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Based on research from the National Archives and Records Administration and the Japanese American National Museum, Chapter One analyzes the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted monetary reparations to survivors of internment, and the testimonies given before the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a fact-finding government body that paved the way for the redress act. While the redress act marked a remarkable achievement for activists and internees, it ultimately marked a shift, not an ending, in the ways the U.S. state deploys racism. However, CWRIC witnesses articulated expansive notions of justice that exceed the limits of redress. Though the redress act ultimately disregarded their critiques, these testimonies nevertheless offer resources to imagine other possible ways to engage with internment’s remains.

This chapter covers the period during and just after World War II, a time when anti-Asian racism peaked against Japanese Americans while softening significantly for other Asian groups and in some ways even for Japanese Americans themselves. The destruction of Pearl Harbor led to the evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast based on deep suspicions about the group’s loyalty. Yet faced with necessities related to war propaganda, the federal government also celebrated Japanese Americans, including internees, as loyal Americans, which culminated in the praise for triumphant Nisei soldiers. Meanwhile, Congress repealed Chinese, Filipino, and Indian exclusion, and California repealed the alien land law due to exigencies stemming for U.S. military alliances and international relations during World War II and subsequent Cold War. By 1952, through the McCarran-Walter immigration legislation, Congress repealed Japanese exclusion and for the first time all Asian nations had immigration quotas and their peoples could become U.S. citizens. This was a “great transformation” in the annuals of Asian American history.

This chapter highlights how many women historians, like the author, delve into the histories that have been marginalized by the dominant canon, finding palpable relevance to present-day social justice issues. The chapter then turns to the little-known history of the internment of Japanese Latin Americans in the United States during World War II, a case of extraordinary rendition. Focusing on the internment of the Japanese Peruvians, this chapter argues that global “yellow peril” and eugenic ideologies played an essential role in U.S. and Peruvian policies during WWII. Further, it challenges readers to consider how purported policies of national security have been motivated by thinly veiled racism.

This chapter begins the story in the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, and follows how the Japanese American subject moved from being an “enemy alien” under surveillance to laboring as an interrogator of Koreans during the Korean War. It reconstructs the types of interrogation rooms these Japanese American interrogators invented, what they resisted, and what they reinterpreted. In contrast with the interrogation rooms of the past that were cloaked in darkness, secrecy, and violence, the US military interrogation room was now supposedly an idealized site of regulated and willing exchange between the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ushered the United States into World War II. Within hours, and suspension and martial law came to rule the Hawaiian Territory. On the mainland, the military imposed curfews, designated huge portions of the western United States to be military areas of exclusion, and ultimately created “relocation centers” across the west to detain over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, including over 70,000 citizens. As this chapter explores, in the face of serious constitutional questions about the propriety of martial law, internment of citizens, and military trials of civilians, constitutional considerations generally gave way to war hysteria. But, as many key government actors recognized at the time, the detention of Japanese American citizens violated the Suspension Clause, standing as it did at odds with the entire history of the Clause. As challenges to the relevant military policies spilled over into the courts, the institution arguably best situated to identify and highlight their constitutional infirmities—the Supreme Court—never did so, leaving this episode standing as both a dangerous and deeply problematic precedent in American constitutional history.

This chapter examines the lasting reverberations of internment that persist even after the camps have closed, rights are restored, and the suffering of victims is acknowledged through official redress. It examines three testimonial texts offered by descendants of internments—CWRIC testimonies, Janice Mirikitani’s “Breaking Silence” (1981), and Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige. It argues that rightlessness is not limited to the body’s confinement within a barbed-wire perimeter, but by a history that endures in the U.S. state’s continuing creation of rightless persons via camp imprisonment and in the lived histories that the rightless carry with them. It argues that, endowed with an ever-adaptable and expanding capacity, rightlessness can become an inherited condition, one that exceeds legal definitions or empirical ways of knowing. The testimonial and aesthetic works at the chapter’s center offer a useful resource in deciphering a dimension of rightlessness as nebulous and resistant to empirical interpretation as the afterlife.

To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan’s “Yellow Peril” prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The chapter concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment.

Chapter 2 considers Kirk’s five years (1942–1946) as a U.S. Army conscript serving in Utah and Florida and working with chemical weapons. During this time, Kirk discovered some form of the supernatural, but he also embraced Stoicism as well as the friendship of then-famous authors Isabel Paterson and Albert Jay Nock. Not surprisingly, the internment of Japanese Americans as well as the use of atomic weaponry on two Japanese cities had a dramatic and profound impact on Kirk’s mind and soul.

This chapter examines the discursive possibilities of the filmed family memoir, called “family portrait documentary,” as a form of historical mediation. Three family portrait documentaries are discussed: Lise Yasui's The Family Gathering (1989), Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury's Halving the Bones (1995), and Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003). The first two films use innovative techniques to reenact the family story of Japanese American internment. In the third, the author also deploys numerous audiovisual techniques to perform the life of her great-grandfather, a vaudeville star, and their transnational family. This chapter considers the ways in which family memoirs manipulate the possibilities that film offers in representing generations of Asian American families, particularly by asking crucial questions about private and public negotiations with history and family stories. It also explores how such documentaries mediate the history of Asian Americans and reconstruct a familial and historical past that acknowledges the elusive nature of personal memory.

President Franklin Roosevelt produced another transformation of both the Constitution and the office of the presidency. The outpouring of legislation during the hundred days altered the presidential role within Congress and initiated new levels of federal involvement in the lives of citizens. A permanent expansion of the executive branch challenged the supervisory capacities of Roosevelt and later presidents. The second New Deal created today’s social safety net. Roosevelt established the modern institutional presidency. He battled the Supreme Court over constitutional interpretation and failed in his court-packing plan. He did not entrench his constitutional vision by seeking amendments. He did not adequately protect civil liberties, notably in the Japanese-American internment in World War II. In foreign policy, he guided the nation to abandon neutrality in favor of international involvement. As commander in chief, he set strategy in World War II. His third term broke the traditional two-term limit.

Witnesses at the 2012 trial in Ohio of a former airman convicted of beating his Okinawan wife to death testified that he had often battered her. The case exemplified the isolation of wives who arrive with no acquaintances in the U.S. besides their husbands, and cannot overcome the language barrier to make other contacts. Isolation also results from the individualistic nature of American society. Interviewees accustomed to close relationships with relatives and neighbours typical in Okinawa were surprised that in the U.S. “neighbours don’t even speak to each other.” Many suffered from homesickness. However, one expressed her gratitude for the close friendship and support of an American woman next door who guided her to the supermarket and post office, teaching her the essentials for daily life. Several encountered racial discrimination in employment, marriage (before 1967), and the bullying of their children in school. Some women had been apprehensive about coming to the U.S. where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II and anti-Japanese hostility persisted afterwards. Those whose husbands were still in the military had free family health care and discount shopping, but had to endure their husbands’ long absences, and deployments to areas of conflict.

The epilogue touches on how the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans and their supervised parole during World War II provided displaced persons for hire as servants. It also briefly explores the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, whose sponsorship requirements meant that European refugees could agree to work as live-in servants in exchange for asylum. More attention is devoted to the labor exceptions built into the 1965 Immigration Act, which provided Jamaican and other Caribbean women with a short-lived opportunity to enter the United States after taking advantage of immigration quota rankings that privileged domestic servants. Policies that continue to authorize migrant servants’ temporary admission into the United States, contingent on their performance of domestic service to the employers they entered with, also garner focus here. Finally, the epilogue concludes by discussing how household consumers have exploited domestic and care workers classified as undocumented—and how the absence of state action has enabled this social relation of production.

This Prologue describes three stories concerning Korematsu. The first is told in late 2015 by U.S. judges. It reaches back to the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in Korematsu validating the World War II Japanese American removal and incarceration. And it discerns insights, maybe lessons, for America about fundamental freedoms sacrificed in the name of perceived exigency. The second story starts with Justice Jackson’s loaded weapon warning about expanding Korematsu’s principle to new purposes. In 2014, then-Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia responded to a question about a possible U.S. mass exclusion or roundup of Muslims with a disturbing prophesy. The third story concerns Scalia’s it-could-happen-again prophesy and how the laws fall silent. That story is an amalgam of calls for mass Muslim exclusion and detention by government officials and Republican presidential candidates after the 2015 Paris and San Bernardino attacks—calls that partially coalesced in President Trump’s controversial 2017 exclusion-and-detention executive orders.

This chapter focuses on Collier and the US Indian Service (IS). Collier brought applied anthology into the Indian Service so as to develop culturally appropriate policies—an innovation he claimed was inspired by what he saw in Mexico. Collier drew on examples of indirect colonial rule, including Spanish colonialism in New Spain, to further a scientific democratic governance of cultural and racial differences. Collier and others sought to promote and use democratic forms of Native leadership. During and after the Second World War, Collier, along with Laura Thompson and other academics, extended what they had learned regarding the management of ethnic difference to the Japanese-American internment camp at Poston, Arizona, which was run by the Indian Service, and, later, to U.S. “dependencies” abroad and “minorities” at home. This chapter charts the shift toward a more universalizing view of modernization and its application to diverse groups.

The Introduction begins by exploring modern examples sanctioning the concept of the citizen enemy combatant, such as the War on Terror cases of José Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. It then suggests that the roots of this concept may be found in the World War II detention of Japanese Americans, including over 70,000 U.S. citizens. The Introduction continues by arguing that this modern conception of the citizen enemy combatant is impossible to reconcile with the historic understanding of the Suspension Clause and the habeas privilege that trace their origins to English legal tradition, an understanding that remained consistent well through Reconstruction. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book.

The book concludes by arguing that the current state of American habeas jurisprudence should trouble anyone who cares about the Constitution. As the chapters of the book reveal, the War on Terror Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans stand entirely at odds with everything the Founding generation sought to achieve with the Suspension Clause. Specifically, the origins and long-standing interpretation of the Suspension Clause understood it to prohibit the government, in the absence of a valid suspension, from detaining persons who can claim the protection of domestic law outside the criminal process, even in wartime.