Video overview for Chapter Title.
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Can the rights of an entire group of people be violated in a democracy?
Chapter objectives
- Describe the constitutional rights breached by the United States government during World War II.
- Identify the processes taken by the United States government that led to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
- Study different perspectives shaped by complex historical circumstances, including the issuance of a loyalty questionnaire to Japanese American prisoners.
- Recognize Japanese Americans’ concerns and opportunities as they resettled in new cities after leaving the camps.
- Analyze the laws and policies that violated Japanese Americans’ constitutional rights.
- Understand the implications of using inaccurate language to describe important events.
- Review the strategies and actions used by Japanese Americans to right the wrongs of their mass incarceration during World War II.
Japanese immigrants Masuo and Shidzuyo Yasui established a large family, a successful store, and other enterprises in Oregon’s Hood River Valley before World War II. Despite intense racism, they and thousands of other Japanese Americans living in West Coast states developed thriving farms, small businesses, and communities. After Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi, decades of anti-Japanese discrimination culminated in the government forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes into prison camps. None of them had committed any crime. Using the Yasui family as a case study, this chapter explores what Japanese Americans experienced in the camps, their varied responses to imprisonment, the long-term impacts of incarceration, and how Japanese Americans obtained redress. The democratic system’s failure to protect Japanese Americans’ rights during World War II has motivated contemporary Japanese Americans to defend other groups that the government has targeted because of race, religion, or immigration status.
Modules in this chapter
MODULE 1
Overview & Introduction
MODULE 4
Cooperation, Resistance, and Dissent
MODULE 5
Starting Over
MODULE 3
Forced Uprooting and Incarceration
MODULE 6
Redress and Solidarity
MODULE 4
Cooperation, Resistance, and Dissent
MODULE 6
Redress and Solidarity
MODULE 3
Forced Uprooting and Incarceration
MODULE 4
Cooperation, Resistance, and Dissent
MODULE 5
Starting Over
MODULE 6
Redress and Solidarity
Sources cited in this chapter
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. 2nd Edition. Seattle: University of Washington, Press, 1997.
Densho Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/
Grodzins, Morton. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949
Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: The Free Press, 1988.
Irons, Peter. Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Kessler, Lauren. Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family. New York: Random House, 1993.
Murray, Alice Y. Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Robinson, Greg. A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Weglyn, Michi N. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.
