American Treatment of Japanese Americans Was Equivalent

The American internment of Japanese Americans was an episode of substantial moral and legal failing by the United States government. Approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, of whom approximately two-thirds were American citizens by birth, were forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States in 1942 and held in ten internment camps until 1945 to 1946. The episode was found by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1982 and 1983 to have been the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”; the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan, formally apologised, paid 20,000 dollars in reparations to each surviving internee, and acknowledged the constitutional violation. The episode is well documented and properly recognised in American historical memory. The denier argument is not about whether the internment occurred (it did) or whether it was wrong (it was, and is officially recognised as such). The argument is about what the internment implies for the German operation. The implication is that the two are equivalent, that ethnic internment was a wartime norm, and that the Nazi case was not exceptional. The implication does not survive any examination of what the two systems actually were.

What the American internment was

The internment was authorised by Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war against Japan. The order authorised the military to designate “exclusion zones” from which any persons could be removed; it was applied principally to people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, with smaller and largely separate operations against German Americans and Italian Americans. The Japanese American operation removed approximately 120,000 people from California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona in March to October 1942, transported them to ten “relocation centres” administered by the War Relocation Authority, and held them there for the duration of the war. The camps were tarpapered wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, and guarded by the US Army.

The conditions in the camps were poor by any reasonable standard but were not designed to kill the inmates. The food rations were provided at military barracks levels (around 2,000 calories a day), the medical care was provided by camp doctors and nurses recruited from the inmates and from the public health service, schools were operated for the children, and a degree of internal self-government was permitted. The total death toll across the ten camps was approximately 1,800 people over four years, mostly of natural causes among the elderly population. Some Japanese Americans died in incidents of military violence (the Lordsburg shooting at Santa Fe internment camp in 1942, when a guard shot two prisoners in disputed circumstances; sporadic other incidents). Many Japanese American men of military age were drafted from the camps into the US Army, where they served with distinction in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy and France, the most decorated American unit of the war.

The internment was challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order in Korematsu v. United States (1944) by a majority decision; the dissents by Justices Murphy, Roberts and Jackson have since been considered the more legally sound positions. The Korematsu decision was formally repudiated by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which described it as “gravely wrong the day it was decided”. The internment system was ended in 1945; most internees were released by early 1946. Their property losses were partly compensated under the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, with much fuller compensation under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The structural comparison

The American operation was an ethnic-based mass detention without due process, in violation of the constitutional rights of the American citizens involved, and motivated by racism, fear and bad political judgement. It was a serious wrong. It was not, in any respect that matters for the comparison the deniers want to make, equivalent to the Nazi operation against the Jews. The structural differences are: (a) the American camps held approximately 120,000 people; the Nazi system processed approximately ten million through its various components; (b) the American camps had a death toll of approximately 1,800 over four years; the Nazi system had a death toll of approximately eleven million; (c) the American camps did not have killing facilities; the Nazi system included gas chambers, mass shooting sites, gas vans and dedicated killing infrastructure; (d) the American camps released their inmates at the end of the war; the Nazi system was destroying its inmates as a primary purpose, and would have continued doing so beyond any military endpoint had the war been won; (e) the American camps were challenged in courts and were eventually subject to formal apology and reparation; the Nazi system was the policy of the regime that ran the courts. Each of these differences is structurally significant; together they make the comparison rhetorical rather than analytical.

The American memorialisation

The American government has formally apologised for the internment and paid reparations. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed by a Republican president of strongly conservative inclination on the basis of a bipartisan congressional commission report. The Manzanar internment camp in California is now a National Historic Site. The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles opened in 1992 and provides extensive documentation of the episode. The case is now taught in American schools and discussed in mainstream American historiography. None of this is true of denialist claims about the Holocaust, which have no comparable foothold in any serious institutional context. The American memorialisation of the internment, in fact, follows the structural pattern that responsible states adopt for their own wrongs: acknowledgement, formal apology, reparation, institutional memory. The German state has done the same for the Holocaust, on a much larger scale corresponding to the much larger crime. The deniers cite the American case to argue for moral equivalence; the American case in fact illustrates the contrast in scale and the available pattern of state response.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses a real American wrong, properly memorialised, to attempt the relativisation of a much larger and structurally different crime. The American wrong stands on its own terms; the Nazi wrong stands on its own terms; the equation between them is false on every measurable dimension. The deniers’ purpose is not to elevate the American case, which is already adequately recognised in American memory, but to use it to lower the moral standing of the German case. The lowering depends on the listener accepting that mass detention of 120,000 people with a death toll of 1,800 is the same kind of operation as the killing of six million people in dedicated facilities over six years. The argument relies on the listener not knowing the figures.

What were the conditions in the American camps? What was the death toll? On what comparison can the camps be said to be equivalent?

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Sources

• Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, US Government Printing Office, 1982 and 1983
• Civil Liberties Act of 1988, US Public Law 100-383, with the formal apology and reparations programme
• Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, Hill and Wang, 1993
• Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Harvard University Press, 2001
• Eric L. Muller, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II, University of North Carolina Press, 2007
• Korematsu v. United States, 323 US 214 (1944), and the dissenting opinions of Justices Murphy, Roberts and Jackson
• Trump v. Hawaii, 585 US ___ (2018), with the formal repudiation of Korematsu
• Brian Niiya (ed.), Encyclopedia of Japanese American History, second edition, Facts on File, 2001
• Manzanar National Historic Site, https://www.nps.gov/manz
• Japanese American National Museum, https://www.janm.org
• Densho Encyclopedia, the comprehensive online reference on the internment, https://encyclopedia.densho.org
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “What Made the Holocaust Distinctive”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org