The Making of Asian America: A History

After Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, the United States officially entered World War II. The attack also led to the classification of first-generation Japanese Americans as “enemy aliens” and the imprisonment of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in concentration camps throughout the United States (211). In Canada and the US, the majority of Japanese Americans lived on the Pacific Coast in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. An estimated 120,000 Japanese residing in the US, two-thirds of whom were citizens, were uprooted, while 23,000 Japanese Canadians faced the same fate. The measure was deemed a “military necessity” (211).

Japanese Latin Americans were arrested in Peru and transported to the US for the same purpose. Overall, “Japanese Americans, Canadians, and Latin Americans were not individually charged with acts of treachery or subversion, but were instead sentenced as a group for incarceration during the war in the name of national and hemispheric security” on racial grounds (212). Nineteen Americans arrested for “serving as agents of Japan” were all white (212). In contrast, the majority of Japanese Americans, per government reports, were “overwhelmingly loyal to the United States” (212).

Nonetheless, the existing US legal framework, such as the 1940 Alien Registration Act, facilitated their incarceration.