ncreased influence and status for JA women, and a sparked a remarkable display of patriotism and valor by the JA men who enlisted in the armed forces.
In 1945-46 the camps were closed and the inmates were resettled by and large peacefully. Most JAs prospered during the postwar decades. The civil rights movement in which some JAs participated helped reduce the level of racial discrimination against JAs and paved the way for the measures of redress which were enacted after the war, especially the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (CLA), the successful campaign for which was due in large part to very effective political efforts by JA groups in Washington, D.C. and at grass roots levels.
In its 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, the independent Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) which was appointed by Congress stated that the decisions to exclude, relocate and resettle the JAs during World War II "[were] not justified by military necessity . . . The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
Long before the Pearl Harbor attack, deep seated white hostility toward Japanese immigrants found expression in a series of discriminatory laws and practices. Like Chinese immigrants who preceded them and were later excluded from the United States by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the 295,280 Japanese who came to Hawaii and to the mainland between 1890 and 1924 were subjected to many indignities and restrictions, especially on the West Coast. These included employment and professional restrictions, alien land laws, informal quotas on immigration contained in the 1907-1908 'Gentlemen's Agreements between the United States and Japan, legislative prohibition against naturalization of the Issei, and finally under the Immigration Act of 1924 a complete ban on further Japanese immigration to the United States. According to Smith...