Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II

Photo courtesy of the National Japanese American Historical Society

How do we decide who belongs?
Where does the boundary between inclusion and exclusion lie?

Long-standing anti-Asian resentment and racial prejudice exaggerated the nation’s fear of those in the Japanese and Japanese American communities.

“These people were truly, in every sense, aliens. The color of their skins, the repulsiveness of their features, their undersize of figure, their incomprehensible language, strange customs, and heathen religion…conspired to set them apart.”
                                             - Hubert Howe Bancroft, “History of California,” 1890

“We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless.” —Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, 1946

In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals living in the United States and sent them to incarceration camps.

Overcome by fear that Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were a threat to national security, the U.S. government summarily incarcerated them.

“I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. [W]e must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.” - General John Dewitt, Commander of the Western Defense Command, 1943

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Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II was developed by the National Museum of American History and adapted by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The traveling exhibition and poster exhibition are supported by a grant from the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Terasaki Family Foundation, and C. L. Ehn & Ginger Lew.