World War II and Japanese Internment

Military necessity or racial profiling?

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese military attacked the American naval base located at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, prompting the U.S. to declare war on Japan the following day. Fears of a Japanese attack on the American mainland intensified, particularly along the West Coast. In February 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which granted military commanders the authority to create military zones inside the U.S. and to exclude anyone deemed harmful to national security from these zones. The following month, Congress passed a law making it a crime to disobey Executive Order 9066. As a result of this order, nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry -- 70,000 of them American citizens -- were forced from their homes and businesses and relocated to internment camps until the war's conclusion in 1945. Most of the camps were in remote areas scattered throughout the western United States, and conditions in the camps were crowded and harsh.

The ostensible reason for the order was to protect those of Japanese descent from mob violence and to prevent acts of espionage and sabotage from being committed by individuals loyal to the Japanese enemy. However, it is important to note that no persons of German or Italian ancestry were relocated, despite the fact that the United States was also at war Germany and Italy. As one Supreme Court justice noted, "not one person of Japanese ancestry was accused or convicted of sabotage after Pearl Harbor while they were still free." Indeed, a group of Japanese-American soldiers assembled in 1943 to fight in Europe became the most highly decorated combat unit in World War II.

In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal of George Hirabayashi, who was convicted for violating a military curfew restricting persons of Japanese ancestry to their homes between the hours of 8:00 pm and 6:00 am. Hirabayashi, an American citizen and student at the University of Washington, claimed that the measures directed against him and others of Japanese heritage violated the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantees. Acknowledging that "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality," the Court nevertheless concluded that military authorities were not acting unreasonably in making racial distinctions during a time when national security was threatened.

The next year, the Court also upheld the conviction of Fred Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry who had refused to report for relocation to an internment camp. Korematsu challenged the Court's reasoning in Hirabayashi and argued further that the military exclusion order was unnecessary because there was no longer any danger of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. In response, the Court noted that Korematsu's loyalty to the United States was not in question, and that any classification based on race was constitutionally suspect. However, the majority reaffirmed the logic it had employed in Hirabayashi, and declared the following:

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. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot -- by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight -- now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.

Today, many Americans regard the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans as one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in our nation's history. In 1983, a congressional commission declared that there was no military necessity for the relocation and that Executive Order 9066 was the result of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." About the same time, a federal judge overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction. Congress went on to authorize reparations to those who had been subjected to internment and in 1998, Fred Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.