ate in mess halls, and our tar paper barracks were so flimsy I remember wind and dust storms so strong that roof tops were torn off, debris flying around like crumpled paper.

Perhaps even more of a shock to me than the prison-like conditions was the fact that for the first time in my life I was living totally surrounded by others of Japanese descent. In my early school years, most of my classmates were white, with a scattering of Mexican American kids. Although I was one of the few American Japanese in my small town, I never experienced any prejudice there. But at Poston my farm upbringing contrasted sharply with the sophistication, manners, and clothes of the American Japanese kids from Los Angeles and other cities.

Here we were, all locked up together, doing our best to be “normal” teens. My mother disapproved of the camp’s faster growing-up process, driven by the city kids. She wasn’t sure about my going to the parties and dances that were a big part of teen life at the camp, and she did not want me to have a brassiere or wear makeup. I missed my white classmates, my home, my town, and my less-pressured life. I felt like an ugly duckling.

Men at Santa Fe, New Mexico Internment Camp. Courtesy of David Rogers/Densho Digital Repository.

We had the trappings of society like schools, jobs, a camp government, a police and fire department. My father did some wood carving while my mother took sewing lessons, making our dresses. I spent a lot of time reading books from the library. But life was far from normal. The usual social hierarchy was turned upside down, with the elders stripped of power and the young freer to pursue their interests.

It was the pettiness of life in camp that got to me. Almost every aspect of everyone’s life was known to all and this promoted a culture of gossip and rumor mongering, with whispers and speculations about others filling our time. The meanness, the nastiness exhibited, the way we picked on one another, was an ugliness I hadn’t known before. Of course, it was a manifestation of the cramped living conditions, forced idleness, and the insecurity of our situation.

A group formerly known for hard work and pride in our accomplishments was reduced to committing little acts of rebellion aimed generally at the government and administration who were oppressing us. People “stole” wood scraps to make furniture and pilfered food from the mess halls. Many did not feel that manual work was worth doing and slacked off, held strikes, and quit their “jobs.” My father “borrowed” a tractor and took a mob of kids to the Colorado River, a couple of miles from the camp.

I was too young and naïve to understand the bigger picture, but the smaller world I inhabited was beset with contradictions. In eighth grade, a white school teacher from Massachusetts ordered us to memorize a Marc Antony speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” it began. “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” We labored mightily to master those lines and dozens more. But, alas, most of us had trouble doing it, and she castigated us as ignorant, lazy, know-nothings.

There were those, particularly older men, who listened to Japanese propaganda broadcasts on smuggled-in radios. Reports of Japanese victories would elicit some cheers. Clumps of men would discuss the latest “news,” sneering at those who didn’t believe, severely criticizing those who remained loyal to the U.S.

Our community was caught up in this international war at a particularly sensitive period. My parents’ generation were still culturally old country. Some, like my mother, never learned to speak English. Their children, including me, were rapidly becoming Americanized. I joined the Girl Scouts and edited the junior high newspaper, The Desert Daze.

In prewar times, it was customary to send children to Japanese school because many believed that eventually they were going to return to their home country. In some places, it was a Saturday-only class, but in my case, we attended an hour of Japanese lessons each day, after American school, and our teachers were brought from Japan. I perfected my calligraphy and reading and writing, but the authoritarian style and emphasis on obedience went against what we were learning in the American school. Even though most of us spoke Japanese at home with our parents, we weren’t interested in it. English was becoming our main language.

These intergenerational conflicts, typical of the American immigrant experience, intensified in the camp. In the beginning, because no Issei (immigrant generation) were allowed any leadership roles in the camps, the block managers and elected members of the camp councils were all young people who had been born on American soil. This powerlessness of the older men was manifest in continuous grumbling about how callow and ill-prepared for leadership the young were.

A call by the Japanese American Citizens League, (composed of young men and women who acted as the liaison between the people and the government), to allow young men to serve in the American military to prove their loyalty, provoked intense conflict. I had no brothers, but I know that my parents thought that to send our youth to fight for this country, the very country which had imprisoned us, was absolutely unacceptable. I had cousins who “resisted”, refusing to comply with draft orders, and I also had an uncle who served as an officer in the army, fighting in Europe.

These divisions in the camp were reflected in my family. Several years into our incarceration, my father decided that he would apply for repatriation. He had had enough of the mistreatment, feeling that prospects would be better in Japan where the family had some property. I was astounded and angry. America was my home and I knew that I was not Japanese. I had no interest in going to Japan. I’d seen enough of the patriarchal, authoritarian style of Japanese society in my own family and others to know that I didn’t want to be a Japanese woman, subservient and under the control of men.

I fought with my parents, even writing letters to magazine editors, but nothing I did would change their minds. As the war wound down I watched as friends left, moving to eastern parts of the U.S. and then back to the West Coast. I was feeling trapped. But when Japan was defeated, my father learned that there was nothing to go back to. He changed his mind and we resettled in Oceanside.

For the rest of my father’s life, we never talked about the camp experience in a serious way. It was too painful. He started farming again, but wasn’t very successful. Two years later my mother died of bleeding ulcers. My father became more passive and quiet.

For my part, I was relieved that the ordeal was over and determined to put it out of my mind. I went to college, married a white man, raised a family, lived mostly in white society. I protested the Vietnam War and was active in the civil rights movement. And in the course of these activities, I began to think about my own background.

The wars against Korea and Vietnam made me very aware of American attitudes toward Asians, and the topic of camp came up from time to time. I ran into a therapist at a party who questioned me about my experience and I brushed it off as not very important. But she pressed on, telling me how formative those early adolescent years were, that I should reexamine those times. This stuck with me, and when a movement for redress began to take shape, I joined in and worked at the legislative level and as a named plaintiff, in a court case that went to the Supreme Court.

Baggage is inspected as Japanese American families arrive in Turlock, California, en route to War Relocation Authority centers. Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration/Densho Digital Reposity.

I learned that the most damaging event that occurred in the camps was a so-called “loyalty questionnaire” administered in 1943, mandatory for everyone 17 and older. It was used to separate the “loyal” from the “disloyal.” It was a poorly designed instrument, resulting in divided families, friends. On the question of agreeing to serve in the American military, to say no was to automatically designate “disloyalty”. My cousins said no and were charged with being draft dodgers. A sympathetic judge fined them one penny.

After the government turned the camp at Tule Lake into a segregation center for all “disloyals” and troublemakers, I watched friends loaded on to trucks to be taken there. By the flimsy logic of the day, our family should have been sent there as well—I never learned why were not. Perhaps a fortunate oversight kept us out.

The government seemed hell-bent on tarnishing all of us as aliens—and enemy aliens at that. How could we remain “loyal” to a country that had held us captive for years, impoverishing us in so many ways? How were we to respond to these humiliations and victimization? We were expected to disallow our Japanese heritage and submit to the demands of our captors. And we did. But it left us with a badly damaged community, an ever-present split between the “loyals” and “disloyals”, and a deep understanding about how vulnerable we were.

Ironically, we were very good at adapting and melting into the American middle class, earning the label of “model minority.” In my own case, I lost my primal language, distanced myself from the American Japanese community and for many years didn’t look back. We paid a heavy emotional price, and the issue of identity has always dogged us: Can we truly be American?

It’s been a long time since World War II and one would think that Poston would be a fading memory, but it is not. I have made pilgrimages to Tule Lake, seeking a better understanding of our history. Though I have spent my years in white society and my children are half white, I am certain that given particular circumstances, I could be targeted again for my political views, ethnic background, for my religion or being a member of a group identified as other.

I am not bitter, but I remain quite angry. I am a liberal, a believer in equality, but I am also a cynic. I don’t think that our founding fathers really meant to extend equality to everybody, but the words and sentiments remain part of our constitution. The struggle for our ideals continues and it is necessary to remind us about what happened to me and 120,000 other Americans because without that memory, it could easily happen again.

The post Why I’m Still Talking About My Incarceration as an American Japanese appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One man stayed downstairs to guard the elevator while the rest snuck upstairs using skeleton keys to make their way to the back rooms. They brought along a safecracker—a convicted felon sprung for one night to help them—as well as local policemen and FBI agents, who set up patrols outside during the operation. Once the safe was open, Ringle’s crew photographed its contents item by item, putting everything back in place before leaving the building.

Though the United States had not yet entered the war, it had launched fledgling espionage efforts with an eye toward the possibility. The Navy had chosen Ringle to assess the Japanese threat in 1940 because he had previously lived and worked in Tokyo and was one of only a handful of U.S. sailors who could speak Japanese. He had gone on to build a network of contacts on the West Coast, determining which cultural organizations were harmless and which might be dangerous.

As a result of the break-in, Ringle made two key discoveries. The first was that he now possessed the consulate’s list of agents and secret codes. The second was that the Japanese government distrusted the Nisei, the generation born in the U.S. to Japanese immigrants, and was thus unlikely to make use of them as spies.

Ringle’s discoveries that night should have been powerful enough to prevent internment of Japanese Americans during the war. But, in wartime, his knowledge would prove an insufficient weapon against manufactured hysteria and deference to the Army.

After the devastation of Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Naval Operations assigned Ringle to write a report on the loyalty of U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. He delivered a 10-page report six weeks after the attack stating that “the entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion,” largely due to racial prejudice. “[T]he removal and internment in concentration camps of all citizens and residents of Japanese extraction … ,” he wrote, would be “not only unwarranted but very unwise.”

It was an insightful, detailed assessment. And nearly all of its recommendations would be ignored.

The story of the detention of nearly 120,000 residents of Japanese descent during World War II has become a mythic narrative, giving Americans the impression that the internment was an inevitable error born of simple ignorance and fear. Acting in haste after Pearl Harbor, the story goes, U.S. officials had no idea that concentration camps would be unnecessary and counterproductive.

But, in fact, senior cabinet members and the president himself had accurate information, and some did not favor internment.

The cinderblock jail at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, which held Japanese American prisoners during World War II internment. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Long before the attack, the federal government had developed a plan for the treatment of enemy aliens in the event of war: targeted individuals would be rounded up and detained by the FBI, then provided a hearing before a review board, which would determine whether they should be given liberty without restriction, liberty on parole under the supervision of a sponsor, or continued detention. Just three days ahead of Pearl Harbor, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who also held the official position of assistant director for the Office of Civilian Defense—announced that noncitizens with “no criminal nor anti-American record” had nothing to fear in the event of war and would not be interned.

In the wake of the bombing, the government stuck to its plan at first. Ringle worked with FBI agents coordinating arrest squads in the hours after the attack, capturing those known or suspected to be spies from his lists. Restrictions and extra guards were put into place in sensitive military areas.

But other voices spread disinformation. A week later, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had advocated internment long before Pearl Harbor, accused Japanese Americans in Hawaii of betraying the nation, announcing without evidence that outside of Europe, “the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii.”

On December 19, the man put in charge of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, first declared his intention to exile all Japanese Americans over the age of 13 from the West Coast. But he initially balked at his subordinates’ request to detain the entire Japanese American community, saying, “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen.”

As he worked on his report after the bombing, Kenneth Ringle had the support of presidential advisor Curtis Munson, who advocated a measured response. The Washington Post concluded near the end of January that “The Alien Program Is Working Well,” noting that only those actually suspected of espionage had been arrested.

But in the background, other dramas were unfolding. U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle closed the Mexican and Canadian borders to all incoming Japanese individuals, and authorized raids of Japanese immigrant homes without warrants. In the days after Pearl Harbor, many Japanese Americans lost their jobs and lived in fear of violence or arrest. It was particularly bitter that white Americans accused Japanese immigrants of disloyalty, when U.S. court decisions had universally barred them from receiving citizenship for decades.

By the end of January 1942, two factions had emerged. The Roberts Commission, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to investigate Pearl Harbor, delivered its report on January 23, making vague allegations of “Japanese spies.” The Commission did not distinguish the nature of the spying or whether it was committed by U.S. citizens or aliens. Yet rumors of espionage were seized on by opportunists to inflame prejudice across the country. The governor of California, Culbert Olson, announced that his state’s residents “don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.” In mid-February, journalist Walter Lippmann argued in a column that the lack of any real sabotage by Japanese residents along the coast to date was actually evidence of a future planned attack.

Pushed by zealous staff members, DeWitt requested control in early February over all citizens and aliens in zones established under his command. That spring, he would reverse his statement about an American citizen being an American citizen, explaining that, “A Jap is a Jap.”

Meanwhile, Ringle’s supporters pressed the case for restraint. On his side were crucial cabinet members: despite harsh measures taken against some noncitizens under his authorization, Attorney General Biddle backed measures focused on aliens rather than citizens. Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a man not known for moderation, agreed that calls for universal internment rose out of political pressure rather than necessity.

Japanese graffiti on the interior wall of a farmer’s shed in Tulelake, California. The shed originally housed Japanese American detainees during World War II. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Ringle turned in his assessment just days after the Roberts Commission filed its report, and it appeared that FDR agreed with Ringle’s supporters. But with Navy leadership unwilling to oppose the Army, by the time Ringle’s assessment wound its way to the White House three weeks later, public outrage and DeWitt’s demands had interceded.

Though Eleanor Roosevelt still stood against internment, her husband ultimately sided with DeWitt. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, sealing the fate of not just Japanese aliens but also of some 70,000 Japanese American citizens of the United States. The Ringle Report had failed to block the Army’s drive for mass internment. But it would return to play a role in postwar events.

The shift toward internment began with the division of the exclusion zone into segments, in which Japanese American residents were given as little as two days’ notice to prepare for departure to temporary detention centers—mostly improvised camps at fairgrounds and racetracks. The War Relocation Authority was soon established, and before the end of 1942, purpose-built camps had been set up in isolated locations around the country, from Arkansas to Wyoming.

As Japanese Americans were forced from the West Coast, they had to sell their businesses and belongings, while the community argued over whether or not to protest. Nisei journalist James Omura condemned the policies of relocation and internment, drawing the wrath of Japanese American cultural organizations that did not want to appear disloyal to America. Other Japanese Americans launched legal challenges to the curfew and exclusion orders that barred them from their rights as citizens. The most famous among them, Korematsu v. United States, became the landmark Supreme Court case on the question of wartime internment.

When Korematsu was heard in 1944, a government attorney alerted U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fahy to the existence of the Ringle Report, noting that failure to acknowledge it in his filings to the Supreme Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” But Fahy ignored this warning and directly indicated to the court that all U.S. government and military assessments were unanimous in support of internment.

The Supreme Court expressed discomfort with mass internment’s failure to address individual guilt or innocence, but was already prone to defer to the executive branch and military leaders in wartime. Unaware of the additional evidence which had been withheld, the court accepted the Army’s argument of the “military necessity” of detention.

The public and the Court would not learn of the solicitor general’s omission until decades later, when a reporter discovered material in archived files. By then, Ringle was dead, with a funeral wreath sent to his widow by the Japanese American community in honor of his efforts to protect them.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that his report, which should have settled the question of universal internment, became the central piece of evidence used by the original plaintiffs to demand justice in court. And it would take three more decades until acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal wrote a public repudiation in 2011 of his predecessor’s actions in Korematsu.

If the Ringle Report could not prevent the tragedies that had been suffered—the degradation of U.S. citizens, the financial losses, and mass dislocation—its reappearance did at least set the historical record straight.

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