First Published in 1995. Since many Japanese immigrants focused on agriculture, California and other western states sought to discourage their presense by passing laws making it impossible for Japanese to own agricultural land and enacted other discriminatory as well. The articles in this volume explore the background and ramifications of the so-called Alien Land laws and other anti-Japanese measures and the fascinating legal challenges that ensued.

Adding an important new dimension to the history of U.S.-Japan relations, this book reveals that an unofficial movement to promote good feeling between the United States and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s only narrowly failed to achieve its goal: to modify the so-called anti-Japanese exclusion clause of the 1924 U.S. immigration law. It is well known that this clause caused great indignation among the Japanese, and scholars have long regarded it as a major contributing factor in the final collapse of U.S.-Japan relations in 1941. Not generally known, however, is that beginning immediately after the enactment of the law, private individuals sought to modify the exclusion clause in an effort to stabilize relations between the two countries. The issue was considered by American and Japanese delegates at almost all subsequent U.S.-Japan diplomatic negotiations, including the 1930 London naval talks and the last-minute attempts to prevent war in 1941. However, neither the U.S. State Department nor the Japanese Foreign Office was able to take concrete measures to resolve the issue. The State Department wanted to avoid appearing to meddle with Congressional prerogatives, and the Foreign Office did not want to be seen as intruding in American domestic affairs. This official reluctance to take action opened the way for major efforts in the private sector to modify the exclusion clause. The book reveals how a number of citizens in the United States—mainly clergy and business people—persevered in their efforts despite the obstacles presented by anti-Japanese feeling and the economic dislocations of the Depression. One of the notable disclosures in the book is that this determined private push for improved relations continued even after the 1931 Manchurian Incident.

From the 1920s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans--one in four U.S.-born Nisei--came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world shaped by increasingly volatile relations between the U.S. and Japan. Based on transnational and bilingual research in the United States and Japan, Michael R. Jin recuperates the stories of this unique group of American emigrants at the crossroads of U.S. and Japanese empire. From the Jim Crow American West to the Japanese colonial frontiers in Asia, and from internment camps in America to Hiroshima on the eve of the atomic bombing, these individuals redefined ideas about home, identity, citizenship, and belonging as they encountered multiple social realities on both sides of the Pacific. Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless examines the deeply intertwined histories of Asian exclusion in the United States, Japanese colonialism in Asia, and volatile geopolitical changes in the Pacific world that converged in the lives of Japanese American migrants.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

Race, Rights and National Security: Law and the Japanese American Incarceration is both a comprehensive resource and course book that uses the lens of the WWII imprisonment of Japanese Americans to explore the danger posed when the country sacrifices the rule of law in the name of national security. Following an historical overview of the Asian American legal experience as unwanted minorities, the book examines the infamous Supreme Court cases that upheld the orders leading to the mass incarceration and their later reopening in coram nobis proceedings that proved the government lied to the Court. With that foundation, the book explores the continued frightening relevance of those cases, including how racial and religious minorities continue to be harmed in the name of national security and the threat to democracy when courts fail to act as a check on their co-equal branches of government. New to the Third Edition: An entirely new section, which views the recent targeting of religious minorities through the lens of the Japanese American incarceration, including the Muslim travel ban case of Trump v. Hawaii, which purported to overrule Korematsu v. United States. A continuous inquiry throughout the book regarding the role of courts in reviewing government actions taken in the name of national security, the tensions inherent in identifying that role, the potential cost of excessive court deference, and a proposed method for judicial review of national security-based government actions. Updated text, including revisions that tailor the book’s content to its revised focus on national security, enhanced discussions of early anti-Asian exclusionary laws and Ex Parte Endo; recent events raising parallels to the Japanese American incarceration, such as the incarceration of immigrants and family separation at the southern border and the continued negative stereotyping of Asian Americans. Augmented discussion of ethical rules in relation to misconduct by government lawyers during World War II. Professors and students will benefit from: A succinct overview of Asian American legal history An overarching narrative that takes the reader from early anti-Asian discriminatory laws to the wartime Japanese American incarceration to today, interweaving carefully contextualized case law with questions, original government and litigation documents, oral histories, commentary, and photographs to stimulate class discussion. A focus on both the legal and non-legal issues surrounding the Japanese American incarceration, so that readers consider how the legal system, the law, and players within the legal system act within a broader milieu of politics, economics, and culture. The ability to understand law and the legal system in a way that is both interdisciplinary and that crosses different areas of law. The book treats subjects such as race relations and critical race theory; constitutional, criminal, and national security law; criminal and civil procedure; professional ethics; evidence; legal history; and lawyering practice. A professor in the area of constitutional law, for example, might excerpt relevant portions of the book to supplement the standard, typically decontextualized case law treatment of the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases. At the same time, this book explores these and other cases in their historical and political context and addresses the law’s real human impact. Finally, the story of the Japanese American incarceration provides a powerful starting place for students to discuss a range of present-day issues regarding stereotypes and profiling, government restraint on liberties, national protectionism, and civic responsibility. If teaching at its best is about engaging students’ hearts and minds, and provoking stimulating debate, these materials are designed to facilitate just that.