Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II

Abstract

The Japanese American internment during World War II remains a popular topic for researchers. In the last decade, a spate of books appeared on the market, sparked by the discovery of relevant documents from many local and national government agencies, including the Japanese Foreign Ministry. But instead of developing new frameworks for understanding this tragic event of six decades ago, many rely on the old wineskin of the civil rights era to hold this new wine. Tetsuden Kashima, a University of Washington sociologist, typifies this approach in his Judgment without Trial. Kashima's aim is to grasp the big picture. He looks at “the totality of the decision-making process by which persons of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned during World War II” (p. 5), which began decades prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and covered not just the West Coast but Alaska, Hawaii, and Latin America. Rather than why, Kashima asks how “the selective and the later mass incarcerations” took place and “who was involved” (p. 8). He seeks to clarify this “complex imprisonment process” (p. 213) through a division of his findings into two parts, with the former half highlighting the prewar preparations for selective imprisonment by the army, navy, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi). His second part focuses on the “mass imprisonment” right after the Pearl Harbor attack when the prewar plans of “a loosely coordinated imprisonment organization…in incipient form” transformed into “a meta-organization” that “engaged in cooperative activities for a common purpose” of interning and suppressing Japanese Americans (p. 5).