March 20, 1946, was the end of WRA’s
administration of 10 camps that held America’s ethnic Japanese.
By P.C. Staff
The Japanese American Citizens League issued a statement following the 80th year since the federal government shuttered the last of the 10 World War II-era concentration camps administered by the federal government.
Those camps, operated by the War Relocation Authority, incarcerated more than 125,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry and legal Japanese residents then-ineligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens.
Originally known as the Tule Lake WRA Center, but later dubbed the Tule Lake Segregation Center, it was located in the northernmost part of California, just south of the state’s border with Oregon. With a peak population of 18,789 inmates, it was the largest of the 10 WRA centers.
“Tule Lake embodies the many abuses of power, losses of civil rights and liberties, and human suffering that our community and ancestors experienced during the Second World War,” the March 30 statement read. “The people confined within Tule Lake faced ever-changing and uniquely brutal circumstances that are important to remember and reckon with if we are to truly learn from the totality of what the Japanese American community faced in the 1940s.”
The League’s statement also noted how the federal government’s issuance of a loyalty questionnaire, with its contradictorily worded Questions 27 and 28 that could only be answered “yes” or “no,” would give rise to an intracommunity rift between those who answered “yes-yes” and “no-no,” swell the center’s population with “no-no” transferees from the nine other camps and change the Tule Lake to becoming a segregation center.
The statement also contained the following: “As we mark the 80th anniversary of this date, we honor the survivors who continue to tell their story and whose memories demand that we do better.”
To read the National JACL’s entire statement, visit tinyurl.com/mw5kzxwe.