During World War II, the United States forcibly removed and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent—roughly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens—in ten War Relocation Authority concentration camps across the western interior. This followed Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942), which turned the entire West Coast into a military exclusion zone. Of the roughly 127,000 Japanese Americans on the mainland (about 112,000 on the West Coast), many were U.S.-born Nisei and Sansei; first-generation Issei, barred from citizenship, were also swept up. In Hawai‘i, where more than one-third of residents were of Japanese descent, only about 1,200–1,800 were incarcerated. The policy, justified as a security measure, far exceeded actions taken against German and Italian Americans. People were sent to assembly centers and then to camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas (Canada undertook similar actions). Forced to bring only what they could carry, many sold homes and businesses at a loss; behind barbed wire and armed patrols, families lived in crowded barracks with scant furnishings. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion orders in Korematsu v. United States but, the same day, ruled in Ex parte Endo that loyal citizens could not be detained, prompting releases; the exclusion orders were rescinded on December 17, 1944, and nine of the ten camps closed by the end of 1945. About 20,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military by 1943, some 4,000 students left camp for college, and camp hospitals recorded 5,981 births and 1,862 deaths. In the 1970s, advocacy by the Japanese American Citizens League and others led President Jimmy Carter to create the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, whose 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of disloyalty and instead cited racism, war hysteria, and failed political leadership. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 issued an official apology and $20,000 to each surviving internee (about $53,000 in 2024); by 1992, more than $1.6 billion (about $4.25 billion in 2024) had been paid to 82,219 people. The episode remains a stark warning about how fear can override rights; in one personal account, 102-year-old Tomi Tanaka recalls her incarceration at the Poston camp in Arizona and life before, during, and after the war.
