'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Japs': Japanese American internment during World War II and its challenge to Americanism

"America promised freedom, but didn't uphold it," observed one of the 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been evacuated from her home on the West Coast after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Perhaps glancing down the rows of barracks, around the desert landscape, or to the fence that defined her World War II internment, she continued, "Witness life, liberty, and the pursuit of Japs." Though exceedingly acerbic, this woman's reproach draws attention to the nation's failure to maintain the democratic principles established at its founding and, ultimately, encapsulates the topic of this thesis.;Though Pearl Harbor appropriately triggered a national sense of fear and vulnerability, more importantly, it precipitated a touchstone event: the evacuation and relocation of all ethnic Japanese living in southern Arizona and the western portions of California, Oregon, and Washington. Citing military necessity while basing exclusion criteria solely on race, the evacuation order effectively exiled over ninety percent of America's ethnic Japanese---two-thirds of whom were American citizens---from their homes on the West Coast. It compelled these men, women, and children to leave virtually all of their possessions and mechanisms of social support and confined them to internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. There most remained incarcerated without trial for the duration of World War II.;This thesis explores the consequences of this event. It argues that the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II challenged notions of Americanism---the very principles that defined America---and profoundly affected Japanese Americans' sense of identity.;Immigrants and citizens alike have been taught that the United States is committed to democracy and personal freedoms, while citizens are ostensibly extended the rights of free speech and free association, security from unreasonable searches and seizure of property, and a trial by peers; yet as this thesis reveals, the mass internment of an entire group of people solely on the basis of race challenged the ideals America espoused, including those codified by its constitution. Indeed, this chapter in American history challenges the concept of what it means to be an American, Japanese American's claim to Americanness, and individual's sense of identity as Americans of Japanese descent.;Although it focuses on the years between 1942 and 1945, the period that witnessed Japanese-American internment, this thesis situates its analysis within a longer historical narrative that details Japanese Americans' early experiences in the U.S. Defining what it means to be an American, this paper shows how Japanese Americans explored their Americanness while incarcerated, revealing further that Japanese Americans at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho explored their American and Japanese identity through mundane activities that were embraced as part of a larger effort to create normalcy in the midst of the physical, emotional, and psychological difficulties of dispossession, displacement, and confinement.