Japanese Relocation Quotes

Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn’t actually left the library—they’d merely been relocated—it wasn’t technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.

Despite all this, they considered themselves fortunate, because they were together. Other families had been split up; first the men had been taken off to what were known as relocation camps, then the women and children sent to another one. In some cases it was two or three years before they were reunited.

Within the month it became apparent that the volunteer evacuation was not working, so further orders were given by the Justice Department to physically relocate the West Coast Japanese. These orders stated: “No military guards will be used except when absolutely necessary for the protection of the evacuees. You will, to the maximum, provide assistance. For those who do not relocate themselves comfortable transportation will be provided to temporary assembly centers. Families will not be separated, medical care, nutrition for children and food for adults will be provided.

In 1924, riding a wave of anti-Asian sentiment, the US government halted almost all immigration from Asia. Within a few years, California, along with several other states, banned marriages between white people and those of Asian descent. With the onset of World War II, the FBI began the Custodial Detention Index—a list of “enemy aliens,” based on demographic data, who might prove a threat to national security, but also included American citizens—second- and third-generation Japanese Americans. This list was later used to facilitate the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, which compelled Japanese immigrants over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted, and to take a loyalty oath to our government. Japanese Americans were subject to curfews, their bank accounts often frozen and insurance policies canceled. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The following day, America declared war on Japan. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the US secretary of war and military commanders to “prescribe military areas” on American soil that allowed the exclusion of any and all persons. This paved the way for the forced internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, without trial or cause. The ten “relocation centers” were all in remote, virtually uninhabitable desert areas. Internees lived in horrible, unsanitary conditions that included forced labor. On December 17, 1944, FDR announced the end of Japanese American internment. But many internees had no home to return to, having lost their livelihoods and property. Each internee was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to the place they used to live. Not one Japanese American was found guilty of treason or acts of sedition during World War II.

a thorough and all-encompassing decoupling from China would require from companies making such a move an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in newly located factories, and from governments equivalent amounts to fund new infrastructure, like airports, transportation links and housing, to serve the relocated supply chains. Notwithstanding that the political desire for decoupling may in some cases be stronger than the actual ability to do so, the direction of the trend is nonetheless clear. The Japanese government made this obvious when it set aside 243 billion of its 108 trillion Japanese yen rescue package to help Japanese companies pull their operations out of China. On multiple occasions, the US administration has hinted at similar measures.

Gordon Hirabayashi was born in Washington State to Christian Issei parents whose flower farm had been seized under restrictive land laws. After high school, he enrolled at the University of Washington, and in the summer of 1940, he attended a YMCA leadership conference at Columbia University in New York, during which he became a pacifist. When he returned home, Hirabayashi joined the Quakers and registered as a conscientious objector. After a curfew was declared for anyone of Japanese ancestry, Hirabayashi decided to resist, continuing to move about freely as a law-abiding citizen. Instead of registering for relocation, Hirabayashi turned himself in to the FBI with the intention of creating a test case of the government’s right to incarcerate Japanese Americans without due process of law.

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919, to parents who ran a flower nursery. After graduating from high school, he worked as a shipyard welder until, like Mitsuye Endo, he lost his job after Pearl Harbor. When the order for relocation came, Korematsu ignored it, unwilling to leave his Italian American girlfriend. He was arrested in May 1942. While awaiting trial, he was visited in jail by an attorney with the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The California ACLU was looking for someone for whom it could file suit to test the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.