How we frame the history of Japanese American incarceration informs our opposition to the intersecting forms of state violence we face in our current crisis — from Muslim bans to mass incarceration.

A truck packed with Japanese American residents of San Pedro, California, leaves for a temporary detention center on April 5, 1942 [PHOTO: CLEM ALBERS]

Seventy-five years ago today, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas…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…may impose in his discretion.”

Despite the race-neutral language of the document, in the midst of wartime anti-Japanese hysteria, the singular intent of the order was clear: to target Japanese Americans, and to a lesser extent, German and Italian Americans, to be stripped of their property and livelihoods to be detained indefinitely in concentration camps. The rest is history: 120,000 Japanese Americans, sixty-two percent of whom were American citizens, were forcibly relocated to ten concentration camps scattered throughout the West and Arkansas.

Steeped in similar wartime paranoias, this anniversary of E.O. 9066 takes on a new resonance. The Trump administration’s rhetorical and policy escalation of the War on Terror, but also the War on Drugs and the War on Crime, urges a rereading of WWII state violence against Japanese Americans: one that challenges Asian Americans whose political convictions are guided by the atrocities of Japanese American incarceration to radically expand our political sympathies, solidarities, and strategies.

Since September 11, 2001, Japanese American incarceration has been read in conversation with the state’s unconstitutional profiling of Muslims under the guise of national security. Such parallels have been fertile ground for building Muslim-Japanese community partnerships and engaging in strategic interventions to Islamophobia as state policy. For example, in 2003, incarceration resistor (and plaintiff in Korematsu vs. United States) Fred Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Muslim inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, calling on the court to learn from the mistake of restricting the civil liberties of Japanese Americans due to similar racist paranoias. Meanwhile, just last December, Japanese and Muslim American community groups in Chicago marked the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by warning against Trump’s calls to register Muslim Americans. Many more such convenings taking place across the country this weekend acknowledge the dire stakes for remembering the history of Japanese American incarceration in order to resist Islamophobia today.

These comparisons are apt, and given the Trump administration’s plans to issue a revised executive order to selectively exclude Muslim travelers, more urgent than ever. As Trump surrogates such as Carl Higbie cite Japanese American incarceration as legal precedent for Muslim registration, and amidst a flurry of ahistorical editorials arguing that E.O. 9066 was justified, it is clear that the right is attempting to use the history of Japanese American incarceration to lay the ideological groundwork for the increased persecution of Muslim Americans. But the contemporary resonances of Japanese American mass incarceration need not end there. Unfortunately, the logics and mechanisms of that history — forced displacement, labor exploitation, the detention of immigrants, and the repression of dissidents — recur throughout the state’s war on communities of color today.

In a 1972 interview, Japanese American reparations activist and prison abolitionist Yuri Kochiyama remarked on how her experiences in American concentration camps informed her intersectional analysis of the conditions of all communities of color living under white supremacy:

“It happens to all third-world people, only they give it a different name. Africans were put in plantations. They were concentration camps. The American Indians were put in reservations, which were concentration camps. Wherever there is a concentration of people who have been dispossessed and disempowered, they are in concentration camps…The Chinese, while they were building the railroads, lived in railroad camps that were very much like concentration camps. I think that the Chicano migratory workers camps were like concentration camps.”

How might borrowing from Kochiyama’s reading of state violence urge a more robust analysis of the state’s systematic denial of civil liberties to communities of color? How might excavating the political priorities of early Japanese American leaders of the Asian American Movement — from Kochiyama to Mo Nishida — reinvigorate a growing Asian American movement calling for an end to prisons, policing, deportations, and beyond?

With newly aggressive ICE raids terrorizing immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Day of Remembrance is not complete without reckoning with another form of concentration camp growing within our midst: the for-profit immigration prisons that house tens of thousands of migrant people and families awaiting forced deportation. Indeed, Japanese American psychologist Satsuki Ina made this very connection when she compared a family detention center for Central American refugees to the Tule Lake concentration camp in which she was born 70 years prior.

Similarly, as critiques of prisons as a source of underclass labor enter the mainstream through groundbreaking work like Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, it is worth revisiting the role that labor exploitation played in making Japanese American incarceration profitable. Amongst the litany of horrors of incarceration, it is less known that Japanese American prisoners were paid as little as $12 a month (compared to a 1941 median market wage of $108), often while being forced to build the very camps that kept them prisoners.

Knowing the brutal treatment of internment dissidents and resistors, our Day of Remembrance also requires reflecting on the ongoing conditions that led incarcerated people at Vaughn prison to rise up this month to fight for dignity and opportunities for rehabilitation. Remembering the Manzanar uprising — in which hundreds of protesting prisoners were subjected to tear gas by military police and two were shot and killed — as a prison rebellion presents another lens through which Asian Americans, particularly those of East Asian descent, can see our histories as inherently tied to movements for prison abolition. Indeed, this is the reading of state violence that led movement elders like Kochiyama to dedicate their political lives to the pursuit of justice for political prisoners (recognizing that under white supremacy, all prisoners are political).

Meanwhile, remembering the commonalities that Japanese Americans saw between their treatment by the War Relocation Authority and Native Americans under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the history of Japanese American incarceration may also be seen as a call for reinvestment in the fight for Native sovereignty and the protection of Native treaties. Recalling that Poston concentration camp was strategically placed to exploit Japanese American labor to build the infrastructure for a future Native American reservation, these histories of forced relocation and post-war resettlement can inform ongoing coalitional work towards Native liberation. Drawing from past histories of Japanese-Native American movement building — such as Japanese American participation in the occupation of Wounded Knee and Alcatraz in the height of the American Indian Movement, can lay the groundwork for continued Asian American support in the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other ongoing attacks on tribal sovereignty.

In his stirring, elegiac Inauguration Day remarks at the Holocaust History Center in Tucson, Arizona, poet Brandon Shimoda explains why he “locate[s] the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the heart” — the hearts of everyday Americans ready to accept, or even encourage, the systematic stripping of an entire community’s basic human rights. Today, we must interrogate our own hearts in search of those dark places that have similarly accepted that some targets of state violence do not deserve our mourning, do not deserve our solidarities. This Day of Remembrance, we can ask ourselves whether we are capable of the radical expansion of empathy necessary to see our own experiences reflected in the political conditions of all those who face exclusion, incarceration, detention, and removal. This is the vision, and work, of mutual liberation. This is the path that leads to abolishing all systems that make people into prisoners.