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Internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians

1942–1949 · Americas

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What happened

After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States under Executive Order 9066 excluded people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and held approximately 120,000 of them, about two-thirds US citizens, in ten guarded camps at Manzanar, Tule Lake, Poston, Gila River, Minidoka, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Granada, Rohwer and Jerome between 1942 and 1945. Canada acted in parallel, clearing a 100-mile coastal 'protected zone' that contained about 90 per cent of its Japanese Canadian population and uprooting some 23,000 people to interior camps, road gangs and prairie sugar-beet farms. Canadian internees' homes, farms, boats and businesses were confiscated and sold by the Custodian of Enemy Property to finance their own detention, and about 4,000 people were deported to Japan after the war; Japanese Canadians were not permitted to move freely again until 1949. Both states later acknowledged the policy as unjust: the United States passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 and Canada reached a redress agreement the same year, including a formal apology, individual payments and restoration of citizenship. The camps were not death camps and no mass killing occurred, but detention lasted years and dispossession was permanent for most families.

Parties

The United States and Canadian governments removed and confined their residents of Japanese ancestry, most of them citizens, from the Pacific coast

Disputed

The denominator

The 1940 US census counted 126,947 people of Japanese ancestry in the continental United States, about 112,000 of them in the three Pacific coast states; the 1941 Canadian census counted 23,149 in British Columbia and adjacent areas. Roughly two thirds in each country were citizens by birth.

Where the baseline comes from

• Internment of Japanese Americans — Wikipediaopen-edited
• Internment of Japanese Canadians — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no mass death toll. The Densho Encyclopedia documents seven unarmed Japanese Americans shot dead by guards in US internment and War Relocation Authority camps between 1942 and 1944, including two men killed when troops fired on a protest at Manzanar and James Wakasa, shot near the fence at Topaz; sentries were acquitted in every case that went to trial. Roughly 1,800 more people died in the camps over four years from illness and old age, a figure broadly consistent with the mortality of a population of that size and not treated as excess mortality by the US camp records.

Documented forms of violence

Detention without individual charge is documented by Britannica and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights; the CMHR also documents coerced labour on Alberta and Manitoba sugar-beet farms and the wartime stripping and post-war restoration of Japanese Canadian citizenship rights.

Movements mapped

• San Francisco Bay Area → Manzanar, California10,000
• Seattle and Puget Sound → Minidoka, Idaho9,000
• Vancouver and coastal British Columbia → Slocan Valley camps12,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

United States of America, Canada

Sources

• Japanese American internment — Britannicareference
• Japanese Canadian internment and the struggle for redress — Canadian Museum for Human Rightspress
• Homicide in camp — Densho Encyclopediapress