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Internment and Paroled Work Release

The anti-Japanese sentiment that led to internment did not appear overnight. Since the nineteenth century, white Americans had made reference to the “Yellow peril,” which characterized Asian immigrants as invaders who came to take jobs and were unassimilable to “American” values. This discourse conflated Asian ancestry with perpetual foreignness. With the 1870 Naturalization Act, the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan, and the 1913 California Alien Land Law Act, as well as other federal and state legislation, Japanese immigrants faced legal barriers to citizenship, immigration, and property ownership respectively. In the late-1930s, representations of Japanese “otherness” fueled sensationalist journalism and stoked fears about espionage as tensions between the United States and Japan increased. Newspapers and magazines, especially on the West Coast, argued that Japanese Americans were to be seen as enemies if war broke out.

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor provided the immediate justification for the internment of more than 120,000 Issei and Nisei. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving military authorities the power to forcibly evacuate Japanese families from their homes on the West Coast for “national security” purposes. Under the auspices of defense, the Western Defense Command (the branch of the War Department responsible for the Pacific Coast) detained American citizens without any concrete evidence – a violation of their constitutional right to individual due process. After putting Issei and Nisei through what future Seabrook resident Iddy Asada called “the horrible stages of the evacuation bit” – a process in which nearly 75 percent of incarcerated families lost all of their assets, often to neighbors – the military sent detainees to internment camps farther inland. The policy of Japanese internment spread throughout the Western hemisphere. The Justice Department coordinated with countries such as Panama and Peru the incarceration of more than two thousand Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry as “enemy aliens,” who were then sent to the United States and stripped of their rights, property, and legal documents.

Internment proved controversial, from both a legal and propaganda standpoint, with the United States fighting a global campaign against fascism. Liberal and leftist Americans decried and protested the policy as an abject and unprecedented violation of the civil liberties of citizens, as did certain Protestant religious organizations. Moreover, the growing need for workers in the wartime economy prompted the government officials to question whether Issei and Nisei labor was being wasted as a wartime resource. From 1943 until the end of the war, the War Relocation Authority, the federal agency created to administer internment, gradually began a process of releasing internees. After swearing “unqualified allegiance to the United States” in a loyalty questionnaire, Issei and Nisei became eligible for supervised work release to locations east of the Mississippi River. (Nisei also became eligible for conscription.) The relocation of more than 2,500 internees to Seabrook Farms was supervised by the WRA’s Philadelphia office, who worked with already released individuals like Ellen Nakamura, to expand recruitment.

Even though released detainees were thoroughly vetted by both the WRA and the military through the loyalty questionnaire, paroled internees continued to encounter racism and suspicion. At Great Meadows in Warren County, New Jersey, local residents protested after farmer George Kowalick agreed to accept five Japanese American laborers from the WRA and, as the Newark Evening News reported in 1943, formed a “secret and self-styled ‘reception committee’ dedicated to keeping the Japs out.” After a barn on his property suspiciously went up in flames, Kowalick asked the WRA to take the laborers back. The mayor of Great Meadows, John Kane, blamed the parolees themselves for the unrest: “We have no objection to the nationality of these men, but we do object to their character if they instigate animosity or infringe upon law and order.”

Exhibition caption

The Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, which was built on the Gila River Indian Reservation, held Issei and Nisei internees until it was closed in 1945. Most internment camps were far inland in arid, remote locations. Like detention centers and carceral sites today, relocation camps were far away from major metropolitan centers and mostly hidden from the public eye.

Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, New Jersey Digital Highway

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Gila River Relocation Camp, Arizona.

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