From 1942 to 1946, thousands of innocent Japanese Americans were held in internment camps across the United States in an act dubbed a "military necessity" in World War II.
During World War II, the U.S. government forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — two-thirds of whom were American citizens — in internment camps across the interior West and Arkansas. This radical move came in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, as fear of sabotage and invasion fueled anti-Japanese sentiment that had already been brewing on the West Coast.
On Feb. 19, 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of people believed to be a threat to national security from the West Coast to various “relocation centers.” While the order never explicitly named Japanese Americans, it was used almost exclusively against them throughout the duration of the war.
The process was overseen by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Families were given mere days to dispose of their property and pack whatever they could carry. They were first sent to temporary “assembly centers,” often converted fairgrounds or racetracks, then to one of 10 main “relocation centers” in remote, harsh locations like Manzanar, Heart Mountain, or Tule Lake. Conditions were cramped, with families living in Army-style barracks that were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
See what everyday life was like for people inside America’s Japanese internment camps in the photo gallery below:
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However, according to PBS, the government eventually admitted it "had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage."
Furthermore, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians later wrote that Japanese internment was "motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
While some people entrusted their possessions with sympathetic neighbors, others would have to leave behind a lifetime of personal belongings, hoping that their homes would not be vandalized or burgled while they were away. National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
The government never bothered to explain why Italian Americans and German Americans were mostly spared from detention, and the military was not required or even pressured to provide concrete evidence that Japanese Americans posed a real threat to national security.Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
PBS reported that the head of the California Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association told the Saturday Evening Post: “If all of the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them… because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either." National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
Once the government announced the internment plan, they often gave Japanese Americans mere days to figure out what to do with their property, register with authorities, and report to temporary "assembly centers," where they would later be transported to the internment camps.
However, not all the camps were completed right away, so some Japanese Americans were held for much longer than expected in temporary holding centers, including converted stables at local racetracks. National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
In the words of one internee, Mary Tsukamoto, who recalled what it was like to first arrive at the camp: "I never will forget, the train stopped and we got off and they put us on a big truck. It looked like one of those cattle cars. Anyway, we stood up because there were no chairs for us to sit on this pickup and crowded into this truck. They drove us to the Fresno Assembly Center. And then we got off there... I will never forget the shocking feeling that human beings were behind this fence like animals... We were going to also lose our freedom."National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
The residents set up newspapers, sports teams, and even fire and police departments, though any community organization had to be approved by the War Relocation Authority. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
David Mas Masumoto wrote that "Japanese-American farmers transformed the barren acres of Manzanar [one of the internment camps]," by carefully working the soil. His relatives, who were incarcerated during the war, "worked the farms, dairy, and produce-shipping operations at Gila River Relocation Center," in Arizona.
Furthermore, the documentary "Passing Poston: An American Story" revealed that at the Poston internment camp in Arizona, people incarcerated in the camp created infrastructure like schools, dams, canals, and farms that the U.S. government later used when consolidating local Native Americans onto one large reservation.Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
Even the War Relocation Authority knew that they were subjecting the internees to abhorrent living conditions, writing that, “for the great majority of the evacuated people, the environment of the centers — despite all efforts to make them livable — remains subnormal and probably always will."Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
According to Smeltzer's reports, "bathing facilities were quite inadequate, running water was late in being made available and two weeks elapsed before hot water was available.” He also wrote that a "serious lack of sanitary facilities” led to widespread dysentery.
In addition, a report from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming said, "The water was terrible because of the rusted and oiled pipes, and it really was not fit to use." At the Jerome and Rohwer Relocation Centers in Arkansas, contaminated milk and water even resulted in an E. coli outbreak. Clem Albers/National Parks Service
In Amy Mass' paper, "Psychological Effects of the Camps on Japanese Americans," she wrote that, "For the honor-conscious Issei [those born and raised in Japan], it was the repudiation of many years of effort and hard work in this country."
Similarly, internees who were American citizens felt that their identity was under attack. The camps' residents were subjected to terrible conditions, witnessed the humiliation of their families, and sometimes even felt ashamed of their cultural heritage, leaving them depressed, lonely, and confused. National Archives and Records Administration/Records of the War Relocation Authority
According to the Digital Public Library of America's exhibit on Japanese internment, "religious organizations advocated for fairer treatment of Japanese Americans, while working to Americanize them through religious indoctrination."
Though Christian churches in the camps provided social services and organized recreation, the camps also saw a resurgence in Buddhist practices, as some Japanese Americans pushed back against Americanization. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
Their elders, who had worked for years to build stable lives for their families in America, no longer enjoyed the positions of respect and leadership that they had in their own homes. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
Traditional Japanese family structures were patriarchal. However, during internment, this changed in many families. Despite the poor living conditions, some women felt a growing sense of independence because marriage and childbirth were often delayed in the camps.
In addition, cramped living quarters required shared responsibility of domestic duties. The same jobs were typically offered to men and women in the camps, and without their previous careers and businesses, men ceased to be the families' only breadwinners. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
As one War Relocation Authority official wrote: "3,971 students are crowded into makeshift buildings without adequate desk and chair facilities."
To help improve things, some churches and relief agencies donated desks, books, and other school supplies. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
In the words of Mary Tsukamoto: "We had no thought about defying the government. And of course the Japanese people respect the elderly, and those who are important, the President of the United States, we wouldn't, you know, even if he's wrong, we wouldn't say anything."Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
In an interview with NPR, internee John Tateishi said that after internment ended, "There were no complaints, no big rallies or demands for justice because it was not the Japanese way."
Nevertheless, in 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology to all living former internees and their families. Surviving victims were also paid $20,000 in reparations. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
"A Date Which Will Live In Infamy": Inside The Attack On Pearl Harbor And The Aftermath
On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, with the goal of crippling America's Pacific Fleet before it could interfere with Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia during World War II.
Just before 8 a.m., two attack waves of over 350 aircraft targeted battleships, airfields, and other key installations at the base. In less than two hours, four battleships were sunk, four others damaged, and over 180 aircraft destroyed. More than 2,400 Americans were killed, another 1,000 wounded.
Japan had hoped the attack would buy time to consolidate its territorial gains, but it instead had the opposite effect of rallying the United States to arms. The next day, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the attack "a date which will live in infamy," and asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, bringing the United States fully into World War II. Not long after that, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. as well.
With the United States preparing to make moves across the sea, however, many American citizens worried about dissent back on the home front. Roosevelt's response? Executive Order 9066, which read, in part:
"I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion."
Simply put, the Executive Order authorized the Secretary of War and designated commanders to mark certain areas of the United States as military zones, and to exclude or remove any people there who may have been considered a potential threat to national security.
Notably, the order did not specifically name Japanese Americans, but it did serve as the legal basis for their mass removal from their homes on the West Coast. And when 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced into internment camps, the conditions were anything but comfortable.
Inside America's Japanese Internment Camps
Public DomainA truckload of Japanese Americans being transported to a relocation camp in Arizona.
One particularly infuriating aspect of the internment camps was that, according to the National WWII Museum, neither the Office of Naval Intelligence nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation believed the Japanese American population posed any significant threat to national security. Members of the American public, on the other hand, were far more worried.
By early 1942, Japanese victories in Guam, Malaya, and the Philippines had bolstered the already growing anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast. People were also paranoid that Japanese Americans were supplying information to Japan that could result in another disastrous attack.
In the meantime, some journalists fueled the fire. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Westbrook Pegler — described by journalist Max Blumenthal as "one of the godfathers of right-wing populism" — wrote, "The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over."
Many U.S. government officials were initially hesitant to simply remove Japanese Americans from their homes without a clear reason, with some even questioning the legality of such a move. Eventually, advisors to Roosevelt convinced him enough that Executive Order 9066 went into effect, to a mixed reception. Some officials, such as Montana Governor Sam C. Ford, worried about the safety of Japanese Americans.
Others, like Idaho's Attorney General, Bert Miller, turned to blatant racism, saying, "We want to keep this a white man's country. All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war."
Soon enough, the WRA was dispatching families of Japanese ancestry to hastily constructed camps in desolate regions, like deserts and swamps.
Dorothea Lange/National Archives and Records AdministrationDetainees at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California working the fields.
"It is hard to overstate just how quickly this happened," Densho Content Director Brian Niiya wrote in 2023. "At the Owens Valley site in central California — what would eventually become Manzanar — lumber began arriving on March 14 and the first building went up three days later. The first Japanese American 'volunteers' arrived on March 21. By April 11 — just three weeks later — there were over 3,300 Japanese Americans there."
Barracks were uninsulated and barely furnished. Families shared cramped spaces with little more than cots and coal stoves. Hot water was rare. Camp life was hardly any different from a rigid military routine: communal meals, regimented schedules, and ever-present guard towers, which were supposedly for the "protection" of Japanese Americans.
One internee later countered: "If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?"
Some comfort came from within. Residents organized schools, produced camp newspapers, and worked in gardens. At Manzanar, internees even set up sports leagues, from baseball to golf, and pursued various landscaping projects, applying skills from their previous lives. Still, it did little to offset the toll of the overcrowding, poor sanitation, and limited access to medical care that sometimes led to unnecessary illnesses and even deaths.
The Lasting Impact And Aftermath Of The Camps
By 1944, stronger resistance to internment started to emerge. One Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. U.S. (1944), showed just how desperate people had become. A young Japanese American man named Fred Korematsu had refused to comply with the order to leave his home and job, opting instead to get plastic surgery on his eyes to change his appearance, to go by the name Clyde Sarah, and to pretend to be of Spanish and Hawaiian descent.
Korematsu was jailed in 1942, and he later allowed the American Civil Liberties Union to represent him in his case against the country to test the constitutionality of the infamous Executive Order. In a divided 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Korematsu's conviction, citing his detention as a "military necessity" during the war.
Public DomainThe Japanese internment camps closed between 1945 and 1946.
However, another case in 1944, Ex parte Endo, challenged the government's definition of what a "loyal" citizen was. Mitsuye Endo, a U.S. citizen, sued, and the Court unanimously ruled that the government could not detain a loyal citizen without cause, raising further questions about how, exactly, Japanese Americans had been profiled and selected for internment.
The ruling, and rising protests from some U.S. officials, eventually forced the government to release "loyal" citizens, and gradually, the WRA began phasing out the camps entirely. Manzanar closed in November 1945; Tule Lake, the last and most heavily guarded camp, shut down in March 1946. Families were given nothing more than $25 and a one-way train ticket back to communities that often did not want them there.
Internment in the camps also had long-lasting psychological effects on the Japanese Americans who were held within. According to a study from the National Institutes of Health in 2019, the unjust imprisonment by the government was often described "as a betrayal by a trusted source."
One interviewee reflected on the camps, saying, "Being labeled as an enemy alien and incarcerated in a concentration camp was the most traumatic experience of my life. My thoughts at the time were, this country, which I loved and trusted, had betrayed me." Another described feeling like a "second-class citizen," and that the camps emphasized "that I didn't belong in this country, that my face, my yellow face, made the difference."
Cindy Chu/Wikimedia CommonsA man whose family members had been placed in a Japanese internment camp during World War II protesting U.S. President Donald Trump's 2017 Muslim travel ban.
Most internees returned to find their homes, farms, and businesses lost, often sold cheaply or seized during their absence. Seeking anonymity and work, many settled in cities rather than rural areas, and the Japanese American community as a whole largely had to rebuild from the ground up. Later on, in 1983, their total property loss was estimated to be $1.3 billion, and their total net income loss was estimated to be $2.7 billion.
The trauma extended to later generations as well, as many older internees refused to speak about the camps for years, as they felt ashamed of having been imprisoned. In an unprecedented acknowledgment of previous governmental wrongdoing, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 issued a formal apology to the formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans and offered reparations of $20,000 to each surviving internee, attributing the injustice to "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
There is an unfortunate, bitter irony that the U.S., which fought so strongly against Nazi concentration camps and persecution, was driven to carry out a great injustice brought about by widespread racial prejudice. Still, it is an important part of our history — and only by acknowledging the mistakes of the past can we do our best to ensure they are not repeated in the future.
Next, learn more about the brutal Pacific Theater of World War II. Then, see some of the most striking World War II photos in color.
