A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America
Greg Robinson
Language: English
Pages: 408
ISBN: 023112922X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective.
Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate.
Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.
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until nearly midnight. They wanted me to promise to go, and I refused. There was not one that I knew, and I knew everyone that lives for miles around. I told them I had a brother . . . fighting in Italy. I told them he fought for the right of his people to live as Americans. I told them he hadn’t turned tail when the going was tough, and that I wasn’t going to either. When they left, I shook hands with all of them. None of them have been back.”24 There were sporadic outbreaks of
between Nisei and other minority groups, his presentation underlined the special problems of Japanese Americans, including Alien Land laws that curtailed property ownership, exclusion of Japanese from immigration and naturalization, and property claims.88 Committee members praised Masaoka’s testimony, adding that he had opened up to them a whole new field of civil rights violations, and they invited him shortly afterward to serve as an official consultant. In October 1947 the committee issued its
from the start.98 The WRA provided housing and education for camp inmates, sponsored camp newspapers, and supported leisure activities and cooperatives. Japanese Canadians did not receive such assistance and had to rely on religious and nonprofit groups for aid or use their own funds. Furthermore, the large-scale official confiscation and forced sale of the properties of Japanese Canadians had no parallel south of the border, while there were no battalions of Nisei soldiers in Canada to
that the principal cause of its actions was insufficient time to make individual determinations of loyalty in a wartime emergency, and it highlighted both the official racism that informed De Witt’s decision and the government manipulation of evidence that had taken place in the course of the wartime court cases. In 1979 William Hohri, a community activist in Chicago, founded an umbrella group, the National Council for Japanese American Redress, to lobby for financial reparations from the
central kitchen/ mess hall, with communal latrines and laundry and shower facilities constructed nearby. Other buildings, designed for use as school buildings and auditoriums, were added.7 In some cases the camp was divided into units, whose inhabitants banded together into distinct communities. Once they arrived at their destinations, the new inmates (known in official parlance as “residents”) were assigned housing in the different blocks and received medical checkups and vaccinations. They
