The Japanese Americans were interned in 1942 until 1945 when the last internment camp was closed. During this time 120,000 Japanese Americans faced overcrowded and poor living conditions. Eventually the Japanese were allowed to leave the concentration camps if they enlisted into to United States army, but only 1,200 internees chose to do so. Even though all this hat and racism against the Japanese Americans there was a scandal that went all the way to the Supreme Court, it was called “korematsu v. United states”. There was an accumulation of myths and suspicions surrounding the oriental stereotype and had grown along the Pacific Coast for almost a hundred years and had exerted a critical influence upon the decisions leading up to the evacuation.
The wholesale internment of Japanese American citizens and resident aliens alike climaxed a long history of racism on the West Coast directed against Asian immigrants. As Japanese immigration increased after the virtual cutoff of Chinese immigrants, discriminatory efforts targeted this new “yellow peril,” as too many white Americans called it at the time. Only Japanese government protests and intervention by President Theodore Roosevelt prevented the segregation of Japanese American students in the San Francisco school system in 1906. One United States senator from California ran for reelection in these years on the slogan, “Keep California white.” This regional prejudice against Japanese Americans became enshrined in federal policy in the 1922 Supreme Court ruling that Japanese immigrants could not become naturalized Americans citizens, and then in the 1924 law that prevented further immigration from japan altogether.
It was in this context of this history of prejudice against Japanese Americans that many West Coast politicians responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and to Japanese Americans from areas considered vital to American defense. Powerful...