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Ten weeks after the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Western portion of the United States. As a result, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, 90 percent of those living on the mainland, were ordered into internment camps where they lived behind barbed-wire fences beneath armed guard towers. Although two-thirds of the internees were U.S. citizens born in this country, citizenship provided no protection. Any person with Japanese heritage within the designated military zone, citizen or alien, was considered potentially disloyal and imprisoned without trial for an average of two to four years.
The story of the internment camps and hardships suffered by Japanese Americans during this time went virtually untold for decades. It was not until 1980, nearly 40 years later, that the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) reviewed the facts and circumstances surrounding Executive Order 9066 and the internment. Through an extensive evaluation of government documents and testimonies of former government officials and internees, the CWRIC found no military justification for the Order, and concluded that a “grave injustice