The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exception

Abstract

The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exception Fred I. Lee (bio) The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. — Carl Schmitt, Political Theology Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 On February 19 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in the first of a series of decisions of fateful consequence for Japanese Americans during World War II. In the first weeks of the American involvement in the war, the state treated Germans, Italians, and Japanese alike as ‘enemy aliens.’ Based on lists compiled with the help of the 1940 Alien Registration Act, the FBI immediately arrested 1,700 potentially dangerous aliens the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Similarly, although the attorney general denied the Western Defense Command (WDC) permission to search “all alien homes” for the purposes of seizing potential tools of espionage and subversion, the Department of Justice ordered all enemy aliens in seven western states to surrender such items on December 29 1941.1 But the military actions authorized by Executive Order (EO) 9066 made sharp distinctions amongst enemy aliens: not only were Japanese aliens treated differently than German and Italian aliens, but in the evacuation and internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast, some 70,000 citizens found themselves forcefully ‘alienated’ into the enemy category. It is apparent that for the state, the West Coast Japanese Americans — including the Issei (first generation aliens), the Nisei (second generation citizens) and the Kibei (Nisei educated in Japan) — were initially enemy aliens alike. Not yet fully realized is the significance of undoing this ‘lumping’ through later decisions on ‘splitting’ this population along different lines. To achieve this recognition, I will theorize the internment as a succession of sovereign decisions on the friend/enemy distinction coincident with a racial state of exception from which a state project of racial assimilation emerged. The stakes of this investigation then involve the identification of the very ‘what’ of the Japanese internment — for the Japanese internment, narrated in a more familiar form, is a story of rights and racism.. Along with assignations of responsibility, scholars have sought out the causes of the decision to displace and confine Japanese Americans in the major historiographical debate surrounding the internment.2 Hence this exceptional event in American history has been understood primarily in terms of the economic lobbying of white farmers on the Pacific Coast, the longstanding tradition of anti-Asian racism in the United States and closely related wartime hysteria over fifth column activity.3 Yet whatever the differences in historical explanations, the vast majority of scholars structure their narratives within what might be called the ‘necessity-rights circle’.4 The political question pursued by these inquiries is whether rights were justifiably or unjustifiably sacrificed by the military necessity invoked by Executive Order 9066, in which “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national defense.” For example, Clinton Rossiter finds the internment “extremely disturbing” especially in the violation of “the most basic rights of a large group of American citizens.”5 This assessment might seem surprising coming from the defender of the doctrine of “Constitutional Dictatorship,” which states that “in times of crisis a democratic, constitutional government must be temporarily altered to whatever degree necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions... the government will have more power and the people fewer rights.”6 But particularly perturbing is the fact that “the criterion for...