Hi Everyone:

This post should rile up some of you, but I have always wondered if the decision to intern Japanese-Americans at the beginning of WWII wasn't correct. We know that Lincoln made a few decisions early in the Civil War that violated our constitution, and most historians today come down on the side of Lincoln relative to these decisions, and I've always wondered if that wasn't the case here.

After Pearl Harbor, our West Coast didn't have the greatest defenses, and even though these people were US citizens, were there enough Japanese sympathizers among them that they all needed to be locked up to help protect the areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle? And was this a legitimate solution?

My opinion is even if there were enough of these bad people, how could it matter? That is, in what way could they have supplied strategic information to assist an invasion. However, if this could have been the case, then perhaps the decision was not so clear cut. Perhaps some of our military experts could comment.

Best wishes,
Mason

There are many angles, but let's take just the possibility of Americans who might support an invasion of the West Coast.

Japan's military objective was to expel the US from East Asia and open the field for its empire, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Landing troops in the US would have been hopelessly foolhardy, disastrous, and irrelevant to their goals. This was all apparent at the time, so a possible invasion was not a reason for incarceration (at least among top decision makers).

Worth noting: Japan would need a series of island bases to contemplate invading the US, just like the US needed in its island hopping campaign toward Tokyo. Hawaii would be a likely spot. But Americans were not interned in Hawaii, despite the high population with Japanese ancestry. I'd say that was because they were economically essential to the area, and as a very mixed region, Hawaii lacked the same racial dynamics as the mainland. So the invasion factor just was not in play in internment, imo.

I wonder if the real reason wasn't to show people that the government was "doing something" since they knew it would take a while until they could hit back at Japan?

But to answer the question no the interment wasn't justified.

No. Unlike in the case of Lincoln, who actually did have real, not imagined, Confederate sympathizers and active rebels in the Northern border States, the only rationale used against the Japanese was their ancestry. It might have been defensible to hold active sympathizers without trial (but little evidence has been offered of their being anything close to a significant number of the populace), but a blanket internment was a gross overreaction and cruelly racist action.

And this:

Hi Bill:

But if Japan wins at Midway and the US has to leave Pearl Harbor, doesn't that make a West Coast invasion more likely? Remember, until Midway, Japan wins all the battles except for a draw at The Coral Sea.

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Prophet:

I'm sure this is all correct, but it's slightly different from my question. So let me rephrase my question as follows:

If Japan does go ahead and invades somewhere on the West Coast, could sympathizers among the Japanese-American population have done anything significant to help the invasion?

Best wishes,
Mason

Invade to accomplish what? Throw away a division? They would be supplying by sea against a much larger opponent with endless roads.

The Pearl attack was a role of the dice. They understood they were up against a larger opponent with many more resources and could not win a long war. The hope was that Pearl would shock the US into giving up on a role in East Asia. Invading California would not advance the objective -- a free hand in East Asia.

It was just a racist and overly vengeful thing to do. Maybe, in a propaganda role, it also added to the perceived legitimacy of the scale of the retaliation.

A better rile up question might be whether if the Japanese justly received reparations for a few years of internment should African Americans not also receive reparations for much more egregious treatment over much longer periods of time?

No it was not right. Mass incarceration of innocent civilians of Japanese-ethnicity served no military or strategic purpose whatsoever. As someone said above, they didn't intern Japanese people living in Hawaii because there were so many of them and they were essential to the economy of the territory. But on the mainland, where they were a tiny minority, they could be abused by the racist majority, much like was done to black people, indians, etc.

How exactly did Britain come to be at war with Germany?

How large? Why is your statement more accurate than, for instance, "There was a small lunatic fringe of British society who held Nazi sympathies throughout the 1930s"?

...

I'm finding your sweeping generalizations and absolute statements a bit disturbing. Unlike your examples of racist statements by Roosevelt you haven't backed them up with any sources. I think it is quite supportable to say that the British cared less about Eastern Europeans than they did about northwest Europeans, but I'd like to see how you support the claim that the British, as a whole had a monolithic and total disinterest in Eastern European states.

It is interesting that you would consider declaring war and mobilizing "nothing meaningful". Perhaps you should consider the British and French views of their own military capabilities at this time. The only trained British armoured formations were in Africa. The Germans were years ahead in the development of armoured warfare doctrine and equipment, and the western Allies knew this.

And according to the British and French, an attack by them on Germany would have been a complete disaster.

Could you provide us with some citations of source documents which support this claim (esp. the bolded)?

You should consider that there is less documentary support for your theory than there is for the simple explanation that neither the British nor the French considered themselves adequately prepared to attack Germany in force. There is plenty of evidence to support this view. Several British units in the BEF still had not received their full scale of authorized equipment when Germany attacked westward in 1940. France was still forming Divisions of its armoured force during the battle for France. German armoured divisions outnumber the combined total of British and French armoured divisions.

Yes, well, that's not at all a given.

Now you're are making unsupported, undocumented sweeping claims about the concerns of History Forum readers too.

The practice of history is not to make sweeping generalizations based on speculation and one's own prejudices. It is to draw conclusions from the documented evidence. The best evidence is that France and Britain did not attack Germany in 1939 or 1940 because they did not believe themselves capable of doing so successfully. There are recorded communications between and within the parties stating so. The state of their equipment, training, doctrine and intelligence estimates all indicate that such a belief was reasonably held.

I was gonna do a response to the thread but I believe DTM is a historian so he'll do a better job than me. I will point out however that there are a fair number of musings and assertions that aren't backed up by any references to historical material.

Also, I'm intrigued by this comment:

As a deterrent to what, war? Declaring war to deter war?

Sorry Husker, I'm not an actual historian - I just play one the Internet. IOW, it's a hobby for me, not a profession.

Anyway, you've already made the important point that he has no source material to back up his interpretations.

Since then, he's made a number of other false or underinformed statements. Some are so outrageous I have to wonder if he's a troll. Not going to waste any more time on him for now.

How did this thread go from Japanese in US to origin of WW2?

Not in 1941. Difficult to organize a large domestic force without being noticed.

Today, mayhaps. They could utilize Twitter to organize flash mobs to strike fear into the citizenry. It would be demoralizing.

But it was wrong then and it would be wrong now. It is better to let 100 guilty men go free than to have 1 innocent man suffer.

The first thing about internment that everyone always gets wrong is that they assume that all the internees were innocent loyal Americans. Many of them were more loyal to Japan than America, many were not citizens, and in there religion the Emperor was a God. Many German and Italians were also interered.

Percentage, and supporting citation?

What perecentage?

There is a difference between interning enemy aliens and one's own citizens.

First off. Do your own math. Statement is obvious logic based on that is true of all immigrant groups. Large numbers of immigrants are not citizens.

38 percent non citizen
20 percent not loyal to USA via Wikipedia

Wow a racist reading as bad as the exrtremes of the time in which it occurred.

The statementsas you prhsed them,especially the use fo eth weasel word "many" is neither obvious no logical. "Some" in place of "many" would be more reasonable.

Most sources put the number of non-citizen Japanese interred, as a percentage of all Japanese American interred at around 32-34%. I'm not sure where you found 38% on Wikipedia. And the large majority of non-citizens were only non-citizens because the racist laws of the early 20th century made it illegal for them to become citizens.

Secondly, the only source of 20% being "disloyal" was a dubious categorization made among a subset of respondents to a "loyalty questionnaire" The actual reasons for the answers which resulted in a "disloyal" categorization most often had nothing to do with disloyalty. Furthermore, the results for such answers among all Japanese Americans answering the question were lower than 20%.

However, the final say has been had by the US courts, which have found the incarcerations to have been illegal.

Since there are a lot of Canadians on 2p2, is this about Canadian internment of the Japanese? Canada interned more Japanese per capita than the US.

No, OP was about the US internment.

Canada interned a higher rate because they didn't have a situation similar to Hawaii. Few Japanese Americans in Hawaii were interned because their labour was too important to the local economy. Very roughly half the Japanese in the US were in Hawaii, so the rate of internment was much less than in Canada where there was no locale dependent on the labour of Japanese immigrants or their descendants.

I wasn't saying we interred a lower percentage of Japanese Americans than they interred Canadian Americans*. I'm saying the Japanese interred in a the US were a smaller percentage of our total population than the Japanese interred in Canada were of total Canadian population.

I'm saying, relative to size of country, Canadian internment of Japanese was a bigger deal.

Which may be true for the reason you state.

20/20 hindsight makes everything done in the past look awful. At the time given the threat it was a reasonable if distasteful action. Especially when you consider that given a couple of lucky carrier strikes the West Coast would have been open to attack. Find out how the Japs treated there internees before you really complain. Plus remember the average Japanese had 2000 years indoctrination of superiority vs the Nazi program of 20 years. And remember that the Japanese are still huge racists.

Ugh.

it's a very tough question to answer.. could articulate both sides but i think those viewpoints are so obvious... i will say too many people a) judge the past by today's standards i.e. abe lincoln was huge racist!!!; b) jump to the most obvious politically correct view without thinking things through.

what was incredibly terrible is that their property was confiscated, disposed of in a corrupt process and they were never anywhere near adequately compensated.... i think even if you believe the internment was arguably right (or at least not horribly wrong) the government should have given them their property back or at least some reasonable compensation for it.

it's funny that "liberal icon" FDR approved this although not sure he was very involved in its genesis, planning or execution. it seems more like he half didn't care, which is somewhat understandable when you think about it (i.e. very busy with more pressing matters)..