Korematsu v US (1944) - Fear and Distrust

Despite the fact that an attack on the US mainland would have been extremely difficult with being so far away and not very technologically advanced, “public opinion in 1942 thought otherwise” (Document 14). This is even confirmed by Attorney General Biddle, who in 1942 stated that “The present military situation does not at this time require the removal of American citizens of the Japanese race” (Document 6), and shows the deep rooted racism in the reasoning for removal. Despite the facts, the public panic caused by the media caused Japanese internment to become “military necessity”, causing a lack in their loyalty to the United States (Takaki). The assumption of disloyalty played a large role in the Japanese internment, even though the Japanese that were in Hawaii, closest to the attack, were actually extremely helpful and essential to the rebuilding of Hawaii after the attack (Fraser). The claim for “military necessity” is undermined with the fact that the Attorney General Biddle opposed the relocation for the very fact that it wasn’t actually necessary (Takaki). Since “there (was) no evidence of planned sabotage”, then the relocation of Japanese during the 1940s was unnecessary and unjust, without any facts to back it up with besides racism, the main root of the

In 1941, the Japanese surprise attacked Pearl Harbor and consequently, the United Stated entered World War II. Thus, in 1942, FDR issued Executive Order No. 9066 which allowed the Secretary of War to designate military areas. The executive order led to Public Law 503 in which Congress made it a criminal offense to violate military orders under Executive Order No. 9066, therefore, allowing the military to begin excluding anyone of Japanese ancestry in the military areas and forcing them to report to internment camps. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American citizen, willingly refused to evacuate under Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 and was arrested and convicted. Korematsu appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court where Korematsu V United States was heard with Korematsu as the petitioner and the United States as the respondent.

Korematsu v. United States (1944) actually began December 7, 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack on Pearl Harbor then began the conquering of Wake, Guam, Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Burma. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, racism, which was hardly unfamiliar, became an even greater problem. The Japanese Government's attacks on Americans including; torturing, raping, and murdering was an excuse for Americans aversion towards the Japanese. Public officials began to lock up the Japanese people simply for their own good, for protection against the hate crimes.

During WWII many civil liberties were affected and felt by the American people; some of these decisions include new policies on foreigners and civil defense groups in towns. A major facet of homefront life in WWII was the discrimination faced by Japanese/German/Italian Americans, especially the Japanese, After the attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the United States into the war, Americans developed a fear towards immigrants and foreigners; not unlike the fear felt during the 1920’s after WWI. Local, state, and federal governments began drafting new laws and policies against persons whose ancestry is that of any of the Axis powers (Italy-Germany-Japan). For instance, a new law stated that all residents (“enemy aliens”) of German, Japanese, or Italian descent were required to register with the government, submit to fingerprinting, and list all their organizational affiliations. In addition, many of these peoples were forced to submit to curfews and travel restrictions. Furthermore, during this time, Japanese persons could not join the military until 1943 due to racism and fears of the American people. In February of 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which designated certain areas as war zones, and allowed for the removal of anyone for any reason. This led to the internment of Japanese people. Japanese-Americans were forced to either store or sell nearly all their property and belongings, only permitted to take “necessities”,

When the Japanese Americans migrated to the United States they were not welcomed with open arms. The Japanese Americans faced many hardships. The biggest hardships they faced were their treatment by the American people as well as by the American government after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and placed in internment camps for years with little to no explanation as to why. According to the United States government the Japanese Americans placement in internment camps “were justified on national security grounds” (Brooks), but the truth is Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps because of fear and racial prejudice. This event in history is important because it

While World War II had been ongoing since 1939, Japan had been fighting for the Axis powers, against the United States. In 1941, when Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States government had assumed the viewpoint that the Japanese were not to be trusted, and that the Japanese-American citizens of the United States were much the same. As such, they had resorted to establishing internment camps, or preventive labor prisons, so as to keep them in check and ostensibly to prevent further Japanese sabotage. However, the government’s actions were not fully justified, as several factors had interplayed into the circumstances that directly contradicted the intentions and visible results of the internment of the Japanese-Americans, in the social, political, economical, and cultural aspects. On the whole, the internment camps served as drastic measures which were not wholly without reasoning; contrarily, those factors in support of the internment camps did not override those which had gone against it, since the United States’ own legislation, in the form of the Constitution and other laws, had explicitly prevented the depriving of human rights, privileges, and pursuits, which had doubtless applied in light of the Japanese-Americans’ universal citizenship along the Pacific Coast in the early 1940s. As such, while the internment camps were not completely unjustified and without purpose from the viewpoint of the government, they did not align with standards of law and

The majority opinion in the ruling of Korematsu v. United States. The majority opinion in this case was in favor of the United States. The court in this case argued that the executive order 9066 (….WHEREAS the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities….(illinois.edu) was legal because after the bombing of pearl harbor, the general population of the United States was in a state of chaos.

December 7, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked, the US government and the FBI began to follow community leaders with strong Japanese ties. As American citizens, Issei and Nisei had enjoyed the rights of any US citizen; “now their own government imposed strict curfews on them and raided their homes for ‘contraband’ or anything that showed special connection to their former homeland”(“Japanese-American Relocation”). They suspected and wanted to be sure that no Japanese Americans were spies and was sending information to anyone from their homeland, but by doing so they striped them of their American rights that all Americans have but the Japanese Americans.

Our president during World War II was Franklin D. Roosevelt. On February 19, 1942, he “authorized the internment of ten of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan.”1 The attack on Pearl Harbor incited the fear against Japanese Americans, because the United States believed that Japanese Americans would turn their backs on the U.S. and be a threat to the security. This authorization was called the Presidential Executive Order 9066. Even though there was no evidence that they imposed threat, the military’s command was to take over and invade Japanese homes. The Japanese were ordered to live in internment camps in the West Coast. These camps were in horrible conditions and fenced with barbed wire. In the camps, the Japanese-American civilians created their own small city with their own doctors, food, and teachers.

The day after bombing, Congress approved Roosevelt’s declaration to start the war with Japan. After that Italy and Germany declared war on the United States. Couple months after the tragical event at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order for all Japanese Americans to evacuate West Coast in order to provide “national security”. It cause relocation of nearly 120,000 people, more than a half of whom were American citizens. They were relocated to internment camps. Japanese aliens were called “enemy aliens”.

During the brink of war in World War II to the Civil Rights era, the United States was globally known for their considerable dedication of nationwide pride and prosperity as the outside perspective of the nation was depicted as a powerhouse along with a booming economy. However, the inside perspective of the nation gave away its true colors, becoming a tough pill to swallow as the minority of the United States’ population experienced a time of turmoil facing the white majority. It was fairly easy to overlook the prime examples of racial injustice in the 20th century, but not unfairly to sense the hardship for equality. Victims of the crimes of hatred and vengeance were heavily targeted as being Japanese-Americans and African-Americans. The motive for the discrimination of the Japanese-Americans was influenced by the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan, which caused mainstream hatred toward all persons of Japanese ancestry. As an act of precaution, all Japanese-Americans were forced to be imprisoned in internment camps until the end of the war. Moreover, the pursuit of racial equality for African-Americans was a continuous struggle that ensured the limitations of their freedom and civil rights. Whereas one of the incentive for the cause of segregation was merely to input fear to distribute the mindset of whites being the dominant race. Both the Japanese-Americans and the African-Americans battled the impaired judgement that was written all over the partial citizenship they were

Fred Korematsu was standing up for thousands of japanese-americans including himself even though no one else was helping him and having faith in him, even his family thought he was an embarrassment. According to Justice Robert Jackson, “the court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” What this is trying to explain is that Fred Korematsu was never taken seriously in court, because of racial discrimination, that just because they are authority they think that they can load a weapon or because they are judges they have the right to discriminate and put citizens in

In the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, three justices disagreed with the ruling to uphold Japanese-American Fred Korematsu’s conviction for breaking an evacuation order. Justice Murphy, one of the dissenters, believed that the President’s mandate was a racist strategy intended on corralling Japanese-Americans into the barracks of an internment camp that masqueraded as a “national security measure” for the “safety” of American citizens. He wrote, “No reasonable relation to an ‘immediate, imminent, and impending’ public danger is evident to support this racial restriction [Executive Order 9066]… no reliable evidence is cited to show that such individuals [Japanese-Americans] were disloyal [to the United States]… Justification for the exclusion is sought, instead, mainly upon questionable racial and sociological grounds not ordinarily within the realm of expert military judgment… [with] conclusions drawn from an unwarranted use of circumstantial evidence.” In the eyes of Justice Murphy, there was no question about the subtle racism embedded within this Executive Order, even if it was justified as a national security measure. Nevertheless, despite his dissenting opinion, Justice Murphy did not actively protest the order; while he did disagree it, his resistance is purely in writing and is passive at

According to DISCovering Multicultural America, “One citizen, Fred Korematsu, disobeyed the evacuation order and was convicted in 1943. In the nation's highest court, he and two other Japanese Americans, also convicted under wartime curfews argued that singling out Japanese-American citizens for such harsh deprivations was unconstitutional” (DISCovering Multicultural America). These three men brought this case to the highest court, attempting to free all Japanese-Americans. Later, in 1944, the three men lost the case, and their convictions were upheld. DISCovering Multicultural America stated, “In the 1944 decision, Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in all three cases based on government evidence of "wartime necessity" (DISCovering Multicultural America). About 40 years later, Korematsu, with new evidence, returned to court to challenge his conviction. In the article, DISCovering Multicultural America, it states, “ In 1984 Fred Korematsu himself, backed by a coalition of Asian/Pacific-American attorneys and advocacy groups, returned to court with newly declassified evidence to challenge his conviction. The evidence established that the government had known Japanese Americans did not pose a threat to national security as it had claimed and that the government had mislead the court in the earlier proceedings. The federal judge rehearing Korematsu's case overturned his conviction and the two curfew convictions” (DISCovering Multicultural America). Soon after, the government gave 20,000 dollars to each surviving

At the time president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan December 8, 1941 the day after Pearl Harbor and led America to join World War ll. It is “a date that will live in infamy” told by Roosevelt. A memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1962. After the attack residents had to be fingerprinted, creating identification cards and businesses could only hold up to 200 dollars in cash. People believed that the Martial Law would last a couple months, it lasted for three years and curfews lasted until July 1945. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that said Japanese American citizens have to move either to California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, or Arkansas (120,000 Japanese and 80 U.S. citizens). Fortunately,