Research by Subject: Japanese American Incarceration Camp Research Guide: How did this happen?

Media

In the 1800s, Chinese immigrants in the United States were seen as a source of inexpensive labor. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. Employers turned to Japanese immigrants as a source of inexpensive labor. As a result, anti-Japanese sentiment grew.

Japanese Americans came to the West Coast and leased and purchased land that was considered by white Americans not to be arable. The result was Japanese American owned and leased productive farms. Soon fear spread that the Japanese Americans were going to “take over” the land. Anti-Asian organizations began sprouting up in early 1900, and in 1924 the government passed the Immigration Act which banned immigration from Asian countries into the United States, focusing specifically on the Japanese.

In the years before WWII, there was a growing fear of Japanese espionage abroad. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, a hysteria of anti-Japanese sentiment grew and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, allowing the secretary of war to prescribe certain areas as military zones and to incarcerate Japanese-American citizens.

(excerpted and paraphrased from Osaki, Jon. Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066. New Day Films).

Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066
A documentary feature film about the false information and political influences which led to the World War ll incarceration of Japanese Americans.
When the Supreme Court Justified Japanese Internment Camps | Korematsu v. United States
Short video explaining the "justification" of Executive Order 9066 through the case of Korematsu Vs. United States.
1943 Film: Japanese Relocation
Primary source video from 1943 with Milton Eisenhower narrating the process of Japanese incarceration. Note the highly propogandist style which makes it seem like the event was almost a happy occasion.

Primary Sources

Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment was established by act of Congress in 1980 to investigate the detention program. Over twenty days, it held hearings in cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast, with testimony from more than 750 witnesses: evacuees, former government officials, public figures, interested citizens, and historians and other professionals. It took steps to locate and to review the records of government action and to analyze contemporary writings and personal and historical accounts. The Commission s report is a masterful summary of events surrounding the wartime relocation and detention activities, and a strong indictment of the policies that led to them.
Japanese Immigration Legislation: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration United States Congress: A Bill to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States
Various representative views on Japanese immigration in 1924. Demonstrates the views of the US Senate on Japanese/Japanese Americans "innate loyalty and allegiance" to Japan.
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also available at HatiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027227688&view=1up&seq=2&q1=exclusion
Executive Order 9066
Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, this document authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas for the creation of the camps and incarceration of Japanese-Americans.

Secondary Sources

Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II
This book reveals that long before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began making plans for the eventual internment and later incarceration of the Japanese American population. Kashima uses newly obtained records to trace this process back to the 1920s, when a nascent imprisonment organization was developed to prepare for a possible war with Japan, and follows it in detail through the war years.
The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924
Argues that Chinese exclusion introduced a gatekeeping ideology, politics, law and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States' identity as a nation of immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act marks a “watershed” in United States history. Not only was it the country's first significant restrictive immigration law; it was also the first to restrict a group of immigrants based on their race and class, and it thus helped to shape twentieth-century United States race-based immigration policy.
Performative Citizenship and Anti-Japanese Melodrama: The Mass Media Construction of Home Front Nationalism
Chapter from the book, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II. Explains how the media was crucial in stirring up anti-Japanese sentiment after Pearl Harbor, and established either satisfaction or indifference in the American people when Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and forced into incarceration camps.