Search for
This Site
The Web

Get a free search
engine for your site









HOME

TIMELINE HOME PAGE

HISTORY OVERVIEW
1600-1874
1875-1899
1900-1909
1910-1919
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2005

HISTORY DETAILS
1600-1874
1875-1899
1900-1909
1910-1919
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005

Click Here
to receive email
when this page changes
o Powered by NetMind o








 

ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN
HISTORICAL TIMELINE DETAILS (1940 to 1949)

Our victories, obstacles and leaders


Discover additional specific info on the many links (outlined in "red" or "blue") listed below



  Bruce Lee Montage, click here for more info
 
Bruce Lee
1940
BRUCE LEE WAS BORN 
Bruce Lee was born on November 27, 1940, at the Jackson Street Hospital in San Francisco's Chinatown, while his father was performing with the Cantonese Opera Company in America.

1940 
CHIUNE "SEMPO" SUGIHARA - JAPANESE SCHINDLER'S LIST!

Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul to Lithuania in 1940, is credited with saving the second largest number of Jews from the Holocaust. (note: Just as Feng Shan Ho did in Vienna!) Haunted by the Jewish refugees outside his consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, Sugihara was forced to defy his own government's orders, risk his career, and issue life-saving transit visas, or obey orders and turn his back on humanity. Sugihara & his wife worked 16 hours a day for three weeks to save over 40,000 people!

In 1945, Sugihara was captured by the Soviets. He, along with his wife and three children, spent the next 16 months in prison camps in Russia. When he returned to Japan, Sugihara was asked to resign from the diplomatic service, "...for the incident in Lithuania." And forced to take many odd jobs.

In 1984, Yad Vashem recognized Sugihara as "Righteous among the Nations," the highest honor which can be bestowed. Chiune Sugihara passed away in 1986, largely unknown, and unrecognized in his native country. It was not until 1991 that Japan finally apologized to his family. His life was documented in the film "Visas & Virtues."
Working in Alaska

The cannery work season lasted only 2-3 months. Several thousand men were dispatched out of union offices in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Below a group waits on pier 40 to board the ship that will take them north. April 27, 1939. The arrow points to Tony Rodrigo.

1940
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON IS BORN

Writer Maxine Hong Kingston born in Stockton, CA. Her book, The Woman Warrior, published in 1976, becomes the most widely taught college-level book by a living author.

1940
TIGER BRIGADE IS FORMED

Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, Koreans form the Tiger Brigade under the California National Guard.

1940 
IMMIGRANTS FORCED TO REGISTER

Aug. 28, 1940: To comply with the Alien Registration Act, Los Angeles begins to register its estimated 125,000 foreign-born residents at its processing headquarters in San Pedro. Immigrants ranged from Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Poles, Finns, Germans, English and Canadians. Many of them had lived in the United States for years, some as long as 20 years. Against the backdrop of war in Europe, the new law required all foreign-born residents over 14 to state their occupation, political beliefs and personal status. d. It also forbade anyone from advocating the overthrow of the government. A fine of $1,000 and six months imprisonment was the penalty for failure to register.

1940 
ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

Indian Americans begin owning hotels and motels throughout the state. 50 years later they own one third of all motels and hotels in the country. In the 1970's and 1980's, Taiwanese Americans follow into the business.

1941 
DEC. 7, 1941 - TIMES OF TROUBLE

With news of the attack on Pearl Harbor,
"men girded for action with .45s slung from their hips and folks wielding various sorts of rifles and pistols descended upon the sheriff's office." They came to the Hall of Justice in response to "an erroneous radio request for 250,000 volunteers for the Civilian Defense Council." "Los Angeles was a city alert as every man and woman, electrified by the news that Japan had struck at this country 2,400 miles westward in the Pacific, took his or her stand solidly for total defense." Filipinos in the city gathered in a mass meeting to pledge their loyalty, police were put on 12-hour shifts and the FBI "began taking into custody Japanese aliens." In Little Tokyo, the people "were not excited. But they seemed sad. The area was "surrounded by a cordon of police.">

1941 
ARMY LANGUAGE SCHOOL

The first U.S. Army language school was founded in 1941 to teach Japanese to American soldiers.

Originally known as the 4th Army Intelligence School and based at the Presidio in San Francisco, the language training program later became the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio of Monterey.

While one hand of the Army was removing Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, another was searching for qualified Nisei for its language and intelligence effort.

In San Francisco, the Army opened a small-scale language school in a converted hangar at Crissy Field on the San Francisco Presidio grounds. It hand-picked 58 Nisei for its first class - sitting on apple boxes and orange crates. When the top brass saw its value, the school was transferred to Camp Savage, Minnesota, where it was reorganized as the Military Intelligence Service Language School.

Classes began Nov. 1 of this year, with 60 students, 58 of them nisei. About five weeks later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II.

 
American Stereotypes of
Asians Before WWII
 
The hostility toward Japanese on the West Coast, coupled with the relocation order, prompted the Army to seek another site for the language school.

The school moved to Camp Savage, Minn., about 25 miles south of Minneapolis, where it changed its name to the Military Intelligence Service Language School. The first language class there started in June 1942; two years later, the school moved to Ft. Snelling in the Minneapolis area.

By war's end, close to 6,000 linguists had graduated from the school. Graduates were assigned not only to the southwestern Pacific area with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's forces, Raugh said, but also to the China-Burma-India theater with Gen. Joseph W. Stillwell's forces, Merrill's Marauders and other allied units. They interrogated prisoners, translated enemy documents and intercepted radio transmissions.

In 1946, the language school moved to the Presidio of Monterey, where it was renamed the Army Language School a year later and added eight or nine other languages to its curriculum.

Shigeya Kihara, the last surviving original instructor of the first U.S. Army language school died on January 16, 2005. Kihara was one of the first four civilian instructors at the original school. Born in Fairfield, between San Francisco and Sacramento, Kihara earned a bachelor's degree in political science from UC Berkeley in 1937 and, after receiving a master's in international relations in 1939, moved to Japan to study and travel. With the advent of WWII, he came back to the U.S. during WWII because of his fear that he would be "stuck" in Japan.

A UC Berkeley professor suggested that he take the job teaching Japanese to soldiers. Kihara reported to the 4th Army Intelligence officer at the Presidio of San Francisco. A week later, Kihara received an appointment to the U.S. Civil Service as a civilian Army employee and instructor in Japanese.

In a 1991 interview with the Herald, Kihara called the government's decision to start the language school "unprecedented." "Heretofore, Japanese Americans were considered second-class citizens, linked to Japan and not to be trusted," he said. "Here they were asked to do something of vital service to the United States, very critical not only for the U.S. Army but for Japanese Americans."

Harold Raugh, command historian of the language center, said of Kihara's involvement with the school: "It was a singularly outstanding contribution to the United States as well as the United States Army, especially during the years of trials and tribulations when we were fighting the Japanese and many Japanese Americans were interred in relocation camps in the United States. "It took incredible strength and conviction when one's family may be interred by a country, to serve that country," Raugh said.

1941 
FLYING TIGERS

These
legendary fliers (a ragtag volunteer force) were the model of U.S.-Chinese friendship, young American pilots who fought for China in World War II that started in September 1941. The pilots were U.S. military men, many fresh from training, sent in secret by President Franklin D. Roosevelt before the United States entered the war. They joined an air force organized for China by Claire Lee Chennault, a retired U.S. Army colonel.

The Flying Tigers had fewer than 100 pilots and 55 planes. And it flew for only nine months, until -- after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war -- U.S. forces arrived in China in May, 1942, and absorbed the unit. The Flying Tigers fought for the leftists' bitter enemies -- the Nationalists who ruled China in the 1930s and '40s. "The Flying Tigers supported the anti-Japanese war," declared Gen. Wang Dinglie, a retired octogenarian veteran of World War II and the 1949 revolution that ended Nationalist rule on the mainland.

When the Flying Tigers arrived, Japanese bombers were pounding undefended Chinese cities. Japanese forces had captured Shanghai and other coastal cities, forcing the Nationalist government to take refuge in the remote southwestern city of Kunming. The U.S. Air Force credits the Tigers with shooting down 286 Japanese planes, while losing just 12 of their own pilots.

1941
JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT-RELATED EVENTS

August 14: In a letter to President Roosevelt, Representative John Dingell of Michigan suggests incarcerating 10,000 Hawaiian Japanese Americans as hostages to ensure "good behavior" on the part of Japan
STATEMENT ON TERMINOLOGY

“They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it.
We were in a period of emergency but it was still the wrong thing to do.”
Harry S. Truman in Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller

The terms used to describe what happened to over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II vary considerably amongst scholars, government officials, and even Japanese Americans themselves: relocation, evacuation, incarceration, internment, concentration camp. No one agrees about what is most accurate or fair.

The language used to describe the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II is often controversial. Some Americans feel that “concentration camps” is the most appropriate term for the places in which Japanese Americans were confined. Other Americans associate the term only with the Holocaust. Although many Americans are more comfortable with milder terms such as relocation or interment camps, these terms are historically and legally inaccurate.

Officially, the camps were named “relocation centers.” Many now acknowledge that “relocation center” and “evacuation” are euphemisms, used purposefully by the government to downplay the significance of their actions. Perhaps the most blatant example is the United States government’s use of the term “non-alien” to refer to American citizens of Japanese ancestry as a way of shrouding the violation of constitutional rights. As historian Roger Daniels has suggested, euphemisms are part of injustice.

The government, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the phrase "concentration camps" in speeches and written documents during World War II to refer to the places where Japanese Americans were confined. It is important to note that a concentration camp is defined broadly as a place where people are imprisoned not because they are guilty of any crimes, but simply because of who they are. Many groups have been singled out for such persecution throughout history, with the term "concentration camp" first used at the turn of the twentieth century in the Boer War.

Despite their differences, all concentration camps have one thing in common: people in power remove a minority group from the general population and the rest of society allows it to happen.

November 7: Report prepared by presidential investigator Curtis Munson and submitted to the President, State Department and Secretary of War certifies that Japanese Americans possess an extraordinary degree of loyalty to U.S. Corroborates years of surveillance by FBI and Naval Intelligence, and do not pose a threat to national security in the event of war with Japan.

November 12: Fifteen Japanese American businessmen and community leaders in Los Angeles Little Tokyo are picked up in an FBI raid. Records and membership lists for such organizations as the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and the Central Japanese Association are seized. The fifteen would cooperate with authorities, while a spokesman for the Central Japanese Association states: "We teach the fundamental principles of America and the high ideals of American democracy. We want to live here in peace and harmony. Our people are 100% loyal to America."

December 7: Japan bombs U.S. fleet and military base at Pearl Harbor. Over 3,500 servicemen are wounded or killed. Martial law is declared in Hawaii.

 
Mochida Family
 
December 7: The FBI begins arresting Japanese immigrants identified as community leaders: priests, Japanese language teachers, newspaper publishers, and heads of organizations. Within 48 hours, 1,291 are arrested. Most of these men would be incarcerated for the duration of the war, separated from their families.

December 8: U.S. Congress declares war on Japan. Within hours, FBI arrests 736 Japanese resident aliens as security risks in Hawaii and mainland.

December 11: The Western Defense Command is established with Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt as the commander.

December 1941 - January 1942: The FBI searches thousands of Japanese American homes on the West Coast for contraband. Short wave radios, cameras, heirloom swords, and explosives used for clearing stumps in agriculture are among the items confiscated. Over 2000 Issei in Hawaii and mainland - teachers, priests, officers of organizations, newspaper editors and other prominent people in Japanese community are imprisoned by the U.S. government.

NOTE: "War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement" can be found at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

1942
ALUETS ARE INTERNED
Fourteenth Air Service Group (activated in November 1942 - they eventually had the largest concentration of Chinese American personnel in the Armed Forces) and the 987th Signal Company mainly consisted of approximately 1,500 men of Chinese ancestry who enlisted in the U.S. Army whose commanding officers were White.

Federal government forced 881 Aleuts to move from their homes on the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to dank wartime internment camps in the rain forest of Southeast Alaska 1,500 miles away after troops from Japan invaded Alaska's western outposts in June 1942. Aleuts were not suspected of spying or sabotage, as were tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans interned after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Officials believed that internment would protect Aleuts from the fighting in Alaska's distant western islands.

They were not allowed to leave the camps unless they were drafted into the military or coerced into working the Pribilof fur seal hunt, which brought millions of dollars to the U.S. government. Sanitation and pipe systems were never installed that resulted in a lot of sickness (i.e. pnemonia & tuberculosis) at the camp. One in 10 people died in the camps from 1942 to 1945. Families returned to the Aleutians and Pribilofs in 1944 and 1945 to find their homes and Russian Orthodox churches looted by U.S. soldiers and rotting from years of neglect in the wind, rain and salt air.

Aleuts joined Japanese-Americans in the 1950s through the 1980s in lawsuits seeking federal restitution for loss of property and civil liberties during internment. In 1987, Congress approved reparations of $12,000 each to interned individuals who were still living; $1.4 million for damaged homes and churches; a $5 million trust for evacuees and descendants and $15 million to the Aleut Native corporation.

1942
14TH AIR SERVICE GROUP & 987TH SIGNAL COMPANY

Fourteenth Air Service Group (activated in November 1942 - they eventually had the largest concentration of Chinese American personnel in the Armed Forces) and the 987th Signal Company mainly consisted of approximately 1,500 men of Chinese ancestry who enlisted in the U.S. Army whose commanding officers were White.

They were formed at the specific request of then Brigadier General Claire L. Chennault, Commander of the China Air Task Force and Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stillwell, Commander of U.S. forces in the China, Burma, India Theater of Operations, to support aerial operations in China with Army Air Force support personnel who were fluent in both the English and Chinese languages. As administrators, mechanics, engineers and electricians, who could easily communicate with both Chinese soldiers and civilians, these Chinese American airmen contributed mightily to Allied success by maintaining aerial operations from airfields across unoccupied China.

 
 
14th Air Service Group

As a unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the 987th Signal Company was raised from bilingual Chinese American soldiers and organized specifically for service in China, with the objectives of providing communication services and enhancing Liaison between American and Chinese military organizations.

In the history of World War II, their stories have largely been overlooked, overshadowed not just by the most famous Allied battles and troops but by other segregated groups as well, such as the all-African-American Tuskegee Airmen fighter pilots, and the highly decorated Japanese-American soldiers from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, who fought in Europe partly because they served supporting roles as aircraft-maintenance and communication specialists, and partly because they served in remote areas of China, Burma and India.

By 1944, the new Chinese-American recruits were shipped to about two dozen remote airbases, mostly in China. Many recovered crashed planes or repaired bullet-ridden U.S. bombers and fighters.

Due to a manpower shortage, they flew Chinese troops and ammunitions over the Himalaya Mountains without bomber or fighter escort. They received no military ground support and were armed only with .45- caliber pistols. Luckily, they escaped any firefights.

When the United States entered World War II, about 29,000 persons of Chinese ancestry were living in Hawaii and another 78,000 on the mainland. By war's end, over 13,000 were serving in all branches of the Army Ground Forces and Army Air Forces. About one quarter of all Chinese-American soldiers served with the Army Air Forces. An estimated 40 percent of Chinese-American soldiers were not native-born citizens.

1942
MING W. CHEN IS BORN

Ming Chin was born August 31, 1942 in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He received his law degree in 1967 from the University of San Francisco's Hastings School of Law and passed the bar in 1970 after a two-year stint as an Army officer, including a year in Vietnam. His first job as a lawyer was prosecuting felonies and misdemeanors with the Alameda County D.A.'s office. Chin is a recognized authority on the use of DNA evidence.

Ming Chin's 1996 appointment to the seven-seat California Supreme Court marked an almost inevitable milestone in a pioneering legal career. Chin had distinguished himself as a capable business litigation trial lawyer at a time when few Asian Americans had begun entering the legal profession. That led to his appointment to the Alameda County Superior Court. In November of 1994 he was elected to a 12-year-term as Presiding Justice of the First District Court of Appeals, Division Three, positioning him to be tapped to the state's highest court by Governor Pete Wilson.

Historical Side Note

In 1937, when imperial Japanese aircraft "mistakenly" attacked and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay and several other vessels on China's Yangtze River, some in the U.S. called for war; but FDR realized that the U.S. was in fact neither politically nor militarily ready for such a conflict.
For info, click
HERE
1942
JAPANESE AMERICANS ARE INTERNED!

In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many expected an immediate attack against the West Coast. Fear gripped the country and a wave of hysterical antipathy against the Japanese engulfed the Pacific Coast.

A Nation Turns on Its Japanese Residents
The nation's Japanese population, sensing that it might be targeted in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, quickly went about demonstrating its loyalty to the United States. Japanese residents bought war bonds, gave blood, and even ran newspaper ads denouncing Japan. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese American Citizens League sent a telegram to President Roosevelt, part of which read: "In this solemn hour we pledge our fullest cooperation to you, Mr. President, and to our country. There cannot be any
question. . . . We in our hearts know we are Americans, loyal to America."

 
 
Flag at Manzanar

The FBI quickly began rounding up any and all "suspicious" Japanese for internment. None was ever charged with any crime. Almost all were simply Japanese community leaders, Buddhist or Shinto priests, newspaper editors, language or Judo instructors, or labor organizers. The Japanese community leadership was liquidated in one quick operation.

Men were taken away without notice. Most families knew nothing about why their men had suddenly disappeared, to where they were taken, or when they would be released. Some arrestees were soon let free, but most were secretly shipped to internment camps around the country. Some families learned what had happened to their men only several years later. The action also included the freezing of bank accounts, seizure of contraband, drastic limitation on travel, curfew and other severely restrictive measures. But this FBI operation merely set the stage for the mass evacuation to come.

In January 1942, War Department classifies Japanese American men of draft age 4-C "enemy aliens." Status not changed until June 16, 1946.

In February 1942, Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Defense Command, requested authorization from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to evacuate "Japanese and other subversive persons" from the West Coast area. On 19 February, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War or any military commander to establish "military areas" and to exclude from them "any or all persons. A month later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9102 establishing the War Relocation Authority, which eventually operated the internment camps. Roosevelt named Milton Eisenhower, brother of the future president, to head the WRA.
"Kenji" (Fort Minor) - Internment Camp Video

: On that night, the FBI surrounded the Torrance home of Nikuma Tanouye (Note: One of his sons, Ted Tanouye, joined the Army and won the Medal of Honor. He was killed in action.). Documents at the National Archives in Laguna Niguel tell the story of Nikuma Tanouye and nearly 2,700 other Japanese citizens and a smaller number of Germans, Italians and others who passed through Tuna Canyon Detention Station. Federal archivist Gwen Granados said the first 35 Japanese nationals arrested (for immigration violations who were mostly fishermen who worked on Terminal Island) here after Pearl Harbor were sent to Griffith Park, where there was a makeshift jail with tight security. They were transferred to Tuna Canyon, which opened Dec. 15, 1941; it had fences topped by barbed wire, sentry boxes at each corner and floodlights.

The Tuna Canyon facility was a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp built in 1933 on 54 acres near Glendale. It could hold 300 detainees. Authorities maintained a low profile there, as at the Griffith Park site. Detainees were subject to Justice Department hearings and trials for such offenses as curfew violations and failure to register as an enemy alien. Their detention ranged from a few days to a few months and they were were prohibited to go within 10 feet of the fence.

American law officers also went to Latin America in 1942, where they rounded up more than 2,000 Japanese nationals and brought them back to centers such as Tuna Canyon. Those detainees were held to exchange for American civilians trapped in Japan. As many as 500 Japanese Peruvians were traded.

Officials were supposed to detain people at Tuna Canyon temporarily, until they had received a hearing. But "temporarily" fluctuated: Usually they were held until there were enough inmates to fill a train, then were moved to inland internment camps. U.S. Border Patrol Officer Merrill Scott supervised Tuna Canyon. In a May 25, 1942, report to the State Department, he listed 76 Japanese, 10 German and 16 Italian male inmates.

Without a murmur of dissent, the Congress quickly affirmed Executive Order 9066 with the passage of Public Law 77-503.

(The order did not specify Japanese Americans, but they were the only group to be imprisoned as a result of it. Eventually 120,000 Japanese, aliens and citizens, were incarcerated.)

   

The terms used to describe what happened to over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II vary considerably amongst scholars, government officials, and even Japanese Americans themselves: relocation, evacuation, incarceration, internment, concentration camp.

No one agrees about what is most accurate or fair.

 
Japanese stated "I Am An American"
 
The language used to describe the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II is often controversial. Some Americans feel that “concentration camps” is the most appropriate term for the places in which Japanese Americans were confined. Other Americans associate the term only with the Holocaust. Although many Americans are more comfortable with milder terms such as relocation or interment camps, these terms are historically and legally inaccurate.

Officially, the camps were named “relocation centers.” Many now acknowledge that “relocation center” and “evacuation” are euphemisms, used purposefully by the government to downplay the significance of their actions. Perhaps the most blatant example is the United States government’s use of the term “non-alien” to refer to American citizens of Japanese ancestry as a way of shrouding the violation of constitutional rights. As historian Roger Daniels has suggested, euphemisms are part of injustice.

This is a portion of Lt. Gen. J.L. DeWitt's letter of transmittal to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, June 5, 1943, of his Final Report; Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942
Intelligence services records reflected the existence of hundreds of Japanese organizations in California, Washington, Oregon and Arizona which, prior to December 7, 1941, were actively engaged in advancing Japanese war aims.

These records also disclosed that thousands of American-born Japanese had gone to Japan to receive their education and indoctrination there and had become rabidly pro-Japanese and then had returned to the United States. Emperor-worshipping ceremonies were commonly held and millions of dollars had flowed into the Japanese imperial war chest from the contributions freely made by Japanese here.

The continued presence of a large, unassimilated, tightly knit and racial group, bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of race, culture, custom and religion along a frontier vulnerable to attack constituted a menace which had to be dealt with. Their loyalties were unknown and time was of the essence.

The evident aspirations of the enemy emboldened by his recent successes made it worse than folly to have left any stone unturned in the building up of our defenses. It is better to have had this protection and not to have needed it than to have needed it an not to have had it – as we have learned to our sorrow.
For more info, click HERE

The government, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the phrase “concentration camps” in speeches and written documents during World War II to refer to the places where Japanese Americans were confined. It is important to note that a concentration camp is defined broadly as a place where people are imprisoned not because they are guilty of any crimes, but simply because of who they are. Many groups have been singled out for such persecution throughout history, with the term “concentration camp” first used at the turn of the twentieth century in the Boer War. Joseph E. Perisco (who wrote the book Roosevelt's Secret War) writes that President Roosevelt had convincing information from several intelligence sources that Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens posed no threat to American security in the event of a war with Japan and yet disregarded the intelligence reports out of political expedience. Earl Warren who later became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and who will be remembered as a champion of civil rights: "So far as this great state of ours is concerned, we have had no fifth-column activities and no sabotage reported.

Despite their differences, all concentration camps have one thing in common: people in power remove a minority group from the general population and the rest of society allows it to happen.

On February 27, 1942 - Idaho Governor Chase Clark tells a congressional committee in Seattle that Japanese would be welcome in Idaho only if they were in "concentration camps under military guard." Some credit Clark with the conception of what was to become a true scenario.

Beginning in March, the Army organized the evacuation of some 77 000 U.S. citizens of Japanese origin ("Nisei") and 43 000 mostly older Japanese citizens ("Issei") from California and parts of Washington, Oregon and Arizona.

On March 2, 1942 - Public Proclamation #1 issued by Lt. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, specifies military zones 1 and 2. Zone 1 includes western halves of California, Washington and Oregon and southern third of Arizona. A curfew goes into effect in these areas; all those of Japanese ancestry must remain at home from 8 pm to 6 am.

On March 18, 1942 - The President signs Executive Order 9102 establishing the War Relocation Authority with Milton Eisenhower as director.

In March 1942 - The Wartime Civil Control Administration opens 16 "Assembly Centers," 13 of them in California, to detain approximately 92,000 men, women, and children until the permanent incarceration camps are completed. Many of the California residents who eventually end up in Arkansas are assigned to the Stockton, CA, center which operated from May 10 through October 17.

Posters appeared the length of the West Coast ordering the Japanese to evacuation points. "Instructions to all persons of JAPANESE ancestry," read the bold headline on a typical poster. The text read: "All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above designated areas by 12:00 o'clock noon Tuesday, April 7, 1942." The evacuees were told to report for internment with bedrolls and only as much baggage as could be carried by hand. (A postwar survey showed that 80 percent of the privately stored goods belonging to the interned Japanese were "rifled, stolen or sold during absence.")

War Relocation Authority / Washington, D.C. / May 1943
The relocation centers, however, are NOT and ever were intended to be internment camps or places of confinement. They were established for two primary purposes:

(1) To provide communities where evacuees might live and contribute, through their work, to their own support pending their gradual reabsorption into private employment and normal American life; and

(2) to serve as wartime homes for those evacuees who might be unable or unfit to relocate in ordinary American communities. Under regulations adopted in September of 1942, the War Relocation Authority is now working toward a steady depopulation of the enters by urging all able-bodied residents with good records of behavior to eenter private employment in agriculture or industry.
For more info, click
HERE

In May 1942 - The evacuees begin transfer to permanent WRA incarceration facilities or "camps." They total ten: Manzanar, Poston, Gila River, Topaz, Granada, Heart Mountain, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Jerome, and Rohwer.

On June 3, 1942, the last of 3,677 Japanese-Americans were evacuated from Oregon, having been registered as potential threats to national security at the municipal building at 34 W. Sixth Ave. They were loaded onto the 87th Civilian Exclusion Order train at Eugene's railroad station and, after a stop in Medford, went on to Tule Lake detention camp in Northern California. It would not be until 1946 that anyone of Japanese ancestry could legally set foot in Western Oregon again.

On June 17, 1942 - Milton Eisenhower resigns as WRA director. Dillon Myer is appointed to replace him.

On July 1, 1942 - Construction begins on Rohwer Relocation Center by the Linebarger- Senne Construction Company of Little Rock, Arkansas.

On July 15, 1942 - Construction begins on Jerome Relocation Center by A.J. Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas.

On August 4, 1942 - A routine search for contraband at the Santa Anita "Assembly Center" turns into a "riot." Eager military personnel had become overzealous and abusive which, along with the failure of several attempts to reach the camp's internal security chief, triggers mass unrest, crowd formation, and the harassing of the searchers. Military police with tanks and machine guns quickly end the incident. The "overzealous" military personnel are later replaced.

In September, 1942 - The last of the 16 Assembly Centers close when the inmates are transferred to concentration camps. The first inmates arrive at Rohwer, Arkansas. Evacuees came from California and had to endure a three-day train ride from the assembly centers to reach Arkansas.
FDR QUOTE:
The argument works both ways. I know a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese. They have all told me that they would feel the same repugnance and objection to having thousands of Americans settle in Japan and intermarry with the Japanese as I would feel in having large numbers of Japanese come over here and intermarry with the American population.
For more info, click
HERE

These deplorable actions actually happened in the United States! Discover the specific details:

  • According to the census of 1940, 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in the United States, the majority on the West Coast. One-third had been born in Japan, and in some states could not own land, be naturalized as citizens, or vote.
  • The Census Bureau was deeply involved in the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans at the onset of U.S. entry into World War II. On Dec. 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau produced a report titled ``Japanese Population of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions.'' The next day the bureau issued a report on the Japanese population by citizenship and place of birth in selected cities. The next day it published another report, this one on the Japanese population by counties in states on the West Coast. All reports were based on data from the 1940 census. The Census Bureau stated "We didn't want to wait for the declaration of war. On Monday morning (January 1942) we put our people to work on the Japanese thing." ** The United States declared war on Japan that Monday afternoon! (see below) (Steven A. Lolmes/New York Times/San Jose Mercury News/March 17, 2000) The Census Bureau attempts to deny they released information confidential information such as the names and addresses of Japanese American citizens! The Census law ensures that your information is only used for statistical purposes and that no unauthorized person can see your form or find out what you tell us - no other government agency, no court of law, NO ONE.
  • The Census Bureau expresses regrets over this situation(!?!?!) in the year 2000!
  • President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing the secretary of war to delegate a military commander to designate military areas in the US "from which any and all persons may be excluded" - primarily enforced against Japanese.
  • Congress passes Public Law 503 to impose penal sanctions on anyone disobeying orders to carry out Executive Order 9066. Japanese Americans at Poston War Relocation Camp, where 9000 West Coast persons of Japanese ancestry were held at various locations, begin a general strike.
    This story about Masumi Hayashi first aired March 25, 2004, on "Outlook." It was rebroadcast Dec. 21, 2006, shortly after Congress approved $38 million to presevere WW II internment camps. Our crew enjoyed meeting her, and learning about the history of the camps. So it was with sadness when we recently learned she was the victim of a senseless crime. In August, Hayashi was shot to death in her Cleveland apartment. As a tribute, we (WV Broadcasting Company) thought it would be worthwhile to take a second look at the work of Masumi Hayashi
  • Eight camps were in the West; the southeast Arkansas sites at Rohwer and Jerome were the only ones in the South. The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation gave $4 million in grants to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Los Angeles-based Japanese American National Museum to preserve the information of the Arkansas internment camp.
  • At Idaho Hunt's Minidoka Relocation Center, 13,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up from their homes in Idaho, Oregon and Washington and sent here in World War II. Unforgettable winter cold, the summer heat or the dust storms that the wooden barracks covered with tar paper did not keep out made life even more intolerable.
  • US Military Police fire on 1000 Japanese American protesters at the Manzanar Relocation Center; 2 die, 8 are wounded.
  • Civilian Exclusion Order #79 was the official word to the masses.
  • The history of the Internment Camps was a sad time in United States history. The final results of War Relocation Authority notes that 120,313 Japanese and Japanese Americans lived in the internment camps from 1942-1945 who had to survive the insanity through various ways possible.
  • It developed, ironically, the offical start of Asian American Jazz!
  • An interesting side note is that the California State Personnel Board voted to bar all "descendants of natives with whom the United States [is] at war" from all civil service positions." This was only enforced against Japanese Americans.
  • Witness the pictures of the Internment Discover specific details of what occured! Camps that truely can tell the true stories of the horrors!?!?!
  • All non-citizens were given the loyalty questionaire for female citizens, except that it was titled "Application for Leave Clearance." -- thereby asking them to swear sole allegiance to the government that excluded them from citizenship.
  • When the U.S. government also ordered the detainment of scores of talented Japanese American baseball players such as Henry Honda (Cleveland Indians), Herb "Moon" Kurima (Semi-pro league and pitched a no-hitter/21-strikeout game), Kenichi Zenimura ("Dean of the Diamond" organized Japanese-American), etc. Baseball leagues were formed in the camps with people such as Pat Morita playing on the teams. They paved the way for Ryan Kurosaki to became the first third-generation Japanese-American to play in the majors (1975).
  • These deplorable actions occurred, despite comments such as (On December 15, 1941) After a brief visit to Hawaii, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox tells the press, "I think the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception of Norway."
For people interested in further information, please feel free to visit the following websites:

RACISM DURING WWII
Racism was rampant following the Japanese attack on that infamous Sunday morning. Wartime hysteria led to the imprisonment of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps that peppered the western part of the nation. Ted Ohira’s (recipient of three Bronze Stars) memory of that white face, that voice so saturated with hate that stated "Hey you dirty Jap." After all that combat. I went through five major battles in Europe, and I received lots of awards and medals. … And then one day, in downtown Los Angeles, I hear this: `Hey you dirty Jap.' "I don't cry. I didn't then. I got mad and I wanted to beat that guy up, but I said `this guy is ignorant.' I had enough of fighting and I just walked away."

INTERNMENT'S "EVACUATED PEOPLE"
In the interest of both accuracy and fairness, it is important to distinguish sharply between the residents of relocation centers and the militarists of Imperial Japan. Two-thirds of the people in the centers are American citizens, born in this country and educated, for the most part, in American public schools. At all centers, the residents have bought thousands of dollars worth of war bonds and have made significant contributions to the American Red Cross. Many of them have sons, husbands, and brothers in the United States Army. Even the aliens among them have nearly all lived in the United States for two decades or longer. And it is important to remember that these particular aliens have been denied the privilege of gaining American citizenship under our laws.

Americans like to think that victory in 1945 also solved the problem posed by Japan. Did it? Even today, as the controversial Yasukuni Shrine reminds us, many Japanese cling to a different understanding of the Pacific war's origins and justification. As far as China and South Korea are concerned, victory in 1945 did not solve their Japan problem; that problem persists and is growing. If East Asia becomes the locus of renewed great power competition between China and Japan, V-J Day will no longer look quite so decisive
For more info, click
HERE.
It is also important to distinguish between residents of relocation centers and civilian internees. Under our laws, aliens of enemy nationality who are found guilty of acts or intentions against the security of the Nation are being confined in internment camps which are administered not by the War Relocation Authority but the Department of Justice. American citizens suspected of subversive activities are being handled through the ordinary courts. The residents of the relocation centers, however, have never been found guilty–either individually or collectively–of any such acts or intentions. They are merely a group of American residents who happen to have Japanese ancestors and who happened to be living in a potential combat zone shortly after the outbreak of war. All evidences available to the War Relocation Authority indicates that the great majority of them are completely loyal to the United States.

STUDENT RELOCATIONS
The physical standards of life in the relocation centers have never been much above the bare subsistence level. For some few of the evacuees, these standards perhaps represent a slight improvement over those enjoyed before evacuation. But for the great majority of the evacuated people, the environment of the centers–despite all efforts to make them livable–remains subnormal and probably always will be. In spite of the leave privileges, the movement of evacuees while they reside at the centers is necessarily somewhat restricted and a certain feeling of isolation and confinement is almost inevitable.

 
Life @ Internment Camp
 

RELOCATION CENTERS
The physical standards of life in the relocation centers have never been much above the bare subsistence level. For some few of the evacuees, these standards perhaps represent a slight improvement over those enjoyed before evacuation. But for the great majority of the evacuated people, the environment of the centers–despite all efforts to make them livable–remains subnormal and probably always will be. In spite of the leave privileges, the movement of evacuees while they reside at the centers is necessarily somewhat restricted and a certain feeling of isolation and confinement is almost inevitable.

Housing is provided for the evacuee residents of the centers in tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind. Most of these barracks are partitioned off so that a family of five or six, for example, will normally occupy a single room 25 by 20 feet. Bachelors and other unattached evacuees live mainly in unpartitioned barracks which have been established as dormitories. The only furnishings provided by the Government in the residence barracks are standard Army cots and blankets and small heating stoves. One bath, laundry, and toilet building is available for each block of barracks and is shared by upwards of 250 people.

Food is furnished by the Government for all evacuee residents. The meals are planned at an average cost of not more than 45 cents per person per day (the actual cost, as this is written, has averaged almost 48 cents), are prepared by evacuee cooks, and are served generally cafeteria style in mess halls that accommodate between 250 and 300 persons. At all centers, Government-owned or Government- leased farmlands are being operated by evacuee agricultural crews to produce a considerable share of the vegetables needed in the mess halls. At nearly all centers, the farm program also includes the production of poultry, eggs, and pork; and at a few the evacuees are raising beef and dairy products. Every evacuee is subject to the same food rationing restrictions as all other residents of the United States.

Medical care is available to all evacuee residents of relocation centers without charge. Hospitals have been built at all the centers and are manned in large part by doctors, nurses, nurses' aides, and technicians from the evacuee population. Simple dental and optical services are also provided and special care is given to infants and nursing mothers. Evacuees requesting special medical services not available at the centers are required to pay for the cost of such services. As all centers, in view of the crowded and abnormal living conditions, special sanitary precautions are necessary to safeguard the community health and prevent the outbreak of epidemics.

Work opportunities of many kinds are made available to able-bodied evacuee residents at relocation centers. The policy of WRA is to make the fullest-possible use of evacuee skills and manpower in all jobs that are essential to community operations. Evacuees are employed in the mess halls, on the farms, in the hospitals, on the internal police force, in construction and road maintenance works, in clerical and stenographic jobs, and in may other lines of activity. Most of those who work are paid at the rate of $16 a month for a 44-hour week. Apprentices and others requiring close supervision receive $12 while those with professional skills, supervisory responsibilities, or unusually difficult duties are paid $19. In addition, each evacuee working at a relocation center receives a small monthly allowance for the purchase of work clothing for himself and personal clothing for his dependents. Opportunities for economic gain in the ordinary sense are almost completely lacking to the residents of the centers.

 
 
Internment Camp Kid

INTERNMENT CAMP TEACHERS
During their time in the Internment Camps, a group of volunteer teachers (mostly White) gave Japanese American students hope. In classrooms that initially lacked desks, textbooks and school supplies, the teachers somehow ignited the young minds and inspired students to pursue careers in science, medicine, education. Teachers such as Margaret Harvey, Katherine Stegner Odum, Joseph Goodman, Margaret Crosby Gunderson, Lois/Frank Ferguson (who wrote his 1942 thesis at UCLA boldly criticized prevailing public attitudes that Japanese Americans were disloyal and unassimilable, and urged understanding of them), Alberta Kassing, Thomas Temple and Ralph/Mary Smeltzer told students at the Tule Lake camp not to give up on the Constitution; that the nation's flawed political leadership was to blame for their unjust internment.

"They gave to us the link to the America we knew: the sense that not all Americans were racist, not all of them saw us as a threat but saw the potential we had as individuals," said Glenn Kumekawa, a retired Rhode Island professor who was sent to Topaz camp in Utah at age 14 after winning his San Francisco grammar school's American Citizenship Award.

From 1942 to 1945, an estimated 30,000 children attended the K-12 schools, which were operated by the federal War Relocation Authority. Teachers were recruited and hired by U.S. civil service representatives; some signed up for altruistic reasons, while others just needed a job. The schools were plagued by inadequate facilities, supply shortages and, in some cases, frequent staff turnover, according to reports, and most were closed in late 1945 along with the camps.

 
Street @ Manzanar
 
INTERNMENT CAMPS
Manzanar was one of 10 internment camps to which the U.S. government sent citizens of Japanese ancestry following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is in the high desert at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, northeast of Los Angeles, not far from the community of Lone Pine. Manzanar, officially called the Manzanar War Relocation Center began as an "assembly center" under U.S. army control. In the 1940s, it housed 10,000 internees. The interred were not suspects in any crimes, not guilty of any wrongdoing.

The camp, which consisted of 36 blocks of barracks within a confined area of one-square mile, was the scene of many hardships as men, women, and children sought to establish some semblance of normal life while attempting to overcome the trauma of forced evacuation and facing an uncertain future.

Manzanar officially closed Nov. 21, 1945. It was designated a National Historic Site in 1972 after a vigorous, yearlong campaign by Japanese Americans. The National Park Service maintains the site, which is open to visitors year-round.
Joyce Yuki Nakamura (1943)

TULE LAKE: Surrounded by a 10-foot-high barbed wire "man-proof" fence and 28 watchtowers, and guarded by a battalion of soldiers and eight armored tanks, the Tule Lake Segregation Center - 20,000 people, it had more than 1,600 buildings spread across 7,400 acres - near the Oregon border was the nation's largest Japanese American internment camp and in time became the only one of the 10 in the country that was designated for internees considered security risks. Most of those internees were known as the "No-No boys," because they had answered "no" to — or refused to answer — a two-part loyalty question that asked internees to renounce the Japanese emperor and agree to serve in the U.S. armed forces. Within a few years of the camp's closing in the summer of 1946, the once-sprawling settlement was dismantled. Some buildings fell victim to weather and time. Much of what remained was scavenged: The jail's metal bars were salvaged for scrap; the internee barracks were cut in half and given to homesteading veterans; and an officers club was converted into a grocery store. Even the headstones from the camp's cemetery were taken as souvenirs and the cemetery was converted into a landfill.

POSTON: Poston was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation for a specific reason: Japanese detainees were brought to the desolate location to provide free, forced labor for the American government. U.S. government sent nearly 20,000 of them to three camps on a Colorado River Indian Tribe reservation at Poston with an explicit plan to use Japanese Americans -- most of them Californians skilled in farming -- to help develop tribal lands for later Indian use. Under the plan, the Japanese Americans helped clear lands and build irrigation systems, started farms and built schools from handmade adobe bricks. Their work in developing a reservation that previously had no electricity, running water or modern homes -- many families lived in mud huts -- laid the foundation for the tribe to jump-start its standard of living and thrive financially. The Japanese were ordered to build the infrastructure — schools, dams, canals and farms — so the U.S. government could consolidate scattered American Indian tribes from smaller reservations in one place after the war.

In this time of racial discrimination and hatred for the Japanese, the plan was a way to displace one group of unwelcome people and use their hard work to build the infrastructure so another displaced group of people — American Indians — could be isolate