The Japanese American Incarceration: A Case For Redress

              birth to an American-born generation, and families decided to
make the United States their permanent home. As the exclusionists
intensified their efforts to get rid of the Japanese, their campaign
was enhanced by the development of a powerful new weapon—
the mass media.
Newspapers, radio, and motion pictures stereotyped Japanese
Americans as untrustworthy and unassimilable. The media did not
recognize the fact that a large number of persons of Japanese
ancestry living in the United States were American citizens. As
Japan became a military power, the media falsely depicted Japanese Americans as agents for Japan. Newspapers inflamed the
"Yellow Peril" myths on the West Coast; radio, movies and comic
strips spread the disease of prejudice throughout the United States.
Trapped in segregated neighborhoods and with no access to the
media, Japanese Americans were unable to counteract the false
stereotypes. Even though those born in the United States were culturally American, spoke English fluently, and were well educated,
they faced almost insurmountable discrimination in employment,
housing, public accommodations and social interaction.
OUTBREAK OF WAR
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when World War II began. Germany and Japan became military powers in the 1930s and began
their conquests by annexing neighboring nations by sheer intimidation. Actually military conflicts broke out in Asia when Japan
invaded China in 1937, and in Europe when Germany invaded
Poland in 1939.
As Germany overran the European continent and drove into
Africa and the Soviet Union, and Japan likewise in Asia and Southeast Asia, the United States was placed under tremendous pressure
to enter the war. In July 1941, the United States together with
Britain and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) imposed a total em
bargo on exports to Japan, thus effectively cutting off Japan's oil
supply.
The United States had broken Japan's top secret code and was
aware of the oil crisis in Japan and the probability of armed conflict. Consequently, the U.S. government undertook certain precautionary measures. In October 1941, the State Department dispatched a special investigator, Curtis B. Munson, to check on the
disposition of the Japanese American communities on the West
Coast and Hawaii.
In November 1941, Munson submitted a confidential report to
the President and the Secretary of State which certified that Japanese Americans possessed an extraordinary degree of loyalty to
the United States, and immigrant Japanese were of no danger.
Munson's findings were corroborated by years of secret surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
Navy Intelligence. Both the FBI and Navy Intelligence reported
there were a few potential extremists identified but almost 100%
of the Japanese American population was perfectly trustworthy.
High U.S. goverment and military officials were aware of these
intelligence reports, but they kept them secret from the public.
Japan's military forces attacked the U.S. military bases near
Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, and near Manila, Territory of the
Philippines, on December 7, 1941 (U.S. Time), and the United
States declared war on the following day.
Many people who are unfamiliar with the historical background
have assumed that the attack on Hawaii was the cause of, or
justification for, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on
the West Coast. But that assumption is contradicted by one glaring
fact: the Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not similarly incarcerated en masse. Such a massive injustice could not have occurred
without the prior history of prejudice and legal discrimination.
Actually it was the culmination of the movement to eliminate
Asians from the West Coast which began nearly 100 years earlier.
The FBI was well prepared for the war and arrested over 2,000
persons of Japanese ancestry throughout the United States and