Hirabayashi v. United States

The roots of the social and legal conditions which surrounded the conviction of Gordon Hirabayashi during World War II can be recognized as early as the late nineteenth century. In 1880 and 1882 the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts which blocked Chinese immigration for the next 60 years. In 1908 the Gentlemen's Agreement was adopted, preventing male Japanese workers from entering the United States. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Ozawa case, prohibiting Japanese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, and in 1924 a new immigration law effectively ended Japanese immigration to the United States.

Tatiana Klimova, in Internment of Japanese Americans: Military Necessity or Racial Prejudice?, asserted that these official actions were prompted by long-standing white majority hostility toward Asian Americans on the West Coast. She contended that Asian immigrants of the time often willingly took poorly-paid jobs and through hard work, many later became financially successful. This approach, she stated, was seen by the white populace as unfair competition. Accustomed to a different culture and visibly racially different, Asian immigrants also tended to remain within their own communities, she said, which intensified majority feelings that Asian immigrants did not really want to blend into the American way of life. This was the unsteady social relationship between Asian Americans and the dominant society in Pacific Coast states when the Second World War erupted.

On 7 December 1941 the Empire of Japan executed a surprising and devastating attack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The next day the U.S. Congress declared war against Japan, and over the next two months Japan followed with successful attacks on Hong Kong, Manila, Thailand, Singapore, Midway, Wake, and Guam. Predictions of bombing and even invasion of the U.S. West Coast spread quickly, and with them came rumors of conspiracy by Japanese people living in America. On 19 February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which stated that "successful prosecution of war requires every possible protection against espionage and . . . sabotage." By this order, military commanders were given the authority and discretion to establish military areas and within those areas restrict the movement of anyone they deemed potentially threatening to the national defense.

By the first two weeks of March of 1942, Lt. General J. L. DeWitt, Military Commander of the Western Defense Command, had issued proclamations establishing military areas and zones that included the coastal regions of Oregon and Washington, the state of California, and the southern half of Arizona. The proclamations said further that "certain persons or classes of persons" could be excluded from those areas, or restricted if they stayed within them. On 21 March 1942 Congress made it illegal to defy any restrictions ordered by the military under Executive Order No. 9066 knowingly. Three days later General DeWitt issued another Proclamation confining "all alien Japanese, . . . Germans, . . . Italians, and all persons of Japanese ancestry residing within . . . Military Area No. 1" to their homes between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM. The same day he also issued several Civil Exclusion Orders requiring that all persons of Japanese ancestry be evacuated from military areas and resettled elsewhere.