# Japanese American Incarceration During World War II *The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was a deliberate wartime removal of a thriving, multi-generational community—built businesses, farms, churches, unions, and arts scenes—erased in later retellings into a sanitary story of “relocation centers.”* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 14, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/japanese-american-incarceration-during-world-war-ii ## Questions this record answers - What is whitewashed in the usual story of Japanese American internment during World War II? - Were Japanese Americans really put in “concentration camps,” and what were those camps built on? - How did Japanese American incarceration impact Black communities and other people of color? - Why do official histories call them “relocation centers” instead of prisons or camps? ## Summary Before the war, Japanese Americans on the West Coast and in Hawaii had built dense farming cooperatives, fishing fleets, hotels, unions, churches, and arts communities that tied them to Black, Native, Filipino, and Mexican neighbors; incarceration broke a living social and economic world, not an abstract “population.” The dominant narrative later softened that rupture into language about “evacuation” and “relocation centers,” obscuring that more than 110,000 people—two‑thirds of them U.S. citizens—were removed by armed force, held behind barbed wire and armed guard, often on Native land and near Black communities whose own claims to housing and work were tightly policed. The archive begins from what they built: farmers who turned swamps into productive fields, longshore workers who helped unionize West Coast ports, churchwomen who ran mutual aid circles, and young people who made jazz bands and sports leagues that crossed racial lines. Only after that can we understand what Executive Order 9066 and its enforcement actually destroyed and how the later language of “order,” “security,” and “relocation” hides the violence of that destruction. ## The archive's standing The incarceration of Japanese Americans was not an unfortunate security measure; it was a state project that dismantled a flourishing set of communities and redistributed their land, labor, and market share under a thin wartime pretext. The archive holds Japanese American farmers, workers, artists, and church leaders as co-authors of multiracial West Coast life whose work underwrote both white and Black prosperity, and whose dispossession reveals how flexible American racial policy could be when property and power were on the line. We hold the sanitized textbook story—the quiet “evacuation” and tidy postwar apology—as part of the machinery that tries to turn a deliberate targeting of communities of color into a bureaucratic mistake. The record here treats the camps as what they were: concentration camps built atop prior Black and Native dispossession and remembered, in large part, through the testimony of those whom the state tried to silence. ## A thriving community before the barbed wire In the decades before World War II, Issei and Nisei communities built dense economic and social worlds along the Pacific Coast and in Hawaii: truck farms on “marginal” land that soon dominated regional fruit and vegetable markets; neighborhood hotels and laundries that served Black as well as Asian migrants; Buddhist and Christian congregations with women’s circles that ran credit clubs and mutual aid; and youth groups that moved between judo halls, baseball diamonds, and jazz clubs. Historians such as Roger Daniels and Eiichiro Azuma, alongside community oral history projects, document Japanese American longshore workers in unions at West Coast ports, farmers experimenting with cooperative marketing, and students who navigated both Jim Crow segregation and anti‑Asian exclusion. This world did not stand separate from Black life. In Los Angeles, Seattle, and Oakland, Black and Japanese Americans were often neighbors in redlined districts, facing the same banks, police, and landlords. Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the California Eagle reported on Japanese American businesses, block clubs, and churches before and after Pearl Harbor, treating them as fellow targets of white supremacy rather than as foreign presences. That shared landscape is largely absent from standard school narratives, which introduce Japanese Americans only at the moment of their removal. ## Executive Order 9066 and the language of “evacuation” President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 authorized military commanders to exclude persons from designated West Coast areas. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s implementation orders, backed by Congress’s Public Law 503, resulted in the forced removal of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry from California, Washington, Oregon, and parts of Arizona. They were ordered to report to “assembly centers” at racetracks and fairgrounds, then moved to inland camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Families lost houses, leases, shops, and stored goods in the weeks between the notices and the trains. The dominant telling uses bureaucratic language—“evacuees,” “relocation centers,” “internment”—drawn from WRA documents and wartime newsreels. Yet those same records describe barbed‑wire fences, guard towers, armed military police, and banishment under threat of prison. Japanese American activists and scholars, including Aiko Herzig‑Yoshinaga and the Japanese American Citizens League’s campaign in the 1970s–80s, pushed back on the vocabulary, insisting on “incarceration” and “concentration camps” to reflect the coercive conditions. This language battle is part of the whitewashing: by calling people “evacuees,” the state recasts a mass imprisonment as a kind of humanitarian shelter from a danger they themselves supposedly posed. ## Built on prior dispossession – Native and Black land Most of the ten main camps were sited on or adjacent to Native lands: Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley, once home to Paiute communities; Poston and Gila River on Colorado River Indian Reservation lands; Heart Mountain, Minidoka, and Topaz on or near territories tied to Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and Goshute peoples. Tribal councils often opposed turning reservation lands into prison sites, but federal agencies overruled them or negotiated minimal consultation, extending a long pattern in which Native land loss underwrote federal projects from dams to military bases. In several cases, the building of camps and the redistribution of Japanese American farms intersected with Black migration and housing policy. In Los Angeles, the removal of Japanese gardeners and farmers opened pockets of employment and rental stock that some Black migrants from the South filled, while white growers and real estate interests lobbied to take over Japanese‑owned plots. Black newspapers reported both a sense of solidarity with Japanese Americans as fellow targets of racism and anxiety that any gains would be contingent and revocable, a dynamic that would echo in later conflicts around public housing and urban renewal. This complexity rarely appears in school lessons that treat incarceration as a fully separate Japanese American story. ## Labor, resistance, and the myth of quiet compliance Inside the camps, Japanese Americans rebuilt elements of the society that had been stripped from them: schools, newspapers, churches, sports leagues, and arts programs. Incarcerated teachers taught under armed watch; artists painted the desert landscapes and camp life; ministers and lay leaders organized worship in barracks; young musicians played jazz and swing in makeshift dance halls. The WRA’s own files, along with camp newspapers preserved at the Japanese American National Museum and university archives, record farm production that supplied not only the camps but local markets, making clear that incarcerated labor subsidized wartime food supply. The dominant narrative often describes camp life as “orderly” and emphasizes loyalty questionnaires and military service. Missing are the hunger strikes, work stoppages, draft resistance at Heart Mountain and elsewhere, and legal challenges like Fred Korematsu’s, Gordon Hirabayashi’s, and Minoru Yasui’s cases. Black editors at papers like the Chicago Defender tracked these challenges and printed editorials tying them to Black fights against police brutality and segregation, underscoring that Japanese American resistance was read in real time as part of a broader struggle against state racism. ## Postwar return, erasure, and the partial repair After the war, many Japanese Americans returned to find their homes sold, farms seized under “abandonment” laws, and equipment gone. They rebuilt businesses and churches in neighborhoods that were now more heavily Black and Latino, navigating new alliances and tensions under redlining and restrictive covenants. The official story of the camps, however, moved quickly toward a narrative of national regret and closure, capped by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and its formal apology and reparations. Community oral histories and local Black and Japanese American press reveal a more complicated aftermath: people who never received compensation; those who stayed away from the coast; and those who, having seen what the state could do, poured into civil rights work. The archive holds these testimonies—often recorded by family, church, and community historians—as central sources, not footnotes, and treats the ongoing fight over terminology and memory as proof that the whitewashed version has never fully succeeded. ## Sources 1. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, Hill and Wang, 1993 2. Aiko Herzig‑Yoshinaga, Words Can Lie or Clarify: Terminology of the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2010 3. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, Oxford University Press, 2005 4. United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982 5. Black newspapers on Japanese American incarceration (for example, articles in the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and California Eagle, 1942–1945, microfilm holdings at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Moorland‑Spingarn Research Center) ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/executive-order-9066 - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/great-migration - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/redlining-in-the-united-states - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/japanese-american-redress-movement - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/urban-renewal-in-the-united-states --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Japanese American Incarceration During World War II," revised July 14, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/japanese-american-incarceration-during-world-war-ii Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.