Japanese American Internment
In 1942 Charles Kikuchi was an American-born citizen of Japanese descent and a twenty-six-year-old graduate student when he was ordered to relocate to the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, California, where he and his family lived in a converted horse stable along with hundreds of others for nine months before moving to Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona. While at Tanforan he kept a vivid diary. In 1943 Kikuchi was released and moved to Chicago. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled that the detention of Japanese Americans did not violate the Constitution. Kikuchi was one of the first to be released because he agreed to move inland, but tens of thousands, like Fred Korematsu, remained interned.
Charles Kikuchi | Internment Diary, 1942
There was a terrific rainstorm last night and we have had to wade through the “slush alleys” again. Everyone sinks up to the ankles in mud. Some trucks came in today with lumber to build new barracks, but the earth was so soft that the truck sank over the hubs and they had a hell of a time pulling it out. The Army certainly is rushing things. About half of the Japanese have already been evacuated from the restricted areas in this state. Manzanar, Santa Anita, and Tanforan will be the three biggest centers. Now that S.F. [San Francisco] has been almost cleared the American Legion, the Native Sons of the Golden West, and the California Joint Immigration Committee are filing charges that the Nisei [children born in America to Japanese parents] should be disfranchised because we have obtained citizenship under false pretenses and that “we are loyal subjects of Japan” and therefore never should have been allowed to obtain citizenship. This sort of thing will gain momentum and we are not in a very advantageous position to combat it. I get fearful sometimes because this sort of hysteria will gain momentum.
The S.F. Registrar has made a statement that we will be sent absentee ballots to which Mr. James Fisk of the Joint Immigration Committee protests greatly. Tomorrow I am going to carry a petition around to protest against their protests. I think that they are stabbing us in the back and that there should be a separate concentration camp for these so-called Americans. They are a lot more dangerous than the Japanese in the U.S. ever will or have been.
Source: John Modell, ed., The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 73.
Justice Hugo Black | Korematsu v. United States, 1944
Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies—we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders—as inevitably it must—determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short.
Source: Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 223–24 (1944).
Interpret the Evidence
According to Charles Kikuchi, why did groups such as the American Legion seek to deprive the Nisei of their right to vote?
According to Justice Hugo Black, why were Japanese American citizens such as Kikuchi and Korematsu interned? What role did he say racial prejudice played?
Put It in Context
In what ways was internment different from when the United States suppressed civil liberties during World War I?
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