Is That Legal?

Dear Greg Robinson,
Your book, By Order of the President, was excellent and I have quoted from it on several occasions in lectures I give on the Japanese American Experience. I am a Nisei who was nine when interned during World War II. My father was a prosperous farmer in Guadalupe, California, and a community leader who was arrested the night after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He thought of himself as a Japanese patriot and expressed his pro-Japan sentiments freely in public speeches. He did not think it necessary to hide his feelings in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which by itself should have shown he was no spy or potential saboteur. He was as surprised as the rest of nation (whether Japan or the United States) by the audacious and, as it turned out, foolish bombing of Pearl Harbor.
We Nisei knew how our parents felt about Japan, even if we ourselves did not know where our loyalties lay. Until Pearl Harbor, most of us were not confronted with the need to make up our minds about such matters. Some older, better educated Nisei did decide early on and formed the Japanese American Citizens League, which was tellingly called “The Loyalty League” in at least one locality. The rest of us did not think in terms of “loyalty,” which comes to the forefront mainly in times of war. If we thought of such things at all, it was in terms of racial and cultural identity. Were we Japanese or were we American? We were both. Our race and all the baggage that attended it would always be Japanese, but our cultural identity became increasingly American as we went through the public schools and were immersed irresistibly in the American popular culture. Our cultural identity, I do not believe, was something most Nisei consciously thought about, nor was it something we needed to think about until December 7, 1941. It was then that we had to decide whether we were American or Japanese in a superimposed political context that ignored the realities of our family histories and our humdrum everyday lives. We were suddenly confronted with accusations that our parents and possibly we ourselves posed a threat to U.S. national security. Military necessity, it was said, required our removal from the West Coast of the United States because of a possibility of a Japanese invasion. Some Nisei, leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League, by this time had become so Americanized that they had become accustomed to seeing themselves through the eyes of the white majority. From this perspective, it was reasonable to suspect all Japanese in America on the basis of their race. During this period of our history, racial prejudice against non-white minorities was viewed not as a fault but as a virtue, as you clearly illustrate in your book through FDR quotes. The problem for assimilated minorities, however, was that they were co-opted into a biased view of themselves, leading some to self-loathing.
Which brings us to the question you raise as to why some Nisei might find comfort in the thought that FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and let it happen to allow U.S. entry into the war in Europe.
My personal view is that FDR, Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, George Marshall and the rest of the military high command knew that Japan was about to begin a campaign of military conquest of the oil-rich regions of southeast Asia. It is also my belief that FDR deliberately did nothing to dissuade the Japanese from beginning this campaign — for example, by lifting the oil embargo placed against Japan — because he was eager to enter the war in Europe. He surmised accurately that a war in Asia would inevitably allow U.S. entry into the war in Europe, which Hitler foolishly expedited by declaring war on the U.S.! I do believe, however, that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a genuine surprise. What has not been sufficiently investigated is why U.S. forces on the Philippines were not better prepared since they were directly in the path of Japan’s southern advance.
All of this, of course, has nothing to do with whether Japanese living on the West Coast of the United States should or should not have been removed and incarcerated. There seems to be Nisei who want to believe that FDR by not preventing the attack on Pearl Harbor actually caused the war, which in this convoluted thinking lifts the guilt from Japan and therefore from Japanese Americans as well.
What we need to understand is that Japan was guilty of aggression in Asia which led to the war with the United States, but none of us in America, including my pro-Japan father, had anything to do with it. The question which should concern us is whether there was a military necessity for our incarceration. We now know there was none, which should suffice, the lunatic ranting a la Michelle Malkin notwithstanding.
Gene Oishi