What was the political outlook on japenese interment camps in wwII?

Question

How did the media, the goverment, and other americans feels about this? What were some of the key disputes?

Answer 1

Japanese American Internment was the forced removal of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans (62 percent of whom were United States citizens) from the West Coast of the United States during World War II. While approximately 10,000 were able to relocate to other parts of the country, the remainder – roughly 110,000 men, women and children – were sent to hastily constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" in remote portions of the nation's interior.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion, removal, and detention, arguing that it is permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity."

Some compensation for property losses was paid in 1948, but most internees were unable to fully recover their losses. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership",and beginning in 1990, the government paid reparations to surviving internees.

Since the subject became a topic of historical inquiry, there have been individuals and organizations who have argued that the suspicion of ethnic Japanese was indeed justified. Others rebut some Japanese American accounts of hardship during the evacuation and in the camps.

Key disputes over redress and reparations include:

Whether there was sufficient military necessity for exclusion, removal, and detention
Extent of hardship experienced by the Japanese Americans
Failure to include reparations for German and Italian Americans who were detained
The historical context of anti-Asian sentiment in general, and anti-Japanese sentiment in particular
The strongest evidence of espionage was derived from a series of decrypted communications from the Japanese government. These messages referred to a network of Japanese Americans with military contractors, as the Japanese consulate stated in the encrypted messages that it was attempting to recruit Japanese American spies.[citation needed] The impact of these communications has been questioned on the claim that much of the information that Japanese officials obtained may have come from public sources such as newspapers, and that there is no data indicating the success of these recruitment efforts.

The most widely reported examples of espionage and treason are the Tachibana spy ring and the Niihau Incident. The Tachibana spy ring was a group of Japanese nationals who were arrested shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack and were deported.The Niihau Incident occurred just after the Pearl Harbor attack, two Japanese Americans on Niihau freed a captured Japanese pilot and assisted him in his machine-gun attack on Native Hawaiians there.

Some present-day supporters of the internment have argued that some Japanese Americans were indeed disloyal, as seen by the approximately 20,000 Japanese Americans in Japan at the start of the war who joined the Japanese war effort, hundreds joining the Japanese Army.[citation needed] One particular example is Tomoya Kawakita, an American citizen who worked as an interpreter and a POW guard for the Japanese army, and who actively participated in the torture (and at least one death) of American soldiers, including survivors of the Bataan Death March. Kawakita was convicted for treason and imprisoned.

Critics of this viewpoint note that it seems unlikely that Japanese Americans in Japan had any choice other than to be conscripted into the Japanese army, given (1) that it was near-impossible for them to return to the U.S. from Japan, and (2) that the United States had already classified all people of Japanese ancestry as "enemy aliens."