Into the Badlands: Japanese American Incarceration and the Environment

Abstract

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States not only declared war on the Empire of Japan, but also began the forced relocation of thousands of Japanese American citizens from the Pacific Coast to concentration camps in the inland West. Over the course of the next four years, the experience of Japanese Americans in these camps was characterized not only by scant wages and arduous work weeks, but also by the harsh climate of Western United States. For Japanese Americans uprooted from the balmy Pacific Coast, the hostile alien landscape shaped everything from their mental and physical health to their overall perception of imprisonment, often compounding their feelings of homesickness and anger. Thus, the environment was not merely a site of Japanese American incarceration, but an instrument of social control manipulated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA): administrators situated the camps in strategic locations designed to both isolate Japanese Americans and secure their labor in the name of patriotism and the public good. Thus, Japanese American internment was more than just an atrocious civil rights violation, but an instance of environmental injustice where one group used the natural world as a tool to assert authority over another.