Dark chapter in U.S. history
“Infamy” a broad look at the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans in WWII
The charges were ludicrous: 90 percent of Japanese fishermen in the U.S. in 1942 were Japanese naval officers. The entire American Japanese population on the West Coast was going to commit sabotage. Japanese officers were cavorting in Northern California wearing gaudy uniforms and plumed hats. (They turned out to be members of a Masonic lodge.)
But in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans were deathly afraid of the Japanese living on the West Coast, despite the fact that a huge number of them were American citizens, born in the U.S., and had never been to Japan. The hysteria was fueled by racism as well as greed on part of Americans who coveted Japanese farms, stores and fishing boats.
Among those who fed the fear were Earl Warren, later Supreme Court Chief Justice, news commentator Edward R. Murrow, even editorial cartoonist Theodore Seuss Geisel, later famous as Dr. Seuss.
They, along with millions of frightened Americans who supported the government’s move to round up some 120,000 Japanese living on the West Coast and force them into concentration camps. So in February, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order forcing the Japanese to leave their homes with only what they could carry and move into 10 inland camps, one of them Amache in southeastern Colorado.
The relocated ones included Bill Hosokawa, who became editorial page editor of The “Denver Post, and Minoru Yasui, later head of Denver’s Human Rights Commission.
World War II Japanese relocation was an enormous violation of human and civil rights, but fear was so great that the government was happy to overlook the illegality. Only a few Caucasians spoke out against the relocation. They included Eleanor Roosevelt, Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr, Ernie Pyle, and oddly enough J. Edgar Hoover, who said the FBI could handle any cases of sabotage.
And, of course, there were none. “There was never a shred of evidence found of sabotage, subversive acts, spying or Fifth Column activity” on the part of second-generation Japanese residents, a government report concluded.
Long one of America’s dirty secrets, the mass move has become public in recent years as evacuees, elderly now, shed the shame they felt at being locked up in camps. The first major book on the camps was “Farewell to Manzanar,” by a former evacuee. Another was “Amache: The Story of Japanese Internment in Colorado During World War II,” by Colorado author Robert Harvey.
Now there’s “Infamy,” which is perhaps the most thorough history of the relocation to date. Author Robert Reeves replays the hysteria that led to the round-up of Japanese, tells the stories of many of the evacuees and recounts the heroism of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the All-Japanese “Go for Broke” unit. (”Go for broke” was a Hawaiian craps game term.) The government had expected 3,000 Nisei from the camps to join, plus 1,000 Hawaiians. Instead, just 1,208 Nisei volunteered, along with 10,000 Hawaiians, who had not been relocated, since such a huge evacuation would have destroyed Hawaii’s economy.
The lower-than-expected figure for camp volunteers was due to the young men’s disgust with their families’ treatment as well as threats from Kibei, American Japanese who had gone to school in Japan. The Kibei threatened pro-U.S. evacuees, even forcing some to renounce their U.S. citizenship. Reeves reveals the unrest in many of the camps and the gangs that threatened peaceful inmates.
In the 1980s, America tried to make amends by giving each camp survivor $20,000, a pittance compared to the $3 billion (in today’s dollars) that relocation cost the Japanese. They suffered in other ways. Family units broke down as children ate with their friends instead of their parents in the mess halls. Men lost stature when they could no longer support their families, and in fact, some were so broken in 1945 that they refused to leave the camps. They were given $25 and a train ticket “home.” But for most, there was no home. The sad climax to an infamous government program was that most evacuees either had sold their homes and businesses for pennies on the dollar in 1942 or they returned to find that during the war, their property had been destroyed or stolen.
Forced relocation indeed was an infamous chapter in U.S. history.
Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II by Richard Reeves (Henry Holt)