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The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in time: the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy. A Penguin Classic Bowing to popular fear after Imperial Japanese Navy planes bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress issued Executive Order 9066 and denied Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process before registering and numbering them by family to enable their mass removal and imprisonment. Government officials then subjected the captive people to a series of administrative orders, including a second registration and a segregation based upon a questionnaire, the compulsory conscription of young men from camp, and a program of voluntary renunciation. By its own latter-day admission, the government had no military need for the mass incarceration - that it was driven by a mixture of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership - rendering everything that followed just as unnecessary and wrong.
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