Topaz Oral History Project research files: Published articles (1920s-1980s)

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PREFACE At the time when the · United States of America entered World War II, there lived on the western rim of our continent a small group of quiet, hard-working and thrifty people; as a group they had been living in the Pacific coastal region for upward of 50 years. They comprised only one-tenth of 1 percent of the Nation's total population. Indeed they were so few, so concentrated in that narrow coastal strip, that few Americans in other parts of the United States had ever encountered o~e of them or had ever given any thought to this small .segment of the population--until the surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor by Japan suddenly and spuriously identified this minute oriental­American minority with the enemy whose ancestry it shared. During the first year of the war this West Coast minor­ity, consisting of approximately 110,000 people ranging from 90-year-old immigrants who had lived here for perhaps 60 years to third-generation citizens in arms, was excluded from home and source of livelihood by a series of military orders which were issued under authority conferred by the President of the United States. These wartime mass exclusion orders affected only. persons of Japanese ancestry. Without being charged with any specific crime, without hearings, those people were evac­uated under military guard to isolated barrack camps in the interior, where the majority of them lived as wards of the Government for nearly 3 years. After January 2, 1945, the ef­fective date of the rescission of the exclusion orders, all except the comparatively small number of evacuees who had lost faith ip American democracy and so wished to repatriate or ex­patriate to Japan were permitted to return to the Pacific Coast. This report is an attempt to explain how American democ­racy, at a time when it was engaged in a death struggle against the forces of totalitarianism across the seas, came to deal in this manner with one of its own minorities, a minority composed of two-thirds citizens by birth and one-third aliens denied naturalization under the law of our country. Taken from Wartime Exile, p. 1.