Less than three months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the mass removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The government's decision, made in the context of long and often intense anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, ultimately resulted in the imprisonment of 119,803 Japanese Americans. American citizens constituted almost two-thirds of these prisoners held without trial. Although many inmates eventually obtained wartime releases from the camps, forced exile from their homes and incarceration produced lasting consequences.

The government's decision to incarcerate Japanese Americans was in part attributable to Americans' racist attitudes. General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command, for example, explained the need to imprison all Japanese Americans by asserting that "a Jap is a Jap… . It makes no difference...