Japanese American & Aleut Redress

On February 19, 1942, more than two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Although the Order did not explicitly mention Japanese Americans, it was clear that it was intended to facilitate the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. While at the time this move was justified by claims of military necessity, a Congressional Commission found that the primary causes were “racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership.” Even before the war, the federal government had commissioned and received the Munson Report, which found that “There is no Japanese problem on the West Coast.” Simultaneously, the Federal Government re-deployed Executive Order 9066 to also forcibly remove Aleuts from their ancestral homelands under the pretense of the threat from Japan. They forced the Aleuts to live in conditions so terrible that it resulted in the deaths of 10 percent of those incarcerated.

After the war, many former incarcerees were traumatized by their wartime incarceration and refused to speak about their experiences to their children. In 1969, Japanese American former incarcerees and their children organized the Manzanar Pilgrimage in an attempt to remember and gain closure around these experiences. This kicked off a nearly 20-year effort to remember and gain redress for these experiences. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which gave living Japanese American former incarcerees $20,000 in reparations and an official apology. It also accorded living Aleut former incarcerees $12,000 in reparations and a $6.4 million trust fund for their communities. The Aleut forced removal remains under-examined to this day, and has often been ignored in favor of the predominant Japanese American incarceration history.

Clearly, in spite of Redress, this history is far from resolved. Japanese American Redress reframed the narrative of Japanese American incarceration as a past wrong for which the Nation has made amends, even as that same Nation carefully crafted its language in this Act to negate any possibility for its Reparations to be extended to the descendants of other National wrongs—like African American slavery and Native American genocide. Since then, a new era of scholarship on the subject has attempted to theorize Japanese American incarceration history in relation to others’ oppressions, using this history to call for a more thoughtful and thorough examination of other wrongs committed by the U.S. This section of the syllabus is organized into three parts: 1) a background on Japanese American & Aleut Incarceration, 2) the significance of Redress, 3) theorizing the unresolved parts of this history in the wake of Japanese American Redress.

 

Order 9066 Podcast. APM Reports.
This podcast provides a strong overview of Japanese American World War II incarceration in an 8-episode series. It traces Japanese American history from before Pearl Harbor, through the forced removal, the assembly centers, the concentration camps, military service, the draft, resistance to their treatment, resettlement and release from camp, ending with the Redress movement.

“Terminology.” Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment. 
This guide expresses the controversies involved in commonly-employed euphemisms around Japanese American forced removal and incarceration, including the term “internment,” and asks the reader to think critically about the terms they use when discussing this period.

Madden, Ryan. “The Forgotten People: The Relocation and Internment of Aleuts during World War II.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, Jan. 1992, pp. 55–76. 
Madden tells the history of Aleut forced removal and incarceration. He shows how the federal government and Alaska government bungled this approach, and uses interviews with Aleut former incarcerees to discuss their experiences during the War. While the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment found “no persuasive showing that evacuation of the Aleuts was motivated by racism or that it was undertaken for any reason but their safety,” Madden suggests that the motives were more complicated: the military took over their houses (those they did not raze) for its purposes, and white residents of Unalaska were not forced to leave.

Nakamura, Tadashi. PILGRIMAGE. 2012. 
Nakamura’s 22-minute video on the Manzanar Pilgrimage shows its significance for Japanese Americans coming to terms with the trauma of forced removal in the 1960s. The first pilgrimage took place in 1969, and helped inspire pilgrimages to other camps, and has since developed into an annual commemoration. Pilgrimages were foundational to garnering support for the Redress Movement in the Japanese American community.

Kozen, Cathleen K. “Redress as American-Style Justice: Congressional Narratives of Japanese American Redress at the End of the Cold War.” Time & Society, vol. 21, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 104–20.
Kozen uses transcripts of the 1987-1988 U.S. House and Senate congressional debates on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to trace the emergence of narratives that posit Japanese American incarceration as an exceptional wrong in its history and as the proof that a “great nation” recognizes and makes amends for past wrongs. She demonstrates its limits as a model for redress to other groups by the ways it was consciously constructed to omit the possibility of other forms of redress. At the same time, this narrative helped consolidate the U.S.’s role as a national leader in the wake of the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

Leong, Karen J., and Myla Vicenti Carpio. “Carceral States: Converging Indigenous and Asian Experiences in the Americas.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 42, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. vii–xviii.
In their introduction to this special issue, Leong and Vicenti Carpio challenge us to consider the ways racialized carceral labor has been exploited in service of the Settler State: “the need for unfree labor to work large scale crops was predicated on the land being removed from Indigenous claims and being made available as private property to colonists for cultivation” (ix).  They ask us to theorize Japanese American incarceration and other Asian American carceral experiences in the context of the past and ongoing violence of settler colonialism, including how Asian American communities have benefited from those violences.

Leong, Karen J., and Myla Vicenti Carpio. “Carceral Subjugations: Gila River Indian Community and Incarceration of Japanese Americans on Its Lands.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 42, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 103–20. 

Gila River Indian Community was coerced into housing two Japanese American concentration camps on its land—Butte and Canal—during World War II. Myla Vicenti Carpio and Karen Leong analyze the complex interactions between the carceral state and the settler state at Gila River. They show that the State used stereotypes about American Indians and Japanese Americans to dispossess the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) from their land.