The internment of Japanese Americans was the World War II internment in War Relocation Camps of over 110,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States. The U.S. government ordered the internment in 1942, shortly after Imperial Japans attack on Pearl Harbor.[2][3] The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally as a geographic matter: all who lived on the West Coast were interned, while in Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1,200[4] to 1,800 were interned. Sixty-two percent of the internees were American citizens.[5][6] President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate military areas as exclusion zones, from which any or all persons may be excluded. This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in internment camps.[7] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders.[8] The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, adding, The provisions of other orders requiring persons of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers and providing for the detention of such persons in assembly and relocation centers were separate, and their validity is not in issue in this proceeding.[9] The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau denied its role for decades, but it was finally proven in 2007.[10][11] In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League and redress organizations,[12] President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the need to put Japanese Americans into internment camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. The commissions report, titled “Personal Justice Denied,” found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and recommended the government pay reparations to the survivors. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.[13] The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.[12][14] Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast.[15] About 80,000 were nisei (literal translation: second generation; Japanese people born in the United States and holding American citizenship) and sansei (literal translation: third generation; the sons or daughters of nisei). The rest were issei (literal translation: first generation; immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship).[16] Approximately 14,500 people of German and Italian ancestry,[17] and 2,200 ethnic Japanese deported from Latin American countries[18] were also subject to the United States wartime confinement program. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 21:56:11 +0000
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