March 28 1942 March 18 1942 March 2 1942

May 8 1942 September 2 1943 July 2 1948 November 6 1962 December 27 1969

February 19 1942

December 7 1941 July 25 1941

July 14 1981 August 10 1988

Japanese American Timeline

1941

July 25th

A Presidential Order froze Japanese assets in the United States and causes a run on Japanese banks.

1941

December 7th Local authorities and the F.B.I. began to round up the Issei leadership of the Japanese American communities in Hawaii and on the mainland. By 6:30 a.m. the following morning 736 Issei were in custody; within 48 hours, the number was 1,291. Caught by surprise for the most part, these men were held under no formal charges and family members were forbidden from seeing them. Most spent the war years in enemy alien internment camps run by the Justice Department.

1942

February 19th President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which allowed military authorities to exclude any group of people from any region without trial or hearings for reasons of "military necessity." E.O. 9066 provided the legal authority behind the mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

1942
March 2nd John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, issued public proclamation no. 1 which created military areas nos. 1 and 2. Military area no. 1 included the western portions of California, Oregon and Washington, and part of Arizona, while military area no. 2 included the rest of these states. The proclamation also indicated that people would be excluded from military area no. 1 and encouraged Japanese Americans to leave voluntarily. For various reasons, voluntary resettlement was doomed to failure and was effectively called off on March 27 after fewer than five thousand people (out of over 110,000) had left the area.

1942

March 18th

The War Relocation Authority is created.

1942

March 28th

Minoru Yasui walked into a Portland, Oregon police station at 11:20 pm to present himself for arrest to test the constitutionality of the curfew orders in court. His case, along with those of fellow dissenters Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

1942

May 8th The first "volunteers" arrived at Poston, Arizona, one of ten "relocation centers" which housed Japanese Americans during the war years. Through the rest of the summer, Japanese Americans were transferred from the "assembly centers" to Manzanar and Tule Lake, California; Amache, Colorado; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas; and Gila River and Poston, Arizona.

1943

September 2nd

After nearly a year and a half of training, the 100th

Infantry Battalion, an all-Nisei unit from Hawaii, finally landed in Oran, North Africa. They were joined by the 442nd in June 1944. Together, they went on to compile a sterling war record, suffering high casualty and low desertion rates, and winning numerous unit and individual citations.

1948

July 2nd President Truman signs the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, a measure to compensate Japanese Americans for certain economic losses attributable to their forced evacuation. Although some $38 million was to be paid out through provisions of the act, it would be largely ineffective even on the limited scope in which it operated.

1962

November 6th Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii becomes the first Japanese American to be elected to the United States Senate with a resounding victory of Republican challenger Ben Dillingham. Inouye had been the first Japanese American elected to the House of Representatives in 1959.

1969

December 27th The first annual Manzanar Pilgrimage take place. These trips back to Manzanar would inspire pilgrimages to other concentration camps in the years to come.

1981

July 14th The CWRIC holds a public hearing in Washington D.C. as part of its investigation into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Similar hearings would be held in many other cities throughout the rest of 1981. The emotional testimony by Japanese American witnesses about their wartime experiences would prove cathartic for the community and might be considered a turning point in the redress movement. In all, some 750 witnesses testify. The last hearing takes place at Harvard University on Dec. 9, 1981.

1988

August 10th HR 442 is signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. It provides for individual payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee and a $1.25 billion education fund among other provisions.