February 19
1942 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 providing military authorities with the power to declare exclusion zones and to relocate persons of Japanese ancestry. Some 110,000 people were moved, without being charged with any crime, to detention centers scattered across the western United States.
Many California politicians and newspapers endorsed the implementation of the order. Compton mayor Roy W. Tarleton called for the deportation of all Japanese. On February 19, 1942, the Santa Cruz Sentinel-News editorialized,
"Efficient prosecution of this war demands that we recognize certain facts which make every Japanese in our midst a potential threat to our security, regardless of how admirable he might have been in time of peace. It is a mistake to think that we can clear up the dangers by process of elimination; that is, by depending entirely upon the FBI to ferret out all the treacherous acts and incriminating documents among the 100,000 Japanese living in areas where they could be of greatest service to an invading horde."
The University of Arizona Library has prepared an interesting site on the camps established in Arizona. The U.S. Army's website includes information about the relocation decision.
In several cases (e.g. Hirabayashi v. United States, 1943 and Endo, 1944), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld challenges to the curfew and the relocation imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry. More than four decades after the U.S. government incarcerated these people, Congress enacted the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Jay Brown has prepared a secondary school curriculum unit on the relocation.
The Teaching about Japan website is edited by Clayton Dube.
He welcomes your comments and suggestions.
© 2001 UCLA Center for East Asian Studies