as potential subversives—not because
Japanese Americans openly worshipped
Emperor Hirohito, but because they’d
already been dehumanized by decades
of anti-immigrant politicking. While no
loyal American cheered the attack on Pearl
Harbor, some citizens used the threat of
sabotage as a vehicle to advance their pre-
existing prejudices against the Japanese.
Lieutenant General John L. Dewitt was
responsible for securing the West Coast
during World War II. Relying “heavily on
civilian politicians rather than informed
military judgments,” according to a later
investigation, he incorporated citizens’
longstanding resentments into a February
1942 report to FDR in which he recom-
mended “excluding” Japanese immi-
grants and their family members from the
West Coast of the United States.
“In the war in which we are now
engaged, racial affinities are not severed
by migration,” Dewitt wrote. “The Japa-
nese race is an enemy race.” He saw no rea-
son to believe that Japanese Americans,
“barred from assimilation by convention...
will not turn against this nation when the
final test of loyalty comes.” That none had
yet betrayed the U.S. was, in his opinion,
“a disturbing and confirming indication
that action will be taken.”
In hindsight, we know that Dewitt was
wrong about the military threat posed by
people of Japanese descent. The Commis-
sion on Wartime Relocation and Intern-
ment of Civilians, formed by Congress in
1980, found no substantiated accounts of
sabotage or subterfuge by Japanese Amer-
icans living in California during the war.
But the public mood at the time would
brook no sober analysis on such things—
so when Dewitt suggested that FDR begin
rounding up Japanese Americans and
moving them east to prevent communica-
tions with the enemy abroad, the presi-
dent was all too happy to oblige.
Any person born in Japan or of Japa-
nese ancestry living on the West Coast in
1942 was asked to report to their nearest
relocation center. Communities that had
existed for decades were broken up and
their residents transferred to camps in
Eastern California, Utah, Arkansas, Wyo-
ming, Arizona, Colorado, and Arkansas.
“From Puyallup to Pomona, internees
found that a cowshed at a fairgrounds or a
horse stall at a racetrack was home for sev-
eral months before they were transported
to a permanent wartime residence,” says
an article on relocation published by the
National Archives.
Many of them never made it back
home when the camps began to discharge
people in 1944. According to the National
Archives, only 30 percent of the Japa-
nese who had been forcefully relocated
from Tacoma, Washington, for example,
ever returned.
The conditions in U.S. internment
camps looked nothing like those in Nazi
Germany. Adults worked, children went
to school, and there were no gas chambers
or heinous, involuntarily medical experi-
ments. But the Japanese—70,000 of them
U.S. citizens—were still imprisoned based
on racial animus, mindless fear, and lies,
and they were still deprived of the liberty,
wealth, and relationships they’d built
before Pearl Harbor.FRED KOREMATSU WAS one of them. Born
in Oakland, California, to Japanese immi-
grant parents, Korematsu had supported
the U.S. war effort after Pearl Harbor untilhis Japanese lineage got him fired from a
factory job. Ordered to report for intern-
ment in May 1942, he refused.
After three weeks on the lam, Kore-
matsu was arrested and tried for violating
a federal law that made it a crime to dis-
obey Roosevelt’s executive order. He even-
tually appealed his case to the Supreme
Court, where a 6–3 majority led by Justice
Hugo Black—a New Dealer and FDR
appointee—ruled that mass detention of
Japanese immigrants and their American
families was not unconstitutional.
Korematsu died in 2005, which means
he did not get to see the ruling that bears
his name excoriated this year by the
same Court that seven decades earlier
had defended his imprisonment. He did,
however, bear witness to President Ronald
Reagan’s signing of the Civil Liberties Act
of 1988, which celebrated its 30th birth-
day in August.
That law was the product of nearly a
decade’s worth of research and investi-
gation by the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians.
It called for giving each living survivor of
internment—starting with the oldest ones
the government could then identify—a
tax-free check for $20,000 and a letter
from the president apologizing for the gov-
ernment’s actions.
“The checks will be consequential,”
Cressey Nakagawa of the Japanese Ameri-
can Citizens League told the L.A. Times in
1990, when the first letters were sent out.
“But most meaningful will be the apology.”
The majority opinion in Trump v.
Hawaii, authored by Chief Justice John
Roberts, does not apologize to Korematsu
or even formally overturn the decision,
but it comes close. “Korematsu was gravely
wrong the day it was decided, has been
overruled in the court of history, and—to
be clear—‘has no place in law under the
Constitution,’” Roberts wrote.
“This formal repudiation of a shameful
precedent is laudable and long overdue,”
Justice Sonya Sotomayor responded in
her dissent. “But it does not make the
majority’s decision [in the travel ban case]
acceptable or right.”MIKE RIGGS is a reporter at Reason.REASON 17When the smoke
cleared in Hawaii,
it was easy for
white Americans
on the Pacific coast
to see their Asian
neighbors as potential
subversives, because
they’d already
been dehumanized
by decades of
anti-immigrant
politicking.