California Takes Back its Japanese Evacuees

On December 17, 1944, the Western Defense Command announced that after January 2, 1945, all persons of Japanese ancestry who were eligible could return to Military Areas Nos. 1 and 2 from which they had, with rare exceptions, been evacuated early in 1942. For three years, most of the West Coast residents had seen few, if any, Japanese on their streets and highways. Other people, many of them newcomers to the West Coast, had occupied their homes, farms, stores, offices, and church buildings. During the absence of the evacuees, over a million civilians, and untold millions of service men, had poured each year from other states into California alone. As many had poured out again, but California retained a residue of about a million over the prewar population. Its population had been further dislocated by the drainage of its residents from the mountain and basin ecological areas to the war industries in the areas of Southern California, Central Coast, San Francisco Bay, and Central Valley. While only 93,000 J

Archaeology · Bay · East coast · Geography · Physical geography · Population · Socioeconomics · Sociology · West coast · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Demography · Oceanography

• Engineering Internment

  Open Access•Orin Starn•American Ethnologist•1986

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