Was the United States sending Japanese people to internment camps justified?

The Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor changed the course of American lives forever; not only did it thrust America into declaring war on Japan, but it also changed the lives of the Japanese-Americans and Japanese people living in the United States. Congress and the President of the United States of America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would pass legislation to remove people of Japanese descent from the West Coast.1 This legislation would become known as Executive Order 9906; the US army was tasked with detaining and removing Japanese people to relocation centers which became known as internment camps.2 Over this six month period over 122,000 men, women, and children would be incarcerated, and 70,000 of them were American citizens who were charged with no crimes.3 I would argue that this is one of the most egregious actions that the US Government has made in the 20th century; they passed an executive order to have their own citizens arrested and incarcerated with no charges filed against them. The lack of substantial evidence against Japanese Americans was evident, and the intelligence gathered by the agencies did not point to any acts of terror or sabotage on the American homeland. Furthermore, the actions were based on “military necessity”, but the government never did an investigation on whether these actions were justified.  Many of these people filed cases against the US Government in court, but the Supreme Court upheld the actions of the US Government. These actions should be very alarming to all citizens of the United States of America no matter what ethnicity; this was a blatant act of prejudice against people with Japanese heritage.  

The US Government used fear tactics along with spreading propaganda in order to justify the actions they would take to incarcerate Japanese Americans.4 They needed to get the public fearful of the Japanese American people living in the United States and they needed to have a few instances of Japanese sympathizers spying on Americans to make their claims legitimate. The best evidence for this would be the LA Times articles that appeared over a year span: they ran the headlines, “Japan Pictures As Nation of Spies”, “American Japs Removal Urged”, and “Lincoln Would Intern Japs”.5 As one could see this type of language and attention would instill fear into anyone who read the articles and thus create an atmosphere of fear and prejudice. Furthermore, an article wrote by Walt Lippmann six days before Executive Order 9906 was passed, stated “The enemy alien problem on the Pacific Coast, or much more accurately, the fifth column problem, is very serious and it is very special. . . .The peculiar danger of the Pacific Coast is in a Japanese raid accompanied by enemy action inside American territory. . . . It is the fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast more or less continually and for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is the fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land. These are facts which we shall ignore or minimize at our peril. It is the fact that since the outbreak of the Japanese war there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast. From what we know about Hawaii and about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect . . . The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody's constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there”. The US Government used military nomenclature and fear as the main components to justify the incarceration of the Japanese and Japanese American’s to the American people.  

The last justification for Executive Order 9906 was due to the actions of a few high ranking officials in Congress and the military, but the most influential of these men was Lieutenant General John DeWitt. He was the commanding officer of the West Coast theatre of operations and was known for his lack of compassion and quick to respond to any threat. Furthermore, he was known to believe any intelligence that was produced on the Japanese Americans, and that he lacked common sense when dealing with all the reports. He was quoted as saying “ I have little confidence that the enemy aliens are law abiding or loyal in any sense

of the word. Some of them, yes; many, no. Particularly the Japanese, I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native-born Japanese-117,000-and 42,000 in California alone.”  

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