On June 5, Robert Asahina delivered the tenth of the 2005-2006 Bradley Lectures. Click here for more information about this speech.

Before I began my book, I knew very little about the history of Japanese-Americans. This may sound a little odd, but I think it’s really a measure of how successfully Japanese-Americans have assimilated, or at least integrated, into American society. It’s only in our politically correct times that we think ethnic groups should regard themselves as hyphenated Americans first and just Americans second.

Anyway, the two things I did know about Japanese-Americans were these: 1) that 110,000 Japanese-Americans had lost their homes, their businesses, their jobs, and their personal possessions, and had been incarcerated in camps in remote areas of the West, Southwest, and South, and 2) that there was a segregated unit of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II that became the most highly decorated unit in the American army for its size and length of service.

But I didn’t know how these two things were related--and that’s the subject of my book. What I learned is that it’s very difficult to understand the connection between the two because of what I call the “post-civil rights perspective.” This is the idea that ethnic groups in America have advanced by following a very clear political agenda, consisting of 1) identifying a grievance, 2) mobilizing political support through protests and demonstrations, 3) lobbying for remedial legislation, and 4) filing Constitutional challenges.

But the more I learned about Japanese-Americans in World War II and afterward, the more I realized this agenda is precisely what Japanese-Americans did not follow.

This was despite the fact that Japanese-Americans had one of the clearest grievances of any ethnic group in the twentieth century. And this was despite the fact that what the government did to Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor--in the name of “military necessity”--was later upheld by the Supreme Court in the infamous Korematsu decision of 1944. Yet most Constitutional scholars regard Korematsu as one of the worse Supreme Court decisions of all time--right behind Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. And as recently as a decade ago, in Adarand, eight of the nine justices agreed that Korematsu was a “mistake.”

Yet “military necessity” continues to be invoked, even though, as I’ll argue later, nobody actually knows what it is.

In any event, it was “military necessity” that the government cited to justify what it called the “relocation” of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. What’s odd, however, is that the phrase “military necessity” does not appear in Executive Order 9066, which Franklin D. Roosevelt issued in 1942 in order to “relocate” Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. What’s even odder is that Japanese-Americans weren’t even mentioned in Executive Order 9066.

All Executive Order 9066 did was transfer to the War Department a power that had previously been reserved by the Justice Department: the power to designate geographical areas from which Americans could be “excluded” in time of war.

This is important to understand because what Executive Order 9066 did not do was authorize the “internment” of Japanese-Americans. In fact, the government did not even have the power to “intern” Japanese-Americans, for the simple reason that most of them were American citizens by birth. “Internment” was, and is, a power the government has over noncitizens.

So the government had to create a whole new vocabulary to describe what it was doing: 1) It had to “exclude” Japanese-Americans--who were regarded as all potentially disloyal--from California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, 2) it then had to “evacuate” them, which meant forcing them out of their homes, at gunpoint, if necessary, 3) then, having just turned 110,000 Japanese-Americans into homeless people, it had to “assemble” them in makeshift camps until the government could decide what to do with them.

(When most people hear the name Santa Anita, they think of the famous racetrack where Seabiscuit won a historic race before World War II. When Japanese-Americans hear the name Santa Anita, they think of living in horse stalls. Santa Anita was one of the so-called assembly camps where Japanese-Americans lived during the summer of 1942.)

Finally, 4) the government had to “relocate” the Japanese-Americans into permanent camps in the American interior.

The point is this: even though the government did not have the power to “intern” Japanese-Americans, it could have brought about the same result by an executive order that authorized first their “exclusion” and then their “evacuation,” “assembly,” and “relocation.” In effect, it deprived an entire ethnic group of its citizenship, and thus of the ordinary rights that citizens take for granted. I’m not talking about political rights such as the right to vote, or procedural rights such as the right to a fair trial, or abstract rights such as the right to free speech. I’m talking about simple rights such as the right to live where you want to live and work where you want to work--the rights that other Americans enjoy without question.

At the same time, secretary of war Henry Stimson told the director of the Selective Service System, Lewis Hershey, that the Armed Forces of the U.S. would not accept Japanese-American men as soldiers. Hershey then directed the local draft boards to reclassify Japanese-American men from category I-A, which meant eligible for the draft, to IV-C, which meant “enemy alien.” With a stroke of the pen, Japanese-American men had been effectively rendered noncitizens--without a hearing, without appeal--simply because of their ethnic heritage.

Oddly enough, however, shortly after the War Department declared all Japanese-American men unfit for duty, one branch of the Army decided that some Japanese-Americans would be useful in the war against Japan. While Japanese-Americans were still in the “assembly camps” in 1942, the Military Intelligence Service began recruiting Japanese-Americans as translators, interpreters, interrogators, propagandists, and analysts. In other words, the very same qualities that had made Japanese-Americans suspect--their command of the Japanese language and their knowledge of Japanese culture--now made some of them valuable to the military.

At this point--only six months after Pearl Harbor--the whole logic of “military necessity” was already beginning to unravel. If some individual Japanese-Americans could be determined to be loyal enough to serve in the most sensitive branch of the military, how could the government justify keeping all other Japanese-Americans in the camps--without likewise determining their loyalty as individuals?

As a result came the fifth step in the government’s program--what it called the “registration.” This was an absurdly bureaucratic attempt to determine loyalty by administering a badly worded and clumsily administered questionnaire to the 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the camps.

One of the questions on the form asked Japanese-Americans if they would forsake their loyalty to a foreign power, namely, the government of Japan. What was absurd, of course, was that most of the Japanese-Americans in the camps were American citizens who had no such loyalty in the first place. They were being put in the position of being asked if they had stopped beating their wives when they had never beaten them in the first place.

The “registration,” as it was called, didn’t really succeed in determining the loyalty of individual Japanese-Americans. All it did was provoke some of them into expressions of disloyalty--at least to the point of giving negative answers to some of the questions. But surely if there had been any spies or saboteurs--and none were ever uncovered--they would not have exposed themselves by honestly declaring their disloyalty on a questionnaire.

At the same time as the “registration,” the government came up with what it called an “opportunity” for Japanese-Americans--the chance to serve in the armed forces in defense of their country. This, of course, meant the whole rationale of “military necessity” had almost completely unraveled. For if Japanese-Americans as a class were so untrustworthy that they all had to be “excluded” from the West Coast and “relocated” to camps, how could thousands of them be trusted to take up arms in defense of their country?

Almost exactly one year after Executive Order 9066, Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the formation of the 442d Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese-Americans to be made up of men from the territory of Hawaii and from the “relocation” camps.

Of course, there had been no “relocation” of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, even though the islands--unlike California--were actually in a war zone. The response to the formation of the 442d was overwhelming in Hawaii--more than 10,000 men immediately volunteered. But on the mainland, to the surprise of the government but not anyone else, only 1,200 men volunteered.

I say “only,” but actually I’m astonished that 1,200 men would volunteer from camps after they and their families had lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, and their personal possessions--and had been forced to live in camps.

In any event, what was happening was a remarkable assertion and acceptance of the responsibilities--and not just the rights--of citizens, by men whose citizenship had been called into question by their own government.

The men of the 442d trained for a year in Mississippi and then were shipped to Italy. There they joined another segregated unit, the 100th Battalion, which was made up of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii who had already been in the army at the time of Pearl Harbor. In August 1944, the two units were combined, and the 100th Battalion became the first battalion of the 442d Regimental Combat Team. In October 1944, they joined the American 7th Army in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France.

The Vosges Mountains were the most formidable natural barrier on the Western front. While Montgomery’s and Patton’s armies were fighting in the lowlands of Belgium, Holland, and Northern France, the 442d and the 7th Army were struggling through thick forests and deep underbrush on steep hills, through mud and sleet and snow.

In the last days of October 1944, the 442d undertook its most famous mission--what became known as the rescue of the Lost Battalion. More than 200 soldiers of the 36th Infantry Division had been cut off behind enemy lines for a week. After four long days and four long nights, the 442d rescued the Lost Battalion. But in doing so, the Japanese-Americans suffered more casualties than the number of men they rescued. When the 442d finally left the Vosges in November, the unit had suffered 60 percent casualties.

But the significance of this battle was not just military. Right at this time, Roosevelt had been reelected to an unprecedented fourth term. A few days after the election--two weeks after the rescue of the Lost Battalion--Roosevelt held his first cabinet meeting. At this meeting were secretary of war Henry Stimson, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and interior secretary Harold Ickes, whose department ran the “relocation” camps.

Biddle and Ickes had been arguing for months that the camps should be closed and the Japanese released from confinement. Even more to the point, in the spring of 1944--six months earlier--Hawaii had ceased to be a war zone. But until the election, Roosevelt had continued to insist that California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona were still an “exclusionary zone” where Japanese-Americans were not permitted to live because of “military necessity.”

Of course by this time, the rationale of “military necessity” had completely collapsed. The 100th/442d had been heroically fighting in Italy and France for months. The Japanese-American men in the Military Intelligence Service had been serving with distinction in the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters for more than a year. No saboteurs or spies had been uncovered following Pearl Harbor.

And in the months before the elections, Roosevelt had even acknowledged that the real rationale for the “relocation” was not “military necessity” at all, but was instead what he called “distribution.” This was his idea that it would be better for the country and for Japanese-Americans if they did not live in ethnic enclaves, but were instead “distributed” across the country.

Eleanor Roosevelt had already made this idea very explicit in an article she had written almost a year earlier: “We should never have allowed any groups to settle as groups where they created a little German or Japanese or Scandinavian island and did not melt into our general community pattern.”

Think about that for a moment. The government should never have allowed Japanese-Americans to live where they wanted to live, work where they wanted to work, associate with whomever they wanted to. This was New Deal social engineering gone mad. There wasn’t even any pretense that the “relocation” had anything to do with “military necessity.” And, of course, German-Americans and Scandinavian-Americans weren’t “relocated”--only Japanese-Americans.

In any event, at the cabinet meeting in November, Roosevelt finally agreed that there was no longer any “military necessity” for keeping Japanese-Americans in camps. And, coming out of the meeting, in a memo to assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy, Stimson gave this as the first reason for closing the camps and freeing the Japanese-Americans. But what is more revealing is the second reason Stimson gave. It was the Japanese-Americans’ “good record as soldiers.”

Keep in mind that this was just two weeks after the bloody sacrifices of the 442d in the rescue of the Lost Battalion. And notice what Stimson did not mention. He did not mention protests in the camps, although there had been a few. He did not mention organized political opposition to the camps, because there was practically none. He did not even mention the Korematsu and Endo cases, which were still awaiting decision by the Supreme Court.

It was the Japanese-Americans’ “good record as soldiers” that freed their families and friends from the camps. Looking backward from what I have called the “post-civil rights perspective,” we have tended to emphasize Japanese-Americans’ fate as victims during their forced “relocation” to camps. But this has blinded us to the Japanese-Americans’ achievements as heroes on the battleground.

By serving with the 100th Battalion and 442d Regimental Combat Team, Japanese-Americans helped win a war abroad and at home. They had made their case as citizens--by taking on the heaviest burden of citizenship, the willingness to give their lives in defense of their country. It was not by fighting in the courts for their Constitutional rights but by fighting against their country’s enemies in battle that Japanese-Americans collectively made their case to their own government.

They men of the 100th/442d had by their actions declared: You have treated our families and us as noncitizens. You have reclassified us as “enemy aliens.” You have stripped away all of the rights that other Americans take for granted. You have forced us to give up our homes, our jobs, and our properties, and forced us to live in camps. But we are citizens. We are Americans. We are just Americans. Not Japanese-Americans, not hyphenated Americans, but just Americans, just like everyone else. And we are also just Americans in representing a higher standard of justice than our own government holds.

And that’s why I called my book Just Americans.

Robert Asahina is a deputy managing editor of the New York Sun and a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at New York University.