Concentration Camps North America: Japanese in the United States and Canada During World War II

In the early months of 1942, the United States government assembled and shipped off to concentration camps 112,000 men, women, and children -- the entire Japanese-American population of the three Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. This book is an attempt to tell their story. It is the story of a national calamity commonly referred to as 'our worst wartime mistake.' This tendency to write off the evacuation as a 'mistake' is to obscure its true significance. The legal atrocity which was committed against the Japanese-Americans was the logical outgrowth of over three centuries of American experience which taught Americans to regard the United States as a white man's country, in which nonwhites 'had no rights which the white man was bound to respect' (Dred Scott decision). Although it affected only a tiny segment of our population, it reflected one of the central themes of American history -- the theme of white supremacy.