MANZANAR Historic Resource Study/Special History Study

One of America's largest undertakings in the name of national defense during World War II was the mass exclusion and evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from California, the western halves of Oregon and Washington, and southern Arizona. Persons of Japanese descent were also removed from Alaska, and efforts were begun for what was initially intended to be a substantial transfer of such persons from Hawaii [1] to the mainland. [2]

Initial plans for evacuation of suspected persons from strategic areas along the Pacific front concerned enemy aliens of all three Axis nations — Germany, Italy and Japan — rather than persons of Japanese ancestry alone. Of the latter, the census of 1940 showed that, out of a total of 126,947 in the continental United States, 112,353 were living in the three Pacific states. California had 93,717 Japanese, or nearly three-fourths of the national total. Of the west coast Japanese, 40,869 were aliens who were born in Japan and were ineligible for citizenship (Issei), and 71,484 were American-born citizens, the children (Nisei) or the grandchildren (Sansei) of immigrant Japanese. A small minority, the Japanese represented less than one tenth of one percent of the total American population and less than two percent of the population in California, the state of their heaviest concentration. [3]

In early 1942 there were some 58,000 Italian and 22,000 German aliens in the Pacific states. Most of the Germans, and a large proportion of the Japanese and Italians, lived in or near major metropolitan areas in the west coast states. Many of the German aliens were recent refugees from Nazi Germany In contrast to the Germans and Italians, the Japanese in the Pacific states, and especially in California, had been the target of racial hostility and restrictive legal action since the late 19th century, a factor that unquestionably colored the measures taken against these people after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. [4]