Internment of Japanese Americans

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The ten internment camps and other facilities of the War relocation authority in the western United States

The internment of Japanese-American Americans was the forced relocation and internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-American Americans from the west coast of the United States during World War II . 62 percent of the resettled were citizens of the United States. While about 10,000 were able to relocate to another part of the country of their own choosing, the remainder - an estimated 110,000 men, women and children - were relocated to hastily built inland camps called War Relocation Centers .

History of Internment

Order to all Japanese-born residents of San Francisco to meet at assembly points for removal within a week.
Manzanar in the dust storm on July 3, 1942

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II in December 1941, not only Japanese nationals in the United States, but all American citizens of Japanese descent were classified as an enemy alien . The measure was based on widespread racial prejudice and the continuation of various discriminatory restrictions, including the Immigration Act of 1924 , which banned the immigration of Japanese people.

On February 19, 1942 signed President Franklin D. Roosevelt , the Executive Order 9066 , large on the basis of parts of the Pacific Rim have been declared a prohibited area. All residents of California , western Oregon, and Washington, as well as a small strip of southern Arizona and Alaska with Japanese ancestry, were sent to internment camps east of the Pacific region by the War Relocation Authority . A comparable authorization for the complete internment of residents of German and Italian descent on the east coast was not implemented. Around 11,000 Germans and people of German origin and around 3,000 Italians were interned individually.

In December 1944, the Supreme Court dismissed the Japanese-born American Fred Korematsu's complaint against the internment, ruling that it was fundamentally lawful. On the same day he ruled that the internment of another Japanese American, Mitsuye Endos, whose loyalty was undisputed, was inadmissible under the habeas corpus principle. The federal government then announced that it wanted to end the internment by the end of 1945. The end of the Second World War came before that.

A total of 116,000 people were affected by the coercive measures against the Japanese population; Until 1945 they lived in ten barracks settlements far away from larger towns and under guard by the US military. After the end of the war, they were reimbursed for some proven damage under tight conditions.

In the 1960s, criticism of the measures began to be loud under the influence of the civil rights movement ; Executive Order 9066 was formally repealed by President Gerald Ford on February 19, 1976 . The discussion led to extensive scientific research and political debate in the 1980s. In 1980 the US Congress set up a special commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the internment of Japanese-born Americans in World War II, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). In 1982 it concluded that the decisions to intern these people in camps had been a “grave injustice” stemming from “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership”, and the government unanimously said that “the decision in Korematsu from, court of history '( court of history had been rejected). "

At about the same secret documents of the US Department of Justice found, which showed that in 1943 and 1944 already by various investigative agencies and intelligence agencies, including the this Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoover and the Naval Intelligence Office of Naval Intelligence was informed was that no wrongdoing by Japanese Americans had been found. These official reports were deliberately never submitted to the US Supreme Court by the Department of Justice; in one case the report was burned. After a so-called coram nobis (Latin for our present ) request to admit and correct a previously made serious error in a court motion, the District Federal Court for Northern California overturned Korematsu's 1942 conviction in 1983. In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 awarded $ 20,000 in compensation to every surviving victim of forced relocation. In a 1992 amendment to the law, additional funds were made available to meet the commitment, and President George Bush made a formal apology.

The constitutionality of internment in Korematsu v. United States was only announced in 2018 in the Trump v. Hawaii explicitly revoked.

Memorials

Memorial stone to the victims in the Manzanar camp

The former Manzanar War Relocation Center in eastern California has been a National Historic Site since 1992 and is the site of annual gatherings for living internment victims and their families.

Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho was established as a National Monument in 2001and converted into a National Historic Site in 2008. The memorial has not yet been expanded; a plan has been in place since 2006. Financing has been secured since 2007, the start of construction has not yet been determined. Since 2003 there have been annual meetings of former internees and their descendants on site

Since 2008 the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in Northern California has been part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument .

Several of the eight other camp locations are classified as National Historic Landmarks .

The following relocation centers existed:

Media reception

Documentaries

Feature films

Television series

  • The Terror: Infamy , (2019) 2nd season of The Terror (USA, since 2018)

Novels

  • Stiller fame (in the English original Silent Honor ) by Danielle Steel, 1996
  • What we dreamed of (original title The Buddha in the Attic ) by Julie Otsuka , 2011

comics

  • Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo , 1947
  • They Called Us Enemy: A Childhood in the Internment Camp (Original title They Called Us Enemy) by George Takei et al., 2020

Songs

  • Tom Russell : Manzanar on Box Of Visions CD , 1992
  • Fort Minor : Kenji on the album The Rising Tied , 2005
  • Kishi Bashi: Summer of '42 on the album Omoiyari , 2019

musical

See also

Web links

Commons : Internment of Japanese Americans  - Collection of Pictures, Videos, and Audio Files

Literature (selection)

  • Jeffery F. Burton et al., Confinement and Ethnicity - Barbed wire divider , Publications in Anthropology 74, National Park Service, Washington DC, 1999 (also online in full text: Confinement and Ethnicity ( Memento of February 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ))
  • Michael L. Cooper: Remembering Manzanar: Life in a Japanese Relocation Camp , Clarian Books, 2002. ISBN 0-618-06778-7
  • Mary Matsuda Gruenewald: Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps , NewSage Press, 2005. ISBN 0-939165-53-8
  • Janne Wakatsuki Houston: Farewell to Manzanar , SparkNotes 2003. ISBN 1-58663-831-9
  • Lawson Fusao Inada (ed.): Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience , Heyday Books, 2000. ISBN 1-890771-30-9
  • Alice Yang Murray: What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? , bedford / St. Martin's, 2000. ISBN 0-312-20829-4
  • Greg Robinson: By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans , Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01118-X
  • Yoshiko Uchida: Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family , University of Washington Press, 1984. ISBN 0-295-96190-2

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German American Internee Coalition: Website ( Memento of the original from September 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gaic.info
  2. ↑ Korematsu v. United States - 323 US 214 (1944) to Justia US Supreme Court, accessed July 7, 2020
  3. ↑ Ex parte Endo - 323 US 283 (1944) on Justia US Supreme Court, accessed July 7, 2020
  4. ↑ President Gerald R. Ford's Proclamation 4417, Confirming the Termination of the Executive Order Authorizing Japanese-American Internment During World War II , Ford Library (English)
  5. ↑ United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians: Personal Justice Denied . Ed .: US Congress . US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC December 1982, LCCN  82-600664 (English, google.com [accessed July 7, 2020]).
  6. ^ Charlie Savage: Korematsu, Notorious Supreme Court Ruling on Japanese Internment, Is Finally Tossed Out. In: The New York Times . June 26, 2018, accessed July 7, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b Fred T. Korematsu. In: Fred T. Korematsu Institute. Retrieved July 7, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Trump v. Hawaii, on the Supreme Court website, accessed May 13, 2020
  9. ^ Text by Manzanar by Tom Russell
  10. ↑ Text by Kenji by Michael Kenji Shinoda