"A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins." — Benjamin Franklin
Yesterday I posted an excerpt from an article about the Manzanar War Relocation Center in my newsletter. In the article I focused primarily on the facts surrounding the creation of these war location centers and Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. In this post I will address the state of fear, racial prejudice, and what other nations did regarding in WWII regarding ethnic populations they deemed as a threat, including the Japanese.
There were returning Marines from Guadalcanal, the Philippines with horrendous accounts of the fanaticism and brutality of the Japanese soldiers, not only to the Marines, but more so to the civilian populations. The people of Manila suffered terribly under Japanese occupation where torture and executions were commonplace in the “internment” camps run by the Japanese. The British also reported similar acts of brutality in Malaysia, Singapore and Burma.
We also need to remember the treatment of the Koreans during WWII by the Japanese Imperial Forces. It was common practice to take girls as young as thirteen to be used in “pleasure houses” by the Japanese soldiers. It was also considered sport for the occupying Japanese forces to shot out of open tram windows at Korean women walking down the street. These women wearing white dresses or kimonos would display a spreading blood stain on their chests as they lay dying in the street while the Japanese soldiers would laugh and call them “rose women” due to the blood stain.
While we were at war with Germany there were not many depictions of the brutality of the NAZIs towards our soldiers let alone the civilian populations of Europe. The American public was not aware of the extermination of millions of European Jews, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, French and other Europeans. Although our government had obtained a photo static copy of the Wannsee Protocol through an agent in Switzerland the Roosevelt administration was reluctant to believe it and deemed it a Jewish propaganda. So did the Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary during WWII. The only knowledge the American people had of the Holocaust was a small article on page 28 of the New York Times. There were no photos, no films, no first hand reports of what the NAZIs were doing. There were only supposition, reports from Jewish immigrants and vague references from some reporters. Even when the Soviet Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp in eastern Poland in July 1944 and thousands of feet of film were turned over to the Allies by Roman Karmen, a Soviet documentary film maker, his footage was mostly ignored due to his past record of producing Stalinist propaganda. Even Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times and a Jew, refused to publish accounts of the NAZI atrocities.
Most of this reluctance to publish reports of the atrocities committed by the NAZIs stemmed from two schools of thought. The first school was that they were just too horrendous to believe. Even with the obtaining a copy of the Wannsee Protocol the NAZI plan for the “Final Solution” was just too fantastic to believe. The second and more plausible reason is that the Allies did not want to create a wave of anti-German hatred in the United States and Great Britain similar to what the Wilson administration did in the First World War through his Committee on Public Information or as more commonly called the Creel Committee. (One of the pioneers in the CPI propaganda and public relations and a mentor of Josef Goebbels was Edward Bernays.) Such a wave of anti-German hatred would affect about 25% of the U.S. population and hamper the plans for the reconstruction of post war Germany.
So what we had during World War II was one enemy, the Germans, who we were handling with kid gloves and another enemy, the Japanese, who we portrayed as a brutal, sub human race — with good cause.
Something else that we must consider when talking about the Japanese in WWII is their atrocities committed in Manchuria (their puppet state of
Other incidents included being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death, being placed into high-pressure chambers until death, having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival, being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead, having animal blood injected and the effects studied, being exposed to lethal doses of x-rays, having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers, being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline and being buried alive. None of this took place at Manzanar or any other war relocation center in the United States or Canada.
Japanese Americans were by far the most widely affected group, as all persons with Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona. As then California Attorney General Earl Warren put it, "When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field." In Hawaii, where there were 140,000 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (constituting 37% of the population), only selected individuals of heightened perceived risk were interned.
While there was no doubt an element of racism and fear of the Japanese for economic reasons by the general populace the government’s reason for the Exclusion Zone on the west coast was national security. There was a great fear in Washington, D.C. (and throughout the nation) that after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the sinking of most of our battleships we had no navy to defend our west coast. This was not the case on the east coast even when German U-boats were sinking merchant ships in sight of the people on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
The fear of a follow up attack on the west coast and a possible invasion was real and severe. Our standing army ranked 16th in the world and the troops were equipped with World War 1 rifles and other equipment. People were scared and with good reason. The racism and anti-Japanese feelings only served to give Roosevelt additional support for his 9066 Executive Order.
There was also a legitimate fear of sabotage to our water supplies, electrical grid, communication networks and transportation systems. There were also plans to move much of the aircraft industry to California where the 50,000 planes Roosevelt had requested could be built 24/7 in outdoor assembly facilities. The administration feared espionage and sabotage efforts against the ship building facilities in San Diego, San Francisco and Bremerton, Washington.
Many notable liberal progressives such as Roosevelt, Justice William Douglas, Justice Hugo Black, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Earl Warren supported the internment of these Japanese Americans as vital to the war effort. One dissenting voice was that of J. Edgar Hoover the director of the FBI. Hoover’s opposition stemmed not so much from a constitutional or civil rights position, but from a belief that the FBI could handle any security threat to the United States from citizens of foreign ancestry. He believed that the most likely spies had already been arrested by the FBI shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Korematsu v. United States (1944) was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. In a 6-3 decision, the Court sided with the government, ruling that the exclusion order was constitutional. The opinion, written by Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Fred Korematsu's individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. (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.")
Fred Korematsu was a Japanese-American man who decided to stay in San Leandro, California and knowingly violate Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army. Korematsu argued that the Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional and that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He was arrested and convicted. No question was raised as to Korematsu's loyalty to the United States. The Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The decision in Korematsu v. United States has been very controversial.
The Korematsu decision has not been explicitly overturned, but remains significant both for being the first instance of the Supreme Court applying the strict scrutiny standard to racial discrimination by the government and for being one of only a handful of cases in which the Court held that the government met that standard.
The majority decision was written by Associate Justice Hugo Black, himself a staunch New Dealer supported of Roosevelt and a racist, anti-Catholic and ex Klu Klux Klan member, stated:
“Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this.”
Justice Frank Murphy issued a vehement dissent, saying that the exclusion of Japanese "falls into the ugly abyss of racism," and resembles "the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy". He also compared the treatment of Japanese Americans with the treatment of Americans of German and Italian ancestry, as evidence that race, and not emergency alone, led to the exclusion order which Korematsu was convicted of violating:
” I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”
The other two dissenters were Justices Roberts and Jackson. Not being a lawyer but a person with the ability to read common English I believe Korematsu’s and the rights of the other Japanese internees were violated under not only the fourteenth amendment but also the fourth and fifth.
Justice Jackson, who would later act a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trails, dissented on differing grounds from Murphy. By contrast, Justice Robert Jackson's dissent argued that "defense measures will not, and often should not, be held within the limits that bind civil authority in peace," and that it would perhaps be unreasonable to hold the military, who issued the exclusion order, to the same standards of constitutionality that apply to the rest of the government. "In the very nature of things," he wrote military decisions are not susceptible of intelligent judicial appraisal." He acknowledged the Court's powerlessness in that regard, writing that "courts can never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint."
He nonetheless dissented, writing that, even if the courts should not be put in the position of second-guessing or interfering with the orders of military commanders that does not mean that they should have to ratify or enforce those orders if they are unconstitutional. Indeed, he warns that the precedent of Korematsu might last well beyond the war and the internment:
“A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period, a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.”
Jackson acknowledged the racial issues at hand, writing:
“Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived. [...] [H]is crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one's antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign. If Congress in peace-time legislation should enact such a criminal law, I should suppose this Court would refuse to enforce it.”
Jackson was a believer in the "clear and present danger" test and is quoted to have quipped the the Constitution is not a suicide pact. To this day the Korematsu case is used in defense of the government’s actions in the War on Terror. See Rasul v. Bush.
Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who represented the U.S. Department of Justice in the "relocation," writes in the Epilogue to the book Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (written by Maisie and Richard Conrat):
“The truth is, the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and despite the Fifth Amendment's command that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, both of these constitutional safeguards were denied by military action under Executive Order 9066”
The United States Constitution was written in plain English for the common citizen to read and understand. You do not have to be a lawyer, legal scholar or judge to understand the meaning of the words in the Constitution. The confusion and misinterpretation that has occurred over the years comes from the lawyers, legal scholars and activist judges that have muddied the waters of the meaning of the Constitution with their decisions based on progressive, activists agendas or empathy, not logic and the understanding of the Founders who wrote the Constitution to provide protection for the citizen against the overreaching power of the government.
While here were sound reason for interning the Japanese Americans based on military and national security they were not enemy combatants captured on the field of battle, but were in most cases citizens of the United States and entitled to all the protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. As J. Edgar Hoover, a man hated by the progressive left, The FBI was totally competent in identifying and arresting foreign agents and enemies of the state.
There is an excellent 27 minute video on the internment of the Japanese Americans and the Korematsu Case. You can access this video by clicking here. Make sure to click on the “Watch the Video” text under the video box. This will allow the video to play in your Windows Media Player. It is well worth your time and if you are a lawyer it’s a great source for debate with your colleagues over a Makers Mark.
You can view this entire video by clicking here
It should be noted that not one case of espionage or treason was attributed to people of Japanese ancestry and the only real cases of treason or espionage were against Germans and Communists like Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.
The United States did not stand alone in interning Japanese during the WWII. The Canadians and Australians had similar, if not stricter, policies towards the Japanese in their countries.
Prior to World War II, there were about 23,000 Canadians of Japanese ancestry in British Columbia, of whom 80% were Canadian nationals. While immigration from Japan to Canada had begun at the end of the 19th century the Japanese were unwelcome and were subject to racism and discrimination. They were denied the right to vote and laws barred them from various professions. Their eligibility for social assistance and permits for forestry and fishing were restricted. The intent was to force them to return to Japan. The Anti-Asiatic League, formed in Canada in 1907, was the source of much of the animosity toward Japanese Canadians. The League included rich white business owners, who used their influence to limit the number of passports given to male Japanese immigrants. This was meant to limit the number of Japanese workers in British Columbia, who by 1919 owned almost half the fisheries in the province. Japanese immigrants were seen as competitors for posts within the sectors of agriculture and fishing. The Anti-Asiatic League sought to restrict fishing licenses to white residents. This legislation was abandoned in 1925, due to strong discontent in the Japanese Canadian community. The government, however, continued to regulate the number of passports given to Japanese immigrants, in order to limit them from the working sectors of British Columbia.
The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor spurred prominent British Columbians, including members of municipal government, local newspapers, and businesses to call for the internment of the ethnic Japanese living in Canada under the Defense of Canada Regulations. In British Columbia, there were fears that some Japanese who worked in the fishing industry were charting the coastline for the Japanese navy, acting as spies on Canada's military. British Columbia borders the Pacific Ocean and therefore believed to be easily susceptible to enemy attacks from Japan. 22,000 Japanese Canadians (14,000 of whom were born in Canada) were interned in the 1940s for political expediency. Prime Minister Mackenzie King decided to intern Japanese Canadian citizens based on speculative evidence, because both the RCMP and defense department lacked proof of any sabotage or espionage.
On February 24, 1942, an order-in-council passed under the War Measures Act gave the federal government the power to intern all "persons of Japanese racial origin." A "protected" 100-mile wide strip up the Pacific coast was created, and men of Japanese origin between the ages of 18 and 45 were removed and taken to road camps in the British Columbia interior or sugar beet projects on the Prairies, such as Taber, Alberta. Despite the 100-mile quarantine, a few Japanese Canadian men remained in McGillivray Falls, which was just outside the quarantine zone; however, they were employed at a logging operation at Devine (near D'Arcy in the Gates Valley), which was in fact inside the quarantine zone but without road access to the Coast. Japanese Canadians interned in Lillooet Country found employment within farms, stores, and the railway. Tashme, on Highway 3 just east of Hope, was notorious for the camp's harsh conditions and existed just outside the protected area. Other internment camps, including Slocan, were in the Kootenay Country in southeastern British Columbia. Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to the Nisei, or Canadian-born citizens of Japanese origin, however excluding the Issei, the older generation born in Japan.
The Liberal government also deported able-bodied Japanese Canadian laborers to camps near fields and orchards, such as the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. The Japanese Canadian laborers were used as a solution to a shortage of farm workers. This obliterated any Japanese competition in the fishing sector. During the 1940s, the Canadian government created policies to direct Chinese, Japanese, and First Nations into farming, and other sectors of the economy that “other groups were abandoning for more lucrative employment elsewhere”.
Those living in "relocation camps" were not legally interned — they could leave, so long as they had permission — however, they were not legally allowed to work or attend school outside the camps. Since the majority of Japanese Canadians had little property aside from their (confiscated) houses, these restrictions left most with no opportunity to survive outside the camps.
Prime Minister King issued a ruling that all property would be removed from Japanese Canadian inhabitants. They were made to believe that their property would be held in trust until they had resettled elsewhere in Canada. In 1943, the Canadian "Custodian of Aliens" liquidated all possessions belonging to the “enemy aliens”. The Custodian of Aliens held auctions for these items, ranging from farm land, homes and clothing. Japanese Canadians lost their fishing boats, bank deposits, stocks and bonds; basically all items that provided them with financial security. Japanese Canadians protested that their property was sold at prices way under the fair market value at the time. Prime Minister King responded to the objections by stating that the “Government is of the opinion that the sales were made at a fair price.”
There was economic benefits to be made with the internment of the Japanese. More precisely, white fishermen directly benefited due to the impounding of all Japanese owned fishing boats. Fishing for salmon was a hotly contested issue between the white population and Japanese population. In 1919, the Japanese had received four thousand and six hundred of the salmon-gill net licenses, representing roughly half of all of the licenses the government had to distribute. In a very public move on behalf of the Department of Fisheries in British Columbia, it was recommended that in the future the Japanese never again receive more fishing licenses than they had in 1919 and also that every year thereafter that number be reduced. These were measurements taken on behalf of the provincial government to oust the Japanese from salmon fishing. The federal government also got involved. In 1926 The House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Fisheries put forward suggestions that the number of fishing licenses issued to the Japanese be systemically reduced by ten percent a year, until they were entirely removed from the industry by 1937. The fact that any Japanese people were still fishing in British Columbia at the outset of World War II is amazing due to the pressure they faced from the province, country, and other fishermen. Yet the reason the government gave for impounding the few remaining and operating Japanese fishing boats was that the government feared these boats would be used by Japan to mount a horrific coastal attack on British Columbia.
Many boats belonging to Japanese Canadians were damaged, and over one hundred sank. A few properties owned by Japanese Canadians in Richmond and Vancouver were vandalized, including the Steveston Buddhist Temple.
In April 1945, the end of the war was plausible and an official movement to remove Japanese Canadians from British Columbia commenced. Japanese Canadians were given the choice to move east of the Rockies or be repatriated to Japan. Many chose to move east to the city of Toronto where they could take part in agricultural work. By 1947, most Japanese Canadians have moved from British Columbia to the Toronto area. Several Japanese Canadians, who resettled in the east, wrote letters back to those still in British Columbia about the harsh labor conditions in the fields of Ontario and the prejudiced attitudes they would encounter. White-collar jobs were not open to them and most Japanese Canadians were reduced to “wage-earners”. I want to note here that my father’s cousin, a liberal Canadian living in Hamilton, Ontario had no problem with his government’s policy towards Japanese Canadians. Much of his attitude stemmed from the reports of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Forces in the Pacific Theater.
Repatriation began in May 1946 and 3, 964 Japanese Canadians were deported back to Japan. The government was willing to offer free passage to those who were willing to be deported to Japan. Thousands of Japanese Canadians (born in Canada) were being sent to a country they had never known and where they would still feel quite alienated. Family members would be divided. They were being deported to a country that had been destroyed by bombs and was now hunger-stricken due to the war."
The first Japanese person known to have settled in Australia was a merchant who immigrated to Queensland in 1871. By the start of the Australian Federation in 1901, it was estimated that Australia had 4000 Japanese immigrants, mostly based around Townsville where the Japanese government had established its first consulate in 1896. The immigrants worked mostly in the sugar cane and maritime industries including turtle, trochus, trepang and pearl harvesting. Further immigration was effectively terminated with the Australian Immigration Restriction Act of 1902, with the imposition of a “dictation test” in a European language on prospective immigrants, and with the White Australia policy. Due to this the Townsville consulate closed in 1908.
However, economic relations continued to flourish, and by the mid-1930s, Japan had become Australia's second largest export market after the United Kingdom. However, in 1936, Britain applied political pressure on Australia to curb the import of Japanese textiles, which were damaging the British textile market in Australia. Japan reacted to the new tariffs with trade barriers of its own. After both sides realized that the trade war was unproductive, an agreement was reached in 1937 to relax restrictions.
In recognition of the importance of Japanese ties, Tokyo was the second capital (after Washington DC in the United States) where Australia established a legation separate from the British embassy.
During World War II, Australian territory was directly threatened by Japanese invasion, and Japanese forces attacked Darwin in Northern Australia and Sydney Harbor. In 1941, the ethnic Japanese population in Australia was interned, and most were deported to Japan at the end of the war. Australian forces played an active combat role in battles throughout the Southeast Asia and South West Pacific theater of World War II, and a significant role in the post-war Occupation of Japan.
During the Second World War 'enemy aliens' were interned by the Australian government. South Australia's main internment camp was at Loveday, near Barmera on the River Murray. The Loveday camp comprised of three compounds and three wood camps. The camps housed German, Italian and Japanese internees from around Australia, prisoners of war from the Middle East, Pacific Islands and Netherlands East Indies and internees from the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Pacific Islands. The first internees arrived at Loveday on June 11, 1941. In May 1943 the complex held its largest number of internees and prisoners of war, 5,382. The last internees were released from Loveday in late February 1946.
Work undertaken by the internees and prisoners of war included growing of guayule shrubs for the production of rubber, pyrethrum for making insecticide and opium poppies for morphine production, all of which were vital during wartime. The internees and prisoners also grew vegetables and many varieties of seed for both Army and civilian use. The wood chopped at the three wood camps went to fire the steam pumps used on the Riverland irrigation settlements. Pigs and poultry were also raised for meat and eggs.
While all three nations interned what they considered enemy aliens the Australians were the most consistent — they interned everyone equally.
The next time a smug Canadian wags his finger at you and accuses you of being a racist by interning Japanese Americans in WWII just remind him of what his liberal government did to their Japanese population during the same time span.
Before we get to judgmental regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII you need to attempt to place yourself in 1941-42 and try to understand the feelings and fears that were present in America after Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Corregidor. Most Americans did not give too much thought to the Constitution and were more concerned with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with safety and security ranking just above breathing, food, water and sex at level two whiles the Constitution ranks at the top of the pyramid at level five. It was at this highest level where our Founders were operating when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were authored and adopted. War tends to take us down to level two.
We must remember the words of Benjamin Franklin when he said; “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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