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In Which PG Tries to Explain Many Things

By "PG"

This is an overgrown response to commenter Bob, one of several people defending the Japanese internment in the comments to this post. In the following, I will endeavor to explain

- the difference between a "military area" and a "combat zone";
- the seemingly mysterious ability of Japanese people to evade prosecution for spying even while whites are being convicted;
- why putting adults in an area that they are shot for leaving without permission is usually deemed a loss of liberty and not a mere "relocation";
- U.S. immigration and naturalization law;
- racism against Asians as shown in other laws;
- and why someone who immigrated to the U.S. after 1954 couldn't have become a naturalized citizen by 1960 no matter how much he wanted to be.

Bob,

The west cost was a military combat zone at the time. Due process is irrelevent in a military combat zone so that point is moot.

I'd be interested to see whether the West Coast was "a military combat zone" beyond the single aspect of making due process "irrelevant" for the Japanese. For example, were soldiers posted to the West Coast paid combat pay?

FDR's Executive Order 9066 authorized the Secretary of War and other military commanders "to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion."

Nothing in this order stated that due process was "irrelevant" for such military areas; the civilian courts remained open on the West Coast. This distinguishes the Coast from Hawaii, where habeas was suspended for all -- not just the Japanese -- and civilian courts were replaced with military ones. A "military area" is not a "combat zone."

After the Pearl Harbor attack, the governor of Hawaii declared martial law, suspending habeas corpus and arresting specific Japanese suspected of subversion. The Japanese consul's employees, priests who preached obedience to the Emperor, former members of the Japanese military and certain others were legitimately suspicious persons. Yet in Hawaii, the Japanese were not relocated or interned wholesale, despite this being the one area that actually was attacked by Japan and that was a non-civilian, military-run zone.

If there was no question that Tachibana headed an espionage ring on the West Coast that enlisted a number of Japanese Americans, both aliens and citizens (sic), nor that the government knew the identities of its members, then why didn't the government arrest these members whose identities they knew? The Espionage Act is quite far reaching: it is illegal to supply any defense-related information, classified or unclassified, to a foreign nation so long as the person has the intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the detriment of the United States. Why not arrest and try for treason members of the Japanese Ex-Service Men's Organization that pledged to do sabotage? If the military had evidence that the organization as a whole was disloyal, it could get a warrant for the membership lists and then charge them with conspiracy against the U.S. based on that membership (as is done today for members of Al Qaeda and other organizations deemed adverse to U.S. interests).

I understand that the U.S. couldn't take action based on the MAGIC cables during the war because then Japan would realize that the U.S. had decoded its system, but no commenter on this post has explained why the U.S. didn't prosecute at the end of the war. It's not as though wartime or postwar juries were reluctant to convict persons accused of espionage. Moreover, Americans who were willing to commit sabotage against the U.S. could hardly be deemed harmless just because the war was over, and should have been punished.

I'm not sure how I can make this point any clearer: I have no problem arresting persons whom the government has reason to think are threats to national security based on those persons' behavior. I have a very big problem with detaining people because their race has made them suspect persons. Indeed, part of the problem with racial profiling is that it often blinds law enforcement to people who don't fit their profile. Of the 19 people charged with spying for Japan, 18 were Caucasians. Moreover, many were Caucasians acting outside the designated military areas (e.g. Kuehn family in Hawaii, Dickinson in NYC), so if Japanese were freely roaming the U.S. outside the West Coast, they should have been equally able as the Caucasians to engage in spying -- if they wanted to do so. So they had the ability to commit the crime, and you’re claiming they had the intent to commit the crime, which gets us halfway through this Law & Order episode. Is there just something about being Japanese that makes it so difficult to find evidence against them and use it for a prosecution?

Ethnic Japanese were not forced into camps, they were forced out of the military combat zone. At no point was the government interested in "locking up" the evacuated Japanese.

Again, it was not a "combat zone." If it was a real combat zone, why weren't all non-military persons evacuated from it? When the British identified areas particularly subject to attack such as London, they did their best to move children out of them. Did the U.S. government actually care more about the Japanese than non-Japanese, to be so considerate in evacuating only them from a "combat zone"?

Moreover, Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian with authority over all alien property interests. With Japanese assets frozen, it was rather difficult for their owners to relocate on their own out of the exclusion zones. And if the Japanese were always free to leave the relocation camps whenever they wanted so long as they stayed away from the exclusion zones, why were multiple Japanese (Ichiro Shimoda, Hikoji Takeuchi, Toshiro Kobata, Hirota Isomura, James Hatsuki Wakasa) shot and sometimes killed if guards thought they were trying to escape the camps? How can one be trying to escape a place that one has freedom to leave?

The issei were illegal aliens.

First, your claim that the Gentlemen's Agreements were treaties is wrong; they were informal agreements between executive branches (hence the name Gentlemen's Agreements). Second, many Issei immigrated before there was any government policy opposed to their admission to the U.S. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese were actively recruited to fill the place of the Chinese as unskilled laborers on the West Coast. The Treaty of 1894 -- the real treaty between Japan and the U.S., the one that went through all those crazy Constitutional formalities like getting approved by the Senate -- was supposed to guarantee equal rights for Japanese persons and was a basis for protesting Japanese segregation from white schools, which began in San Francisco in 1906.

I don't mean to be rude, but do you know any of the history of U.S. immigration and naturalization law? The Constitution federalized such matters and put them under Congressional authority. The first naturalization law (of 1790) limited naturalization to white people. At that time, there was no treaty nor law prohibiting non-whites from immigrating to the U.S., and of course the slave trade was still active at that point, so plenty of non-whites were being involuntarily immigrated to the U.S. The naturalization law of 1870 then expanded who could be naturalized, allowing persons of African descent as well as whites to be naturalized. At that time, persons we now consider Latino were categorized as white, as were in some cases Middle Easterners. Thus the main racial group that could not be naturalized was Asian.

There still was nothing to prohibit, for example, Indians (then living in a British colony) from immigrating to the U.S., but they were unable to become naturalized citizens if they were deemed non-white. One Indian immigrant even tried to establish himself as white so he could become a citizen, and the Supreme Court came to the peculiar conclusion that Indians -- or at least the high caste ones -- are "Caucasian" but not "white." To claim that only illegal aliens were prohibited from naturalization shows ignorance of the applicable law. One could immigrate without violation of any law or treaty, join the U.S. military in WWI, and still be denied naturalization because of one's race.

Until 1924, it was not even possible for Germans, Italians, Hungarians and Romanians to come to the U.S. "illegally," because there were no quotas or other limits on their immigration. Europeans could get on a boat, arrive at Ellis Island, and if they were disease-free, were sent on their way into America. The U.S. government sought to limit Asian immigration only -- not that of other groups. These "droves" of Japanese were a fraction of the "droves" of Italians. Kindly explain the non-racial reason the U.S. government somehow was staggering under the weight of Asian immigrants but had plenty of room for European ones. You can hardly make the same "oh, they just come for the welfare!" arguments that anti-Latino forces do now, considering that the welfare state didn't exist before the Great Depression. The racism toward Asians largely was driven by their economic success, a feeling that white farmers on the West Coast frankly admitted and could indulge by buying up the Japanese internees' property at rock bottom prices.

A friend who has been reading this blog discussion made the argument that the Japanese, unlike Germans and Italians, were less assimilated, and he used as an example the fact that Germans and Italians were much more intermarried with other ethnic groups than were the Japanese. What this leaves out, of course, is that Asians in many states were prohibited from marrying whites, under the miscegenation laws that also prohibited interracial marriage between whites and blacks. It’s rather difficult for Japanese to have become assimilated through intermarriage when such marriage was impossible in states like California.

The idea that U.S. law at both the federal and state levels from roughly the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s was not racist toward Asians is ludicrous. Chinese were not allowed to attend white schools in Mississippi; the 1913 Alien Land Law prohibited "aliens ineligible to citizenship" -- which is to say, Asians -- from owning land in California; legally immigrated Indians could not be naturalized. If you do not see these as examples of racism, then we clearly don't speak the same language.

According to the U.S.Census, in 1940 there were approx 84,000 Issei in the U.S. and Hawaii, the bulk of them were under 50 years of age. By 1960 there were approx 101,000, no doubt including some war brides. According to INS publication "Persons Naturalized by Former Allegiance" only 32,168 Japanese-born became naturalized U.S.citizens between 1952-1960. That's only 32%.

Very nice playing with the numbers there. If 101,000 Issei were present in 1960, how is it logical to use that as your numerator in determining the percentage who would eventually become naturalized, when your denominator comes from the 1952-1960 era? As you might discover upon investigating naturalization law, in 1952 one had to be a legal U.S. resident for five years in order to become naturalized. Someone who immigrated to the U.S. in 1955 and immediately declared an intention to become a citizen (which would be unusual, as many immigrants can’t know right away whether they will be able to succeed in the U.S.) still couldn’t have become naturalized by 1960, but you include such a person in your 1960 total of 101,000 Issei in order to declare that “only 32%” had wanted to become citizens.

As for the Issei's slowness to take advantage of naturalization once the U.S. government was kind enough to offer it to Asians, it strikes me as psychologically sound: they had seen that even citizenship status was not enough to protect them from legalized racism, so for many it probably didn’t seem to be worth the effort. I completely understand why people dispossessed of everything they had worked to gain in a country would be mistrustful of that nation and not feel a great inclination to swear allegiance to it.

My parents are naturalized citizens, and if the government forced my father to sell off his medical practice of 25 years to the first taker, as well as all their other hard-gained assets, then relocated him to be a farmer or whatever use the government had for him, he might be just a little bitter. Yet right now he is as patriotic an American as you will find, probably even more so than his U.S. born children, because of his gratitude for the opportunities America has given him, which many U.S. natives take for granted.

In the internment and relocation of the Japanese, the U.S. threw away these people’s accumulated goodwill for what America had made possible for them. This makes the internment not only morally wrong; it shows its practical stupidity. Instead of saying that loyal Japanese were with the U.S. in opposing the disloyal Japanese and the warmongering Japanese government, the U.S. pushed the Japanese to the other side of the line, effectively declaring that there could not be such a thing as a U.S-loyal Japanese person. Thankfully many Japanese-Americans were stubborn in their loyalty and determined to prove it, and we benefited from that. But how much more help might we have gotten from Japanese people had the government not treated them as traitors by their race?

Full post as published by De Novo on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).