From Despised Enemy to Wronged American: Images of the Japanese American Internment, 1942-1992

This thesis attempts to elucidate the popular image of the World War II Japanese American internment in postwar America. It examines how the internment was described in the print press, high school history textbooks, and motion pictures between the early 1940s and the early 1990s, and explains when, why, and how the description changed.

The popular image of the internment was transformed from “justifiable relocation of despised enemies” to “unjustifiable incarceration of wronged American citizens.” Despite earlier studies on the internment, which often suggest this dramatic shift occurred in the late 1980s, this thesis demonstrates that the shift actually took place in the mid 1950s and the early 1960s. Although the image of Japanese Americans as hateful enemies dominated the wartime print media, it dissipated quickly after the end of the war and never became prevalent in the postwar era. The counter image of them as wronged citizens emerged in the midst of the war, and swiftly replaced the negative image within a decade after the war. From then on, the internment has always been depicted as a grave injustice and a tragic mistake. Therefore, at least at the level of the popular image, the American public’s critical attitude toward the internment and their sympathy for Japanese Americans were obvious three decades before the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which mandated a formal apology by the president and monetary compensation to surviving ex-internees.

This transition of Japanese American image seems attributable to a series of reversals of longstanding legal discrimination against Asian Americans in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, as well as to the enactment of the Japanese American Claims Act of 1948. These legal changes presumably raised the image of ex-internees. Furthermore, Japanese Americans’ wartime good behavior contributed to the development of their own image as wronged citizens.