Eighty three years ago, though a different community was targeted, they were targeted in much the same way. Like the breadth and variety of anti-trans legislation occurring now, the scope of actions against Japanese Americans remains difficult to summarize concisely, but a few highlights follow:
On January 5, 1942, less than a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military officially classified American selective service registrants of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens.” (Those already serving had their weapons removed and were reassigned to grunt roles or dismissed.) On March 24, Western Defense Command announced Public Proclamation No. 3, mandating a curfew, travel restrictions, and other regulations on German, Italian, and Japanese aliens, as well as on American citizens of Japanese descent. On the basis of nothing more than their ethnicity—in other words, their perceived biology—a new class of fellow citizen had been created whose civil liberties our government claimed the freedom to strip at will.
As a group, Japanese Americans posed no particular threat, a truth confirmed well before their exclusion by U.S. Navy intelligence reports. But an overweening chorus of voices—from legislators, media, and civilian organizations—declared that, unlike white citizens of German and Italian descent, danger lurked in Japanese American bodies. As General John DeWitt famously argued, the “Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil…have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”
Three days after Public Proclamation No. 3, Public Proclamation No. 4 mandated the forced evacuation and detention of West Coast Japanese Americans, both aliens and citizens, on 48 hour notice. An estimated 80,000-90,000 American citizens of Japanese descent were thus forcibly removed, ultimately placed in inland concentration camps, where most remained incarcerated throughout the war. No mass removal of German or Italian Americans occurred.
The justifications for targeting Japanese Americans relied on supposed connections between biology, morality, and national safety. Thus, Japanese Americans as a so-called “race,” and not just those based on the West Coast, became targets. On February 26, 1942, Senator Tom Stewart argued for stripping rights, citizenship, and freedom purely on the basis of biology, filing bill S. 2293, “directing the Secretary of War to take into custody and restrain” all Japanese Americans “in the United States and its Territories.” He elaborated, “the Japanese born on American soil should not be allowed citizenship…They are cowardly and immoral…[and] different from Americans in every conceivable way.”