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“Our daily life in the camp was monotonous and empty eat and sleep, eat and sleep,” recalled Jack Tasaka, who was interned at Honouliuli. Others who wished to be repatriated to Japan were held in internment camps in the mainland United States. About 10,000 people were arrested and 2,000 incarcerated, one-third of them American citizens. They underwent military hearings during which they were not told of the nature of their accusations.

Though it was not military policy to intern people of Japanese descent in Hawaii, dual citizens, community leaders and suspected spies were rounded up and detained. “Speak American,” encouraged one campaign. Now, pressure to speak only English came from both the military and Japanese groups desperate to prove their loyalty to the United States. Hawaii’s Japanese population had long been subjected to English-only campaigns, but they had never been successful. The Japanese language ban affected schools, which were forced to close. So were people placing long-distance calls. “Everybody was under martial law and treated equally unfairly because the military couldn’t target just the Japanese, who were so important to the economy,” historian DeSoto Brown told the Huffington Post.ĭuring martial law, the media was censored, and press outlets were only allowed to use English. Other facets of military rule applied to all Hawaiian civilians. Japanese-born people couldn’t own shortwave radios, gather in groups of more than ten people, or move without requesting official permission. Many of the period’s rules focused specifically on non-citizens who had been born in Japan. Though she had enjoyed a thriving Japanese community in the years before the war, under martial law she was shunned by her former friends. Her father, a Buddhist priest and Japanese language school teacher, was swept up in an FBI raid soon after the attacks. “The community was fearful of…being taken away,” recalled Tomoko Hisamoto in an oral history interview. “I wasn’t supposed to speak Japanese anymore,” said Jane Kurahara, who was a young girl in Honolulu during the Pearl Harbor attack, in an oral history. Japanese-American merchants salvaging what goods were left in their stores, after the attacks on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. And so, they turned the Hawaiian Islands into its own type of internment facility instead. Besides, the logistics of imprisoning nearly 160,000 people in a territory that was small to begin with seemed insurmountable. The federal government couldn’t afford to intern one-third of the population of Hawaii: The war effort needed labor and feared such a move might stoke pro-Japanese sentiment.

#Martial law hawaii japanese how to#

As the United States sent people of Japanese descent to internment camps on the mainland, it vacillated as to how to deal with Japanese Americans in Hawaii itself. But military officials doubted the loyalties of the island’s many Japanese Americans. Hawaii’s proximity to Japan made it of prime strategic importance, and put the islands at unique risk. Thirty-seven percent of residents were of Japanese descent, including 37,000 Nissei (Japanese-born people who were not eligible for citizenship) and 121,000 Japanese American citizens. The law that established a territorial government in 1900 covered Hawaiians with the protections of the United States’ constitution. Hawaii’s Japanese Americans, who had long been under surveillance by federal and military intelligence agencies that feared they would side with Japan during wartime, were treated particularly harshly.Īt the time, Hawaii was a territory, not a state. Civilians were banned from photographing any coastal location. Every person on the island, with the exception of children, was fingerprinted and issued identification papers they had to produce on demand.

48.Military rule meant big changes for Hawaiians. McNaughton, Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2006), p.