Japanese American Internment Research Paper

This investigation assesses the extent to which Japanese American internment from 1942 to 1946 was a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which declares that, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The question must be asked in order to examine the legality of the actions taken by the US government in opposition to American citizens of Japanese extraction (Nisei) and their immigrant parents (Issei). To determine this, the scope of this investigation will concentrate on the reasons for internment and the conditions in which the Japanese people lived during 1942 and 1946, particularly in a camp called Manzanar. One method applied is to explore an oral history interview
with Paul Ohtaki, who was detained at 17 years old, then later in the Minadoka War Relocation Center. Another method is an examination of the article “Constitutional Displacement,” which gives information about the justification for internment.
B. Summary of Evidence On December 7, 1941, Japanese air pilots attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which led the US to join the Allied Forces during the third year of World War II.
One reason for the attack on Pearl Harbor can be traced back to the creation of the League of Nations, in which Japan felt considerably belittled by non-Asian member countries. The constant underestimation of Japan’s military power made the attack on Pearl Harbor an immense shock to the US and made them aware of the threat Japan posed. Following the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order forbid the presence of Japanese American persons near military bases and areas because their ancestry made sabotage more likely (Zick). The next order forced the evacuation of 120,000 Issei and Nisei from their homes on the Pacific Coast into one of ten internment camps under the veil of “national security concerns” during World War II, a time period that struck Americans with a great amount of fear (Zick). However, since no specified threat warranted movement of a person to a camp, many incarcerations were made on the basis of race alone (Lilly). Paul Ohtaki, a camp survivor, gave his recollection of the first FBI raids in his hometown of Bainbridge Island, Washington. During the raids, federal agents discovered dynamite sticks in the homes of few Japanese families, who were used to clear farmland and replenish the fertile soil for the beginning of the strawberry season, and the heads of those households were
immediately taken away to Justice Camps (Ohtaki). Later, all fifty Japanese American families, some 200 people in total, living on Bainbridge Island were brought to Manzanar in California (Ohtaki).
Ohtaki, his parents, and his brother were all subject to the evacuation. Antecedently, the Ohtaki family’s bank accounts were frozen and they were only permitted to bring with them two suitcases. The Bainbridge Review, a local newspaper, begged local citizens not to worry about their Japanese neighbors because they would be back soon, as they were not guilty of any crimes (Ohtaki). The publishers, Walt and Mildred Woodward, recruited Ohtaki and four others to write letters of the weekly happenings in Manzanar. The Woodwards aided them by making a deal with a soldier to collect the letters from the teens and send them back to Seattle (Ohtaki). While living in the camp, Ohtaki slept on canvas bags filled with straw in a bedroom made of tarpaper walls that provided no privacy and he was constantly under the watch of armed soldiers. The biggest contrast between living in Bainbridge and in Manzanar was that Ohtaki could not leave, which he greatly resented, so he took the first opportunity to leave through being recruited by a farmer in Montana who required labor, however he was made to return to camp during the Manzanar Riot and his family was transferred to Minadoka in Hunt, Idaho a month later. When asked about the Riot, which started over rumors of food being rerouted from Manzanar for the benefit of camp administrators, Ohtaki said, “a lot of people don’t think very sanely” inside an internment camp. Ohtaki did not leave the camp for good until he was drafted into the Military Intelligence Service, where he was taught to speak Japanese to become a translator for the army, and became a member of the 442nd Regiment. This is a highly honored unit, which consisted mostly of Japanese American soldiers (Ohtaki).
Korematsu v.
United States was the first case in 1944 that questioned internment as a violation of the Fifth Amendment rights and it resulted in the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the incarceration (Lilly). At the time, the military claimed there was no way of distinguishing a national menace from an upright civilian, and so the Fifth Amendment rights were subordinate to the president’s war powers at the high point of World War II (Lilly). During a 1983 appeal of the Korematsu case judgment, hidden Navy intelligence reports from 1942 were discovered that stated, “there was no military justification for the President's action,” still, as 37 years had already passed, the reparation claims were denied due to the six-year statute of limitations (Pawalek; Hessbruegge). It would be decades until Japanese Americans were compensated for their government-issued trauma when Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which indemnified the remaining camp survivors with $20,000 each
(Hessbruegge).