INTRODUCTION

P
eople who live in Southern California sometimes head
north from Los Angeles on U.S. Route 395, usually on the
way to skiing on Mammoth Mountain on the eastern
slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It’s a long, boring
six-hour drive through mostly uninhabited territory. About
halfway there, in the desolate high desert framed by distant
mountains, they would see a sign: manzanar war relocation
center.
Few people stop there. Driving past, someone in a car might
ask, “Isn’t that where they put the Japanese?”
Yes it is. More than 120,000 American Japa nese were forced
from their homes and incarcerated in ten “relocation centers”
and several prisons during World War II. Within months of the
attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
sent them to these “concentration camps” by executive order.
Most of the evacuees and prisoners, more than 70 percent of

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 xiv ● Introduction

them, were American citizens, born in the United States. Their

first-generation immigrant parents, however, were forever aliens,
prevented from gaining naturalized citizenship by the Immi-
gration Act of 1924. Most of them, citizens and aliens alike,
were fiercely patriotic. Guarded by soldiers in machine-gun
towers, none of them were charged with any crime against the
United States. In fact, there was not a single American of Japa-
nese descent, alien or citizen, charged with espionage or sabotage
during the war. These men, women, and children were locked
up for the duration of the war because they looked like the
enemy, the troops of Imperial Japan, a place most of them had
never seen.
Living in California on and off for years, I’ve passed Man-
zanar many times, each time thinking I should stop, each time
thinking I should write about what happened there and in the
other camps in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Arkan-
sas. I am from a part of the country, New York, where most of
the people I know had only the vaguest notion that these events
happened. I finally decided to write this book when I saw that
my country, not for the first time, began turning on immigrants,
blaming them for the American troubles of the day. Seventy
years ago, it was American Japanese, most of them loyal to their
new country; now it is Muslims and Hispanics. This story is not
about Japanese Americans, it is about Americans, on both sides
of the barbed wire surrounding the relocation centers, the Amer-
icans crammed into tar-paper barracks and the Americans with
machine guns and searchlights in watchtowers.
The sweeping story of what happened to the American Japa-
nese and the Caucasians who imprisoned them is not a series
of isolated events, but a look into a dark side of the “American
way.” The story goes back at least to the treatment of Native
Americans, to the persecution of British loyalists after the
American Revolution, to the enslavement of Africans in the

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 Introduction ● xv

New World, to the treatment of American Germans during

World War I, to Jewish quotas and “Irish Need Not Apply,” to
the excesses of official bodies such as the House Un-American
Activities Committee. And, at least to me, it seems there is
always the possibility of similar persecutions happening again
if fear and hysteria overwhelm what Abraham Lincoln called
“the better angels of our nature.”
The dangers of history repeating itself seem greater given
that this story is often forgotten, or treated as a footnote in the
larger, mostly heroic description of World War II found in Ameri-
can history textbooks. Even at the time, the American Japanese
concentration camps were underreported or misrepresented.
Although there were periodic national stories about the roundup
and incarceration of the American Japanese, much of that cover-
age treated the evacuation as something like a vacation trip to
the country. The camps were generally portrayed as resorts; “pio-
neer communities” was the euphemism of the day. Americans,
their sons shipping off to Europe and the Pacific, had a lot on
their minds in those days—and California was still far away
from most of America.
The United States government and military had no reason
to publicize the evacuation and incarceration. President Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt, who within ten weeks of the Imperial Japa-
nese attack on Pearl Harbor had signed Executive Order 9066
authorizing the detention of the American Japa nese, did not
want the incarceration debated as a political issue. The evacu-
ees themselves were, for decades, reluctant to tell their stories
even to, especially to, their own families. The truth was simply
too painful.
Then, partly because of the black civil rights and anti–
Vietnam War protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s, young
Japanese Americans began questioning their parents and grand-
parents about what happened to them in the 1940s. Soon enough,

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 xvi ● Introduction

books and memoirs by American Japanese held in camps began

to appear; many of them were striking works of literature, many
privately published, many never published, and, significantly, a
large number of them were books for children and young adults.
Japanese American organizations were energized by the ques-
tions asked by the new generations; oral history projects were
created, letters became public, small museums were opened, and
activists lobbied for official apologies, financial redress, and the
designation of some of the camp sites, like Manzanar, as national
historical monuments. Government records of the evacuation
began to be discovered or declassified. Soon academic tracts and
legal texts were written focusing on the constitutionality (or
unconstitutionality) of what happened during the war.
The men of history who had demanded and overseen the
relocation camps tried in later years to explain themselves in
books and hearings. They had striking injustices to explain. The
Supreme Court had delayed or ignored challenges to the mass
incarceration, deciding instead to protect President Roosevelt
by waiting to hear all related cases until after the 1944 presi-
dential election, and in the end the justices approved the con-
centration camps. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy
said in a memo, “We can cover the legal situation . . . in spite of
the Constitution. Why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper
to me.” The governor of Wyoming, Nels Smith, shouted at Mil-
ton Eisenhower, then director of the War Relocation Authority,
“If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be
hanging from every tree.” The governor of Idaho, Chase Clark,
added, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats.”
Two army officers of the Western Defense Command, Lieu-
tenant General John DeWitt and Colonel Karl Bendetsen, both
bigots, the former a fool, the latter a brilliant pathological liar,
drove the process, grossly exaggerating the dangers posed by
West Coast Japanese. The theory advocated before the House

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 Introduction ● xvii

Committee on Naval Affairs by General DeWitt (and many

others) was simply, “A Jap is a Jap! There is no way to determine
their loyalty.”
While DeWitt was recognized by peers as weak and igno-
rant, Bendetsen could have been a calculating character in a
bad spy novel. He stated in his 1944 entry in Who’s Who in
America that he had “conceived the method, formulated the
details, and directed the evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japa-
nese ancestry from military areas.” When the Japanese evacua-
tion was being investigated by congressional committees in the
1970s, he was asked about his involvement, and he replied, “Of
course, I wasn’t in high-level meetings. I was just a Major.”
The villains of this story include California attorney general
Earl Warren, who rode the anti-Japanese tide to the governorship
of California; Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Secretary of War
Henry Stimson; Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy; Roger
Baldwin, the hypocritical founder of the American Civil Liber-
ties Union; Supreme Court justices Tom Clark and William O.
Douglas; as well as William Randolph Hearst, Walter Lippmann,
Edward R. Murrow, and hundreds of other raving journalists.
There were heroes, too, though lesser known, including
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, assistant attorneys gen-
eral Edward Ennis and James Rowe, and San Francisco civil lib-
erties lawyers Ernest Besig and Wayne Collins. There were also
many ordinary folks, everyday heroes, like the fi re chief Bob
Fletcher in Florin, California, “The Strawberry Capital of the
World,” who took real risks to protect the property of his Amer-
ican Japanese former neighbors, while other white men were
taking over their land or burning down their houses and van-
dalizing the depositories filled with the possessions of the
incarcerated—usually churches and Buddhist temples.
The heart of the book is formed by the stories of the evac-
uated families who were caught between those heroes and

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 xviii ● Introduction

villains. This is an American story of enduring themes: racism

and greed, injustice and denial—and then soul-searching, an
apology, and the most American of coping mechanisms, moving
on. Through it all, the desert heat and windstorms and bitter
cold, the breakdowns and suicides, the overwhelming majority
of the Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans remained loyal to
the United States. Even as their country’s government humili-
ated first-generation immigrants, or Issei, in front of their Nisei
children, young people strove to resume some semblance of
normal American life in the camps. They were organized into
Cub packs and Boy Scout troops and baseball leagues in the
camps; high school yearbooks from the camps have a jitterbug-
ging Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney look, with photos cropped
to hide the soldiers with bayonets at the doors. Many graduates
of those camp schools were among the thirty thousand Nisei
who served in the army, some serving in the all-Nisei 442nd
Regimental Combat Team in Europe, which fought across Italy
and France and became, per capita, the most decorated unit in
army history. The 442nd won fourteen Congressional Medals
of Honor, including one to Sergeant Daniel Inouye, who would
one day become a U.S. senator. Six thousand more served
secretly as combat interpreters and translators in the Pacific
war against Imperial Japan, heroically saving tens of thousands
of American lives.
At the same time, many young American Japa nese refused
to fight for the country that imprisoned their families. Some
stayed in the camps to care for their elderly parents; others felt
betrayed and came to hate America.
Despite their forced evacuation, almost all of the former
camp students went on to productive lives around the country,
even if many college graduates became gardeners. In the 1960s,
Time magazine called Japa nese Americans and other Asian
immigrants “the Model Minority.” In 1976, on the thirty-

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 Introduction ● xix

fourth anniversary of Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order

9066—the legal basis for the detention—President Gerald Ford,
who served as a lieutenant commander in the navy during the
Pacific war, said:

We now know what we should have known then—not

only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans
were and are loyal Americans. On the battlefield and at
home, Japanese-Americans—names like Hamada, Mitsu-
mori, Marimoto, Noguchi, Yamasaki, Kido, Munemori
and Miyamura—have been and continue to be written in
our history for the sacrifices and the contributions they
have made to the well-being and security of this, our
common Nation.

I was only five years old when all this began, but for some
reason I remember vividly a patriotic song, sung in 1942 by
Frank Sinatra, who grew up a couple of miles from my family
home, called “The House I Live In.” The song ends, “All races
and religions / That’s America to me.” That popular song was
made into a short film that was played in most every theater in
the country. Maybe I saw it. But while it was playing, 120,000
American Japanese were incarcerated in camps on barren des-
ert land and swamps from California to Arkansas.
The story of the “Japa nese Internment,” as it is usually
called, is a tale of the best and worst of America. I learned,
I  think, that what pushes America forward and expands our
liberty is not the old Anglo-Saxon Protestant values of the
Founders, but the almost blind faith of each wave of
immigrants—including the ones we put behind barbed wire:
The Germans. The Irish. The Italians. The Jews. The Chinese.
The Japanese. The Latinos. The South Asians. The African
Americans. We are not only a nation of immigrants. We are a

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 xx ● Introduction

nation made by immigrants, foreigners who were needed for

their labor and skills and faith—but were often hated because
they were not like us until they were us.

● ● ●

A final note: Scholars continue to debate the language used

to  tell the stories of Japanese American citizens and Japanese
aliens during World War II. Among others, Japanese American
writers Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Robert Asahina told me that
the most common complaints involve the use of the terms intern-
ment and concentration camps.
In legal terminology, internment applies only to government
regulation of aliens, not citizens, and more than two-thirds of
the American Japanese rounded up in 1942 were citizens of the
United States. However, the word internment was commonly
used to describe the detention of both citizens and aliens during
the war.
The term concentration camp was commonly used in gov-
ernment offices during those years to describe the ten officially
named relocation centers around the country. Among those who
called them concentration camps was the president of the United
States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Understanding that the meaning of
the term concentration camp changed forever because of the
death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe, I have used those words
interchangeably, as Americans did in the early 1940s, along with
the officially sanctioned terms evacuation and relocation centers.
There can also be some confusion about the use of the word
Japanese. Obviously, it has more than one meaning when one is
writing about World War II. It describes the citizens and sol-
diers of the Empire of Japan, the enemy. In the United States, it
was also used to identify both American-born citizens and their
alien parents and grandparents who were born in Japan and not
allowed to apply for American citizenship because of their race.

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 Introduction ● xxi

I have used the words American Japanese and the Japanese word
Nikkei to identify both citizens and aliens living in the United
States at the beginning of the war. The word Issei describes aliens,
the first generation of people born in Japan who had immigrated
to the United States. The word Nisei describes the second gen-
eration, men and women born in the United States, citizens.
Finally, the word Kibei describes men and women born in the
United States who were sent back to be educated in Japan before
returning to America.
Richard Reeves
Los Angeles, California
October 2014

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