The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and

incarceration duringWorld War II of between 110,000 and 120,000[2] people of Japanese

ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country. Sixty-two percent
of the internees were United States citizens.[3][4] The U.S. government ordered the removal of
Japanese Americans in 1942, shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.[5]
Such incarceration was applied unequally due to differing population concentrations and, more
importantly, state and regional politics: more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, nearly all who
lived on the West Coast, were forced into interior camps, but in Hawaii, where the 150,000-plus
Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were
interned.[6] The forced relocation and incarceration has been determined to have resulted more
from racism and discrimination among whites on the West Coast, rather than any military danger
posed by the Japanese Americans[citation needed].
President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the deportation and incarceration with Executive
Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed regional military commanders to designate
"military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to
declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire West Coast, including
all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in government
c+amps.[7] Approximately 5,000 Japanese Americans voluntarily relocated outside the exclusion
zone,[8]and some 5,500 community leaders arrested after Pearl Harbor were already in custody,
[9]
but the majority of mainland Japanese Americans were evacuated (forcibly relocated) from
their West Coast homes during the spring of 1942. The United States Census Bureau assisted the
internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans.
The Bureau denied its role for decades, but this was finally proven in 2007.[10][11] In 1944,
the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removal by ruling against Fred
Korematsu's appeal for violating an exclusion order.[12] The Court limited its decision to the
validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens with no
due process.[13]
In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League and redress
organizations,[14] President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the
decision to put Japanese Americans into internment camps had been justified by the government.
He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to
investigate the camps. The Commission's report, titled Personal Justice Denied, found little
evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and, concluding the incarceration had been the
product of racism, recommended that the government pay reparations to the survivors. In 1988,
President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the

internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each
individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race
prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".[15] The U.S. government eventually
disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been
interned and their heirs.[14][16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans