50 Fun Facts About Japanese American Internment

Which 1942 presidential directive let the Army remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast?

Executive Order 9066 never mentioned Japanese Americans by name. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it about ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, and it was applied almost solely to people of Japanese descent.

Which actor recalled his childhood in wartime camps in the graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy?

George Takei and his family first lived in converted horse stables before being sent on to two camps. He later starred in a Broadway musical about the experience.

Which actor, later a screen karate mentor, left hospital at 11 to join his interned family at Gila River?

Pat Morita spent most of his childhood in hospitals with spinal tuberculosis. After surgery let him walk again, he was taken straight from the ward to the camp where his family was held.

Which children's author backed the removal of Japanese Americans in wartime cartoons, then changed his view?

Dr. Seuss drew more than 400 political cartoons for the New York paper PM. He later dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to a Japanese friend.

Which president signed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized to surviving internees?

Ronald Reagan at first resisted the bill over its cost, then signed it in August 1988. The first payments went out in 1990, starting with the oldest survivors.

Which California racetrack, where Seabiscuit last won, held over 18,000 Japanese Americans in 1942?

Santa Anita turned its horse stables into living quarters and put single men in the grandstand. About 500 barracks were built beside the track.

Which Migrant Mother photographer had most of her Japanese American removal images impounded?

Dorothea Lange gave up a Guggenheim fellowship to take the government assignment. Her photographs of families leaving their homes were not seen publicly until after the war.

Which US territory, over a third Japanese by ancestry, interned fewer than 2,000 of those residents?

Hawaii depended so heavily on Japanese American workers that business leaders opposed mass removal. More than 150,000 people there had Japanese ancestry.

Which Oakland welder had plastic surgery to dodge removal, then lost a landmark 1944 Supreme Court case?

Fred Korematsu saw his conviction thrown out by a federal judge in 1983, after it emerged that the government had withheld evidence. Bill Clinton gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.

Mike Shinoda, whose song Kenji retells his family's wartime internment, co-founded which rock band?

Linkin Park's co-founder built the track around recorded interviews with his father and aunt about the family's years in camp. It appeared on his Fort Minor side project in 2005.

Which Japanese American unit that fought in Italy and France is known as the most decorated in US history?

The 442nd Infantry Regiment earned 21 Medals of Honor and more than 4,000 Purple Hearts. Many of its soldiers had families held in the camps while they fought abroad.

Which California camp became a maximum-security segregation center for Japanese Americans labeled disloyal?

Tule Lake held 18,700 people at its peak, more than any other camp. It did not close until March 1946, seven months after the war ended.

The Heart Mountain camp, known for its Fair Play Committee of draft resisters, stood in which state?

Wyoming briefly gained its third-largest town when the camp's population passed 10,000. Heart Mountain's resisters said they would serve once their families were freed.

Which future Chief Justice pushed to remove Japanese Americans while California's attorney general?

Earl Warren came to regret his role, though he long resisted saying so in public. As Chief Justice he led the court that outlawed school segregation.

Which federal lawman dismissed rumors of Japanese American spying as calls for removal grew in 1942?

J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Francis Biddle both doubted the spy scare. Public opinion turned against Japanese Americans anyway, and the pressure on the White House kept building.

Which Japanese term names the American-born second generation, who made up most of those sent to the camps?

Nisei were US citizens by birth, while their immigrant parents were ineligible for citizenship. About two-thirds of the people removed were citizens.

From which province did Canada remove over 22,000 Japanese Canadians, selling their homes and boats?

British Columbia was home to more than 90% of Japanese Canadians. They were not allowed back to its coast until April 1949, almost four years after the war ended.

How much did each surviving internee receive under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988?

$20,000 went to each of 82,219 people. A federal commission had found the removal was driven by race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.

Which president formally ended Roosevelt's removal order on its 34th anniversary, calling it wrong?

Gerald Ford signed the proclamation on February 19, 1976, in the bicentennial year. He said the country now knew what it should have known then: that Japanese Americans were loyal.

Farewell to Manzanar, the 1973 memoir of a camp childhood, takes place in which part of California?

Owens Valley sits on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, about 230 miles north of Los Angeles. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was seven when her family was sent there.

Which South American country sent about 1,800 residents of Japanese descent to US internment camps?

Peru sent far more people than the dozen other Latin American countries that cooperated. Many ended up in a family camp at Crystal City, alongside German internees.

Which Alaska Native people, moved from their islands to camps in 1942, shared in the 1988 redress law?

Aleut villagers were taken to camps in Southeast Alaska, where an estimated one in ten died. The 1988 law that compensated Japanese Americans also paid restitution to them.

Which future president's youngest brother ran the War Relocation Authority, then quit after just ninety days?

Dwight Eisenhower's brother Milton took the job early in 1942 and resigned that June. He went on to serve as president of three major universities.

Which Western Defense Command general urged the removal of Japanese Americans and then oversaw it?

John L. DeWitt believed Japanese Americans on the coast were conspiring to sabotage the war effort. His military proclamations put most of the West Coast off limits to them.

Which Puget Sound community's Japanese Americans were removed first, by ferry, on six days' notice?

Bainbridge Island sat close to naval bases, so its 227 Japanese American residents went first, on March 30, 1942. About 150 of them came back after the war.

Governor Ralph Carr, who defended Japanese Americans' rights and lost his next election, led which state?

Colorado's Ralph Carr stood almost alone among Western governors, who backed removal yet objected to camps in their own states. He narrowly lost a Senate race in 1942.

Rohwer and Jerome, camps about 30 miles apart in the Delta, briefly ranked among which state's biggest towns?

Arkansas briefly counted the two camps as its fifth- and sixth-largest towns. Jerome was the last camp to open and the first to close, and later held German prisoners of war.

Which future Transportation Secretary met Senator Alan Simpson as a Boy Scout inside the Heart Mountain camp?

Norman Mineta was a boy when his family was held at the camp, which Simpson's troop often came to visit. In 2000 he became the first Asian American to hold a cabinet post.

Which Yosemite landscape photographer published images of life at Manzanar as Born Free and Equal?

Ansel Adams asked permission to visit the camp, and his photo-essay first appeared in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit. The pictures are now held by the Library of Congress.

Which David Guterson novel follows the 1954 murder trial of a Japanese American on a fictional island?

Snow Falling on Cedars took David Guterson, then a teacher, ten years of early mornings to write. The trial unfolds amid anti-Japanese feeling that lingered after the war.

Which federal agency was told to restore Manzanar when Congress made it a historic site in 1992?

The National Park Service judged Manzanar the best preserved of the ten former camps. Former internees and their families have made an annual pilgrimage there since 1969.

Kenichi Zenimura led fellow internees at Gila River in building a full field, with stands, for which sport?

Baseball leagues for the internees were Zenimura's next project once the field was done. Before the war he had helped bring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to Japan for exhibition games.

Roughly how many people of Japanese ancestry were held in US camps during World War II?

About 120,000 people were held in ten main camps, mostly in the western interior. Many of the immigrant generation had already lived in the United States for decades.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, a dissenter from the 1944 removal ruling, later prosecuted war criminals where?

Nuremberg came a year after Jackson warned that the ruling would lie about like a loaded weapon for any future authority to pick up. Truman named him US chief of counsel there.

Manzanar, the best known of the ten camps, takes its name from the Spanish for what?

Apple orchard is the meaning because a fruit-growing town was founded on the spot in 1910. It was abandoned by 1929, after Los Angeles bought up the area's water.

Which American figure skating star's mother was born inside a World War II internment camp?

Kristi Yamaguchi's maternal grandfather was fighting in Europe with the US Army while his family was interned. In 1992 she became the first Asian American to win Winter Olympic gold.

Japanese American gunners of the 522nd Field Artillery freed prisoners from a subcamp of which Nazi camp?

Dachau was ringed by satellite labor camps, and the battalion liberated at least one of them. Its men also saved survivors of a death march near Waakirchen.

Which 1957 John Okada novel follows a Seattle man home from prison for refusing the wartime draft?

No-No Boy takes its title from those who answered no to questions 27 and 28 on the form. Largely unknown in Okada's lifetime, it was later championed by Asian American writers.

Which 2015 Broadway musical follows a California farming family sent to the Heart Mountain camp?

Allegiance grew out of a chance meeting at a New York theater between its writers and the actor whose childhood inspired it. He went on to star in the show.

What did teenager Ralph Lazo, who was not Japanese American, do in 1942 out of loyalty to his friends?

Lazo joined them in a camp by boarding a train to Manzanar, where officials never asked about his ancestry. He is the only known non-spouse outsider to have gone voluntarily.

What did photographer Toyo Miyatake smuggle into Manzanar, later having a wooden box built around it?

A camera lens was what he smuggled in, and a camera body was then made for it out of wood. He later became the official camp photographer, though at first a white person had to press the shutter.

Which sculptor and furniture designer became the Poston camp's only voluntary internee in May 1942?

Isamu Noguchi went hoping to promote arts and crafts, and drew up plans for swimming pools and a cemetery. The camp authorities had no intention of building them.

Which activist, held at the Jerome camp in her twenties, later cradled the head of the dying Malcolm X?

Yuri Kochiyama's time behind barbed wire shaped her views on racism in America. A Life magazine photograph shows her at Malcolm X's side moments after he was shot.

On which small island did a crashed Pearl Harbor raider get help from residents of Japanese descent?

Niihau islanders eventually killed the pilot. A Navy report on the episode warned that residents believed loyal might aid Japan, and some writers say it influenced the removal.

Jerry Stanley's children's history I Am an American is built around which Japanese American's story?

Shi Nomura later married Mary Kageyama, the singer known as the Songbird of Manzanar. Stanley, a history professor, quotes him throughout the book.

Which California state clerk won a unanimous 1944 Supreme Court ruling against detaining loyal citizens?

Mitsuye Endo refused an offer of release that required her to stay away from the West Coast, so her case could go on. Her win led to the coast being reopened to Japanese Americans.

Which Japanese phrase, meaning it cannot be helped, gives a chapter of Farewell to Manzanar its theme?

Shikata ga nai was how many internees explained enduring what they could not change. The memoir uses the idea to account for how little open resistance there was.

Which novelist based When the Emperor Was Divine on her grandfather's arrest the day after Pearl Harbor?

Julie Otsuka's debut begins in California, where she was born and raised. Her next novel, The Buddha in the Attic, follows Japanese women who immigrated to marry men they knew only from photographs.

Poston and Gila River, the two main camps in Arizona, were both built on what kind of land?

Tribal reservations hosted both camps. Poston's tribal council objected, unwilling to do to others what had been done to its own people, but officials overruled it.

Japanese American troops took over 800 casualties in France rescuing a Lost Battalion from which state?

Texas later made the rescuers honorary Texans, by proclamation of Governor John Connally. Five days of fighting in the Vosges Mountains freed 211 trapped men.