Japanese American Internment
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50 free Japanese American Internment trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government forced people of Japanese ancestry out of their West Coast homes and into remote, hastily built camps. Most were American citizens. Families lost farms, shops and years of their lives, and it took the country more than four decades to say sorry. This quiz walks through the whole story: the wartime panic and the officials who fed or resisted it, the racetracks and desert barracks, the court cases, the soldiers who fought for the country that had locked up their parents, and the long campaign for an apology. It also covers the photographers, memoirs, novels and familiar faces from film, music and sport whose family histories run through the camps. It is written for students, teachers and anyone reading books such as Farewell to Manzanar or Jerry Stanley's I Am an American, with an explanation after every answer so you learn the history as you play.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1942 presidential directive let the Army remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast?
Executive Order 9066
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.
Q 02Which actor recalled his childhood in wartime camps in the graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy?
George Takei
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.
Q 03Which actor, later a screen karate mentor, left hospital at 11 to join his interned family at Gila River?
Pat Morita
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.
Q 04Which children's author backed the removal of Japanese Americans in wartime cartoons, then changed his view?
Dr. Seuss
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.
Q 05Which president signed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized to surviving internees?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 06Which California racetrack, where Seabiscuit last won, held over 18,000 Japanese Americans in 1942?
Santa Anita
Santa Anita turned its horse stables into living quarters and put single men in the grandstand. About 500 barracks were built beside the track.
Q 07Which Migrant Mother photographer had most of her Japanese American removal images impounded?
Dorothea Lange
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.
Q 08Which US territory, over a third Japanese by ancestry, interned fewer than 2,000 of those residents?
Hawaii
Hawaii depended so heavily on Japanese American workers that business leaders opposed mass removal. More than 150,000 people there had Japanese ancestry.
Q 09Which Oakland welder had plastic surgery to dodge removal, then lost a landmark 1944 Supreme Court case?
Fred Korematsu
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.
Q 10Mike Shinoda, whose song Kenji retells his family's wartime internment, co-founded which rock band?
Linkin Park
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.
Q 11Which Japanese American unit that fought in Italy and France is known as the most decorated in US history?
442nd Infantry Regiment
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.
Q 12Which California camp became a maximum-security segregation center for Japanese Americans labeled disloyal?
Tule Lake
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.
Q 13The Heart Mountain camp, known for its Fair Play Committee of draft resisters, stood in which state?
Wyoming
Q 21Which South American country sent about 1,800 residents of Japanese descent to US internment camps?
Peru
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.
Q 22Which Alaska Native people, moved from their islands to camps in 1942, shared in the 1988 redress law?
Aleut
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.
Q 23Which future president's youngest brother ran the War Relocation Authority, then quit after just ninety days?
Dwight Eisenhower
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.
Q 14Which future Chief Justice pushed to remove Japanese Americans while California's attorney general?
Earl Warren
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.
Q 15Which federal lawman dismissed rumors of Japanese American spying as calls for removal grew in 1942?
J. Edgar Hoover
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.
Q 16Which Japanese term names the American-born second generation, who made up most of those sent to the camps?
Nisei
Nisei were US citizens by birth, while their immigrant parents were ineligible for citizenship. About two-thirds of the people removed were citizens.
Q 17From which province did Canada remove over 22,000 Japanese Canadians, selling their homes and boats?
British Columbia
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.
Q 18How much did each surviving internee receive under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988?
$20,000
$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.
Q 19Which president formally ended Roosevelt's removal order on its 34th anniversary, calling it wrong?
Gerald Ford
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.
Q 20Farewell to Manzanar, the 1973 memoir of a camp childhood, takes place in which part of California?
Owens Valley
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.
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.
Q 24Which Western Defense Command general urged the removal of Japanese Americans and then oversaw it?
John L. DeWitt
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.
Q 25Which Puget Sound community's Japanese Americans were removed first, by ferry, on six days' notice?
Bainbridge Island
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.
Q 26Governor Ralph Carr, who defended Japanese Americans' rights and lost his next election, led which state?
Colorado
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.
Q 27Rohwer and Jerome, camps about 30 miles apart in the Delta, briefly ranked among which state's biggest towns?
Arkansas
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.
Q 28Which future Transportation Secretary met Senator Alan Simpson as a Boy Scout inside the Heart Mountain camp?
Norman Mineta
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.
Q 29Which Yosemite landscape photographer published images of life at Manzanar as Born Free and Equal?
Ansel Adams
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.
Q 30Which David Guterson novel follows the 1954 murder trial of a Japanese American on a fictional island?
Snow Falling on Cedars
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.