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Outline of Japanese American Internment during World War II

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Outline of the internment of Japanese American during World War II

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Japanese American internment
Part of the United States home front during World War II
Clockwise from top left:
DateFebruary 19, 1942 – March 20, 1946
Location
CauseExecutive Order 9066 signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt
Motive
PerpetratorsUnited States federal government
Outcome
DeathsAt least 1,862; at least 7 homicides by sentries.
InquiriesCommission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (1983)
Prisoners120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast

This is a topical guide to articles about the history of the Japanese American internment during World War II.

During World War II, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly relocated and incarcerated[1] in ten internment camps in the United States, operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country.[2] About two-thirds were U.S. citizens.[3] These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.[4][5]

About 127,000 Japanese Americans then lived in the continental U.S.,[6][7][a] of whom about 112,000 were removed from the West Coast.[9] About 80,000 were Nisei ('second generation'; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei ('third generation', the children of Nisei).[7][6][10] The rest were Issei ('first generation') immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship.[11] In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population,[6][3] only about 1,330 were incarcerated.[12][13]

Most Japanese Americans were first held in temporary assembly centers, run by the Army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, before they were sent to internment camps[14] in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas.[15] The internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many of them were forced to sell either some or all of their property, including their homes and their businesses.[16]

Overview

  • Internment of Japanese Americans - (1942–1946) - The forced removal and imprisonment of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, by the United States government during World War II.
  • List of Japanese-American internment camps - List of sites used to hold Japanese Americans, from temporary assembly centers and the ten War Relocation Authority camps.

Background

  • World War II - Global conflict.
  • Pearl Harbor (attack) - Beginning of the Pacific War, when the nation of Japan attacked military facilities in the Territory of Hawaii.
  • Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States - Hostility toward Japanese immigrants and their American-born children.
  • Alien and Sedition Acts - (1798) - Four statutes of 1798, used as the legal basis for interning Japanese, German and Italian nationals during the Second World War.
  • FBI Index - The Bureau's card-file system for tracking people it considered dangerous.
  • Munson Report - (1941) - Curtis B. Munson's twenty-five-page survey for the State Department, delivered to the White House on October 7, 1941, which found no Japanese problem on the West Coast and reported extraordinary loyalty among the people it examined.
  • Roberts Commissions - (1941–1942) - Presidential commissions chaired by Justice Owen Roberts.
  • Niʻihau incident - (December 7–13, 1941) - The week after Pearl Harbor, a downed Japanese pilot on the Hawaiian island of Niʻihau was helped by two residents of Japanese ancestry.
  • Black Dragon Society - Japanese ultranationalist group founded in 1901.
  • Pacific Movement of the Eastern World - (founded c. 1932) - African American movement, started in Chicago, that looked to Japan as a champion of non-white peoples; the FBI sought a grand jury investigation of it in 1942.
  • Propaganda for Japanese-American internment - The newsreels, films and newspaper campaigns.
  • Shikata ga nai - Japanese phrase meaning "it cannot be helped," associated with how the incarcerated generation described enduring the camps.

Enactment and administration

Places

Assembly centers

Internment camps

Other

Life in internment camps

  • Buddhist Temple of Chicago - (founded October 1944) - Founded by Rev. Gyomay Kubose with recently released prisoners.
  • Cleveland Buddhist Temple - (founded 1944) - Jodo Shinshu congregation founded by resettlers in Cleveland.
  • Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee - (1943–1944) - Draft resistance group; 85 men convicted, pardoned in 1947.
  • Lordsburg killings - (July 27, 1942) - Guard shot two elderly internees, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura, in the back; he was acquitted of manslaughter.
  • Manzanar Guayule Project - (begun April 1942) - Rubber research program run by prisoners at Manzanar.
  • Manzanar Riot - (December 5–6, 1942) - Military police fired on protesters, killing two.
  • Minidoka Irrigator - (September 1942 – July 1945) - Camp newspaper at Minidoka.
  • Renunciation Act of 1944 - (July 1, 1944) - Allowed wartime renunciation of citizenship on U.S. soil; used mainly at Tule Lake.
  • Santa Fe riot - (March 12, 1945) - Guards attacked internees protesting three transfers, badly injuring four.
  • Seabrook Buddhist Temple - (founded winter 1945) - Built by Japanese American workers at Seabrook Farms.
  • Seabrook, New Jersey - Farming community where nearly 3,000 Japanese Americans resettled after the camps.
  • Topaz Times - (September 1942 – August 1945) - Camp newspaper at Topaz.
  • Hirabayashi v. United States - (1943) - Upheld Gordon Hirabayashi's conviction for violating the curfew on people of Japanese ancestry.
  • Yasui v. United States - (1943) - Companion ruling affirming that the curfew applied to citizens; Minoru Yasui's conviction upheld.
  • Korematsu v. United States - (1944) - 6–3 ruling upholding Fred Korematsu's conviction for defying exclusion; repudiated in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).
  • Ex parte Endo - (1944) - Unanimous ruling that the government could not detain a citizen it conceded was loyal.
  • Hirabayashi v. United States (1987) - (1987) - Ninth Circuit vacated Hirabayashi's wartime convictions after the government's suppression of evidence came to light.
  • Mochizuki v. United States - (1998–1999) - Class action by interned Japanese Latin Americans; settled for $5,000 each and a presidential apology.
  • Japanese-American Claims Act - (1948) - Property loss compensation; ~23,000 claims settled for roughly $38 million of $131 million claimed.

People

  • Karl Bendetsen - (1907–1989) - Army officer who drafted the removal plan and is generally named its architect
  • Clara Breed - (1906–1994) - San Diego librarian who wrote to the children of her branch throughout their incarceration and lobbied on their behalf
  • Ralph Lawrence Carr - (1887–1950) - Colorado governor who defended Japanese Americans' rights and welcomed them to his state, at the cost of his career
  • Wayne M. Collins - (1899–1974) - San Francisco lawyer whose 23-year campaign restored the citizenship of the Tule Lake renunciants
  • John L. DeWitt - (1880–1962) - General commanding the Western Defense Command, who issued the exclusion orders
  • Milton S. Eisenhower - (1899–1985) - First director of the War Relocation Authority, who resigned after ninety days
  • Mitsuye Endo - (1920–2006) - Her habeas petition won the ruling that the government could not hold citizens it conceded were loyal
  • Bob Emmett Fletcher - (1911–2013) - Agricultural inspector who farmed three interned families' vineyards and handed back their share of the profits
  • Julius Goldwater - (1908–2001) - Buddhist priest who safeguarded families' property, visited all ten camps and opened hostels for those returning
  • Peter Irons - (born 1940) - Legal scholar whose archival research uncovered the suppressed evidence that reopened the wartime cases
  • Estelle Ishigo - (1899–1990) - White American artist who followed her Japanese American husband to Heart Mountain and drew what she saw
  • Lincoln Kanai - (1908–1982) - YMCA social worker jailed for refusing to report, and one of the few to challenge the orders in court
  • Ralph Lazo - (1924–1992) - Los Angeles teenager who followed his friends into Manzanar and stayed two years
  • Alexander H. Leighton - (1908–2007) - Social analyst whose fifteen months at Poston became The Governing of Men
  • Mike Masaoka - (1915–1991) - JACL national secretary who urged cooperation with removal and pressed for Nisei military service
  • Dale Minami - (born 1946) - Led the pro bono team that overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction in 1983
  • Dillon S. Myer - (1891–1982) - Directed the War Relocation Authority from 1942 until it closed in 1946
  • Joyce Nakamura Okazaki - (born 1934) - Held at Manzanar as a child and photographed there by Ansel Adams; later treasurer of the Manzanar Committee
  • Culbert Olson - (1876–1962) - California governor who dropped his early opposition and endorsed mass removal
  • Marvin Opler - (1914–1981) - Community analyst at Tule Lake who recorded both the camp's abuses and its cultural life
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt - (1882–1945) - President who signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal
  • Earl Warren - (1891–1974) - California attorney general who pushed for removal and later said he regretted it
  • Eric Yamamoto - Co-counsel on Korematsu's 1983 coram nobis petition and a leading scholar of redress

Organizations

  • Japanese American Citizens League - (founded 1929) - The oldest and largest Asian American civil rights group; its wartime leaders urged compliance with removal and helped the FBI identify Issei, decisions still contested
  • Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project - (founded 1996) - Seattle nonprofit whose free online archive gathers oral histories, photographs and documents from the incarceration
  • Japanese American National Museum - (founded 1992) - Little Tokyo museum covering 130 years of Japanese American life, including a large archive of home movies

Reparations

Memorials, museums and historical sites

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ At the time of the internment, Hawaii was not a state, but the Territory of Hawaii; Hawaii became a state on August 21, 1959.[8]

Citations

  1. ^ "The War Relocation Centers of World War II: When Fear was Stronger than Justice". National Park Service. Teaching with Historic Places. October 12, 2018. Retrieved August 13, 2026. nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, citizens and aliens alike
  2. ^ "Japanese American Incarceration". The National WWII Museum. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  3. ^ a b "About the Incarceration". Densho Encyclopedia. Densho. Retrieved August 13, 2026. More than two-thirds of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens.
  4. ^ "Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese-American Incarceration (1942)". National Archives. National Archives and Records Administration. February 9, 2026. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  5. ^ Niiya, Brian (July 24, 2026). "Executive Order 9066". Densho Encyclopedia. Densho. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  6. ^ a b c "Japanese American Relocation". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved August 13, 2026. In 1940, approximately 127,000 persons of Japanese descent lived in the continental United States.
  7. ^ a b "August 2025: The End of World War II". Census.gov. U.S. Census Bureau. August 1, 2025. Retrieved August 13, 2026. 126,947 Japanese (79,642 native and 47,305 foreign born)
  8. ^ "Hawaii Statehood, August 21, 1959". National Archives. Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration. March 10, 2023. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  9. ^ "Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II". National Archives. National Archives and Records Administration. September 24, 2025 [August 15, 2016]. Retrieved August 13, 2026. From the end of March to August, approximately 112,000 persons were sent to "assembly centers"
  10. ^ "Nisei". Densho Encyclopedia. Densho. March 19, 2013. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  11. ^ Imai, Shiho (February 6, 2024). "Ozawa v. United States". Densho Encyclopedia. Densho. Retrieved August 13, 2026. Landmark Supreme Court case that denied eligibility for citizenship to the Issei.
  12. ^ Mattos, Jodie (May 18, 2026). "Incarceration of Japanese & Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi". Research Guides. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  13. ^ "Hawaii's Other Internment Camps". National Park Service. June 11, 2025. Retrieved August 13, 2026. A total of 1,330 Japanese American citizens and Japanese nationals living in Hawai'i were incarcerated across the islands.
  14. ^ Linke, Konrad (August 29, 2024). "Assembly centers". Densho Encyclopedia. Densho. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  15. ^ "War Relocation Centers". National Park Service. July 30, 2025. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
  16. ^ "A Brief History of Japanese American Relocation During World War II". National Park Service. March 20, 2023. Retrieved August 13, 2026.
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