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Reviews
Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II
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By Tetsuden Kashima
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 336 pages. $35.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Tim Alan Garrison
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| Conventional wisdom holds that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instigated an irrational overreaction by the United States: the federal government, pressured by politicians on the West Coast and fearing invasion and acts of espionage, took the abrupt step of relocating and interning Japanese Americans and Japanese foreign nationals. In this meticulous history of the bureaucracy and administration of the internment, Tetsuden Kashima shows that the United States had programs in place to intern individuals of Japanese ancestry long before the outbreak of war. These plans enabled federal agents to begin arresting persons suspected of disloyalty even before the Japanese drew off from the attack. Within months, the United States had interned almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. As many as two thirds of the internees were U.S. citizens. |
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Kashima, who was interned as a child at a camp in Topaz, Utah, maintains that the rapid implementation of the program could not have occurred without extensive prewar planning and prejudice. He demonstrates that officials throughout the federal government had long doubted the loyalty of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans, that these suspicions inspired national agencies to devise plans for internment in the event of war, and that Pearl Harbor simply set those plans into motion. In the 1920s, national security officials began to express concerns about the potential for espionage or subversion by Japanese immigrants. The FBI and Army and Navy intelligence offices initiated plans to identify, assess, and imprison persons who posed a threat to national security. Fear of Japanese treachery permeated the U.S. government by the middle of the 1930s. In 1934, for example, the State Department warned that if war broke out between the United States and Japan, "the entire Japanese population on the west coast will rise and commit sabotage" (p. 16). In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested that in the event of war with the empire the naval intelligence office should identify people of Japanese descent in Hawaii and place them in concentration camps. By 1941, agencies within the State, Justice, War, and Navy departments had collaborated — to the extent that inter bureaucratic cooperation is possible — to construct a loose but elaborate network to detain suspect characters of German, Italian, and Japanese heritage. |
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Kashima also argues that Pearl Harbor allowed the U.S. government to radicalize this prewar program and expand its existing detention plans to a much broader population. He rejects any suggestion that the expansion of internment was unforeseen or irrational and instead argues that after the attack the United States quickly seized an opportunity to "remove an undesirable ethnoracial group from the West Coast" (p. 130). According to Kashima, a broad racial animosity against people of Japanese ancestry existed throughout the federal government and compelled those involved in the planning and implementing the internment program to treat Japanese Americans more severely than detainees of German or Italian descent. He points out that, while federal policymakers instituted procedures to differentiate the loyal from the disloyal among the Italian American and German American population, they were so obsessed by racial antipathies against the Japanese that they abandoned any effort to draw distinctions between the innocent and the dangerous. |
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Setting aside Kashima's controversial thesis, his work is valuable for its painstaking examination of the extremely complicated workings of the laws and administration of the internment program and the conflicts and confusion that troubled the imprisonment bureaucracy. In attempting to readdress our attention to the motivations and planning for internment, Kashima also provides an overview of a remarkable number of issues tangential to his primary argument. He recounts the now-familiar litany of violations of civil liberties committed against the internees, the physical and mental abuses inflicted on the camp residents, and the internees' major protests against this mistreatment. He also offers discussions on how the government planned and managed the camps and how an individual's treatment might have differed depending on whether one was under the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Army, or the War Relocation Authority. He includes chapters on how the demand for labor limited the implementation of internment in Hawaii (despite the fact that over a third of the islands' population was of Japanese ancestry); on the federal government's efforts to force Mexico, Cuba, and Peru to transport Japanese nationals to the United States for the purpose of internment; and on how specific aspects of the program violated the Geneva Conventions. |
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Kashima's work continues scholarly efforts to understand and apportion responsibility for the internment. Even if readers reject his assertions of federal intent, they will, at the least, be impressed with his understanding and explication of a bureaucracy that is becoming more and more difficult for its rationalizers to defend. |
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