Japanese American Incarceration in World War II: The Camps, the Labor, and the Apology

On February 19, 1942 — ten weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The text was brief and named no ethnic group; it simply authorised the Secretary of War to designate military areas from which “any or all persons” could be excluded. In practice, the order was used over the following five months to forcibly remove approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the United States — roughly two-thirds of them American citizens — and to confine them in ten remote camps for up to four years. Inside those camps, the people the US government had labelled enemy aliens worked: in fields, in mess halls, in clinics, in classrooms, in factories making camouflage netting and military uniforms, often for $12 to $19 a month. They built the very infrastructure of their own incarceration.

Forty-six years later, the US government formally acknowledged that the program had been an act of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and paid $20,000 in compensation to each surviving incarceree. The amount did not include the wages owed for the work the camps had extracted. It still does not. This is what actually happened.

Executive Order 9066 and the Removal

The political pressure to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast came from a combination of forces: the shock of Pearl Harbor, the publicly inflammatory reporting of columnists like Henry McLemore (whose January 1942 San Francisco Examiner column called for “all Japanese, citizens or not,” to be put in “the badlands”), the testimony of California Attorney General Earl Warren — later Chief Justice of the United States — that Japanese Americans were a security risk, and the recommendations of Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command. DeWitt’s Final Report, issued in 1943, contained the formulation that “the Japanese race is an enemy race.” There was no documented case of espionage or sabotage by a Japanese American before, during, or after the war.

Executive Order 9066 itself was signed on February 19, 1942. DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 1 on March 2, 1942, designating Military Area No. 1 (the western halves of Washington, Oregon, and California, plus southern Arizona) and authorising removals. Over the following five months, Civilian Exclusion Orders — there were 108 of them — were posted on telephone poles in West Coast neighbourhoods, giving Japanese American families typically one week to dispose of their homes, businesses, farms, and personal property and report to an assembly centre. Most lost almost everything they owned. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s wartime study later estimated the total loss of property at the time at roughly $400 million in 1942 dollars — about $7 billion in today’s money.

The Assembly Centers and the Ten Camps

The initial detention sites were “Assembly Centers” — fifteen facilities run by the Wartime Civilian Control Administration, mostly at converted racetracks (Santa Anita Park outside Los Angeles, Tanforan south of San Francisco) and fairgrounds. Families were assigned to horse stalls, often still smelling of manure. They were held there from spring through autumn 1942.

Permanent detention was at the ten War Relocation Authority camps, each holding roughly 7,000 to 18,000 people. Manzanar in the Owens Valley of California and Heart Mountain in northern Wyoming were the most photographed; Tule Lake in northern California became the segregation camp for those classified as “disloyal” after a controversial 1943 loyalty questionnaire; Poston in Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, was the largest. All ten were in remote, harsh climates — temperatures ranging from below freezing in winter to over 100°F in summer — and all were ringed by barbed wire and watched by armed military police in guard towers. The first WRA director, Milton S. Eisenhower (brother of the future president), resigned after three months because of his discomfort with the program. He was replaced by Dillon S. Myer, who ran the agency until its termination in 1946.

The Labor System Inside the Camps

The War Relocation Authority’s policy was that camps should be as self-supporting as possible. Within weeks of opening, each camp was running on the labor of its own inmates. Cooks prepared meals in shared mess halls. Farmers grew vegetables on land that had to be irrigated, cleared, or first dewatered (Tule Lake had been an actual lake). Doctors and dentists, many of them prewar professionals, ran clinics. Nisei teachers staffed makeshift schools. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics kept the barracks habitable. At Heart Mountain, incarcerees ran a garment factory producing US Army uniforms; at Manzanar, they produced rubber from guayule plants as part of a wartime synthetic rubber project; at Topaz, they painted camouflage netting for the army.

The wage structure was set deliberately at three tiers: $12 a month for unskilled laborers, $16 for semi-skilled workers, and $19 for professionals — doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, engineers. The reason given was that no incarceree should be paid more than a US Army private (whose base pay was $21 a month). A camp doctor with a private practice income of $10,000 a year before the war earned $228 a year inside the wire. The federal government, by contrast, valued the camps’ economic output in the tens of millions of dollars annually.

At Heart Mountain in 1944, a group of incarcerees organised the Fair Play Committee to challenge the draft on the grounds that they could not be required to fight for a country that was holding their families behind barbed wire. Sixty-three of the committee’s members were convicted of draft resistance in the largest mass federal trial in Wyoming history; their convictions were later pardoned by President Harry Truman in 1947.

The 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd

The contradictions of the policy reached their starkest expression in the simultaneous existence of the camps and the all-Nisei combat units of the US Army. Beginning in early 1943, the army recruited and drafted Japanese American men — many directly from the camps themselves — into the 100th Infantry Battalion, formed largely from prewar Hawaiian National Guard soldiers, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed mostly from mainland Nisei. The 442nd’s motto was “Go for Broke.”

The two units, fighting principally in Italy and France, became the most decorated American unit of their size in US military history: 21 Medals of Honor (most awarded retroactively in 2000 after a review of records that had been racially under-evaluated at the time), 9,486 Purple Hearts, and a casualty rate roughly three times the army average. The 442nd’s most famous action was the rescue of the “Lost Battalion” of the 36th Texas Infantry Division in the Vosges Mountains in October 1944, in which 211 Texans were saved at a cost of more than 800 Nisei casualties. Many of these soldiers’ parents and siblings were behind barbed wire at Heart Mountain, Manzanar, or Tule Lake while they fought.

The Supreme Court and the Slow Reckoning

The legal challenges to the program reached the Supreme Court three times during the war. In Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) the Court upheld the West Coast curfew on Japanese Americans. In Korematsu v. United States (December 18, 1944), in a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Hugo Black, the Court upheld the exclusion order itself, holding that the wartime emergency justified the racial classification. Justices Robert Jackson, Frank Murphy, and Owen Roberts dissented; Murphy’s dissent called the order “the legalization of racism.” On the same day, in Ex parte Endo, the Court ruled unanimously that the WRA had no authority to continue detaining loyal citizens — a ruling the Roosevelt administration had been given advance notice of and which prompted the announcement, the day before the decision was released, that the camps would begin closing.

The camps closed between March and November 1945, except Tule Lake, which closed in March 1946. Many incarcerees, having lost their homes and businesses, had nowhere to return to. The federal government provided $25 and a one-way ticket.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued Proclamation 4417, formally rescinding Executive Order 9066. In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), which heard testimony from more than 750 witnesses over 1981–82 and issued its report, Personal Justice Denied, in February 1983. The report concluded that the program had not been a military necessity but the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan on August 10, 1988, implemented its recommendations: a formal presidential apology and $20,000 in compensation to each surviving incarceree. Approximately 82,000 people received the payment between 1990 and 1999. Many had died waiting.

Fred Korematsu’s own 1944 conviction was finally vacated by a federal district court in San Francisco on November 10, 1983, under a writ of coram nobis, after evidence emerged that the wartime government had suppressed FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence findings of no security threat. The Korematsu precedent itself was not repudiated by the Supreme Court until 2018, when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Trump v. Hawaii that “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.”

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three points are still worth correcting. The first is the term. The current scholarly preference, used by the National Park Service, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Densho project, is incarceration rather than internment. “Internment” has a specific international-law meaning — the wartime detention of enemy nationals — which fits the small number of Issei held in separate Department of Justice camps but does not fit the 80,000 American citizens held in WRA camps without charge.

The second is the idea that the program was a reasonable wartime precaution. It was not. The government’s own contemporaneous intelligence agencies — the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the State Department’s Munson Report of November 1941 — had all concluded before Pearl Harbor that the Japanese American community on the West Coast posed no significant security threat. Those findings were suppressed and not introduced as evidence in the wartime Supreme Court cases.

The third is the question of compensation for the work. The $20,000 payment of 1988 explicitly covered loss of liberty and constitutional rights. It did not compensate for the labor extracted at sub-private-soldier wages, for the property losses, or for the lifetime economic damage to incarcerees, their families, and their communities. Estimates of the unpaid wages alone run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. No further compensation has been paid.

Why It Still Matters

The sites of all ten WRA camps are now part of the National Park Service system, either as full National Historic Sites (Manzanar, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Honouliuli) or as historic landmarks. Manzanar receives more than 100,000 visitors a year. The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the National Japanese American Memorial in Washington, DC — featuring sculptor Nina Akamu’s bronze of two cranes entangled in barbed wire — are the principal national institutions of remembrance. The Densho project, founded in Seattle in 1996, has digitised tens of thousands of oral-history interviews, photographs, and government documents.

The history matters because the legal mechanism that produced it — emergency executive authority to detain a racially defined group without individual hearings — was not abolished when the camps closed. The 2018 Trump v. Hawaii repudiation of Korematsu rejected its result but the underlying questions about executive power and group-based detention recur in every major immigration enforcement debate since. The labor of the camps, and the apology that does not yet cover it, is the unfinished part of the record.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II?

Approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States between March and August 1942. About 70,000 — roughly two-thirds — were US citizens by birth (Nisei). The remaining third, the Issei generation, were prohibited from naturalising by the 1924 Immigration Act and remained Japanese citizens not by choice but by law.

What was Executive Order 9066?

Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorised the Secretary of War to designate military areas from which “any or all persons” could be excluded. It named no ethnic group but was used by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the western halves of Washington, Oregon, California, and southern Arizona.

Where were the camps?

Ten War Relocation Authority camps held the incarcerees: Manzanar and Tule Lake in California; Poston and Gila River in Arizona; Heart Mountain in Wyoming; Minidoka in Idaho; Topaz in Utah; Granada (Amache) in Colorado; and Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. All were in remote, climatically harsh areas, ringed by barbed wire, and guarded by armed military police.

What was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team?

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was an all-Nisei US Army unit, formed in 1943 from Japanese American volunteers and draftees — many of them recruited directly from the WRA camps. Together with the 100th Infantry Battalion, the unit became the most decorated American unit of its size in US military history, earning 21 Medals of Honor and approximately 9,486 Purple Hearts. Its motto was “Go for Broke.”

Has the US government apologised for the incarceration?

Yes. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan on August 10, 1988, formally apologised and provided $20,000 in compensation to each surviving incarceree, on the recommendation of the 1983 federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians report Personal Justice Denied. Approximately 82,000 people received the payment between 1990 and 1999. The Supreme Court formally repudiated its 1944 Korematsu decision upholding the program in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).

Should it be called internment or incarceration?

The current scholarly preference, used by the National Park Service, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Densho project, is incarceration. “Internment” has a specific international-law meaning — the wartime detention of enemy nationals — which applies to the small number of Issei held in separate Department of Justice camps but does not accurately describe the holding of more than 70,000 American citizens, without charge, in War Relocation Authority camps.

Sources

1. US National Archives — Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942)
2. National Park Service — Manzanar National Historic Site
3. Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project
4. US Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (US Government Printing Office, 1982–83)
5. Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001)
6. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, rev. ed. (Hill and Wang, 2004)
7. Eric L. Muller, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
8. Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (William Morrow, 1976)
9. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Columbia University Press, 1946) — contemporary illustrated account by an incarceree at Tanforan and Topaz