MOVEMENTS AND MOMENTS
The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II
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How was the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans possible?
Chapter objectives
- Learn about the violation of constitutional rights that led to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the movement for reparations after.
- Understand how the US government justified mass incarceration and the complex historical circumstances that shaped different responses from Japanese Americans.
- Explore how the power of language can shape historical narratives, as well as the strategies and actions communities take to achieve justice.
Japanese immigrants Masuo and Shidzuyo Yasui established a large family, a successful store, and other enterprises in Oregon’s Hood River Valley before World War II. Despite intense racism, they and thousands of other Japanese Americans living in West Coast states developed thriving farms, small businesses, and communities. After Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi, decades of anti-Japanese discrimination culminated in the government forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes into prison camps. None of them had committed any crime. The democratic system’s failure to protect Japanese Americans’ rights during World War II has motivated contemporary Japanese Americans to defend other groups that the government has targeted because of race, religion, or immigration status. Using the Yasui family as a case study, this chapter explores what Japanese Americans experienced in the camps, their varied responses to imprisonment, the long-term impacts of incarceration, and how Japanese Americans obtained redress.
Modules in this chapter
Overview & Introduction
Setting the Stage for Japanese American Mass Incarceration
Forced Uprooting and Incarceration
Cooperation, Resistance, and Dissent
Starting Over
Redress and Solidarity
Overview & Introduction
Setting the Stage for Japanese American Mass Incarceration
Forced Uprooting and Incarceration
Cooperation, Resistance, and Dissent
Starting Over
Redress and Solidarity
Chapter Sources
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. 2nd Edition. Seattle: University of Washington, Press, 1997.
Densho Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/
Grodzins, Morton. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949
Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: The Free Press, 1988.
Irons, Peter. Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Kessler, Lauren. Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family. New York: Random House, 1993.
Murray, Alice Y. Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Robinson, Greg. A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Weglyn, Michi N. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.
