The End of Detention
Even before the end of WW II, the US government was taking steps to eliminate internment camps and allow Japanese Americans to return to their homes on the West Coast. In 1943, detention of Japanese Americans was no longer considered “militarily necessary.” The Departments of the Interior, Justice, and War hoped to end the policy of excluding Japanese Americans from far western states as early as the spring of 1944. The US Navy got onboard in September, and the head of the US Army’s Western Defense Command (WDC), the military units responsible for defending the Pacific Coast from enemy attack, took the lead, exempting more than 1400 individual Japanese Americans from exclusion at the end of the year. (Kristen Hayashi: The Return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast, 1945, March 6, 2021; Brian Densho, Return to West Coast, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Return_to_West_Coast/)
At the first Cabinet meeting following the general election in November, leaders of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration made the final decision, issuing Public Proclamation Number 21 on December 17 and setting January 2, 1945 as the date Japanese Americans could begin reentering the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. (Return to West Coast)
A key factor was the US Supreme Court decision in the case In re Mitsuye Endo 323 U.S. 283 that unanimously concluded the federal government could not indefinitely confine citizens of Japanese citizenry who were “concededly loyal.” (Greg Robinson, Université du Québec À Montréal, Ex parte Mitsuye Endo (1944)
The Endo Case
Mitsuye Endo was the daughter of Japanese immigrants. She was born in Sacramento, California, in 1920, graduated from Sacramento Senior High School and secretarial school, and got a clerical job with the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Endo and other employees were fired.
While Endo and her family were interned at the camp at Tule Lake and later Topaz, Utah, she along with 62 other dismissed employees challenged the decision by the state’s Personnel Board. She became lead plaintiff in a habeas corpus petition that challenged the exclusion of Japanese Americans and made it impossible for them to return to their jobs. The petition became a test case on behalf of second-generation Japanese people who were Christian, had never been to Japan, and could neither speak nor read Japanese. Endo not only met all three conditions, she had a brother in the U.S. Army. (Ex parte Mitsuye Endo)
Resettlement
Four to six train coaches each week began to leave the Heart Mountain (Wyoming) Japanese Relocation Center in 1945, carrying Japanese Americans away from internment and into Billings, Montana.
As internment camps started closing, internees were given $25 and a one-way ticket to their former home towns. (Michael T. Maki: How Japanese Americans Fought for—and Won—Redress for WW II Incarceration, April 20, 2022, updated January 31, 2025.
The process of returning Japanese Americans was nevertheless slow-going. Before the war, nearly 36,000 Japanese Americans lived in Los Angeles County. But only 300 returned a month after the territory was reopened in early 1945, and only 2000 relocated by the end of August. (The Return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast ).
Of the original 120,000 total number of internees in all internment camps, 55,000 Japanese were still incarcerated in April, 1945, and only 12,000 to 15,000 internees were expected to return to Los Angeles County by the end of the year. (Return of Japanese Americans; Return to West Coast)
A number of internees relocated relatively smoothly. Some still had a business, farm, or home they could return to and reclaim the property as their own. These included Japanese Americans who had arranged for caretakers to oversee their land or farms before leaving for camp, such as those who had lived in the agricultural areas of Cortez, Cressy, and Livingston, California, and those who operated the California Flower Market in San Francisco. Some took advantage of The War Relocation Authority’s 25 district offices that helped with resettlement. (Return to West Coast)
Others were called “scouts,” people willing to visit their home towns, look for available housing, assess the job market, and determine whether residents would welcome, or at least tolerate, Japanese people before they actually made the trip back home. (Return to West Coast)
But many had lost their property and belongings and could not return to the life they had known. Kristen Hayashi tells about one family. Kimiko Keimi and her 13-year-old son no longer had access to their home and the laundry they had managed before the war when they left the internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, in October, 1945. So they moved into a temporary trailer operated by the federal government until Kimiko found domestic work for a family in the San Fernando Valley, and she and her son could share a room in the family home. Kimiko’s older son Albert got room and board while working for a family in Hollywood and completing his senior year at Hollywood High School, and Kimiko’s husband moved in with other laborers working for the railroad in the Pacific Northwest. (Return of Japanese Americans)
While Japanese Americans could find temporary housing in hostels, hotels, or trailers, they often had difficulty finding and acquiring permanent housing because of restrictions on home purchases by Japanese and other people of color. (Return to West Coast)
There also was an overall shortage of adequate housing. Much of the land and property once owned by Japanese Americans were now slated for development as shopping centers or other development. And existing housing was in short supply because of high demand. Japanese Americans recently freed from internment were not the only housing seekers: Large numbers of migrants had relocated to work in Pacific Coast war industries over the last four years, and increasing numbers of GIs were returning from overseas. (Return of Japanese Americans, Return to West Coast)
Japanese Americans no longer had businesses or jobs they could return to, so many went into domestic work or turned to gardening until civil service and other employment opportunities opened up over time. (Return of Japanese Americans; Return to West Coast)
Returning Japanese Americans also worried about discrimination and possible violence. Although most were able to return without incident, there were reports of shots being fired into returnees’ homes, arson attempts, terrorist threats, and vandalism. (Return to West Coast)
The Beginning and the End
Between March and November, 1942, everyone of Japanese heritage was evacuated from the state of California and parts of Arizona, Oregon, and Washington and moved to one of ten internment camps in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, or Wyoming.
The War Department rescinded its orders for exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans in December, 1944, and beginning in January, 1945, internees were released and sent home.
The last internment camp closed on March 20, 1946. (Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong, Stanford University Press, 1993)
The Cost
”The losses sustained by Japanese Americans were great,” writes Leslie T. Hatamiya in Righting a Wrong. Wartime property losses, estimated by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, topped $400 million in 1942. Professional careers and educational advancement were disrupted or lost.
Beyond business, there were heavy personal losses. “As families fell apart, individuals lost their self-esteem and pride—two characteristics important in Japanese culture. But most significantly, Japanese Americans suffered the indignity of being falsely imprisoned by their own government. They had been innocent victims in a racist episode that betrayed the very principles on which the United States was founded.” (Righting a Wrong, p 25)
The Japanese American community did not silently accept these losses over the long term. Beginning in 1970, the Japanese American Citizens League resolved to seek redress. See the next Time Stamp
Sources
Brian Niiya , Densho, Return to West Coast, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Return_to_West_Coast/)
Greg Robinson , Université du Québec À Montréal, Ex parte Mitsuye Endo (1944)
Leslie T. Hatamiya: Righting a Wrong, Stanford University Press, 1993)