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Japanese internment in WWII is a major episode in U.S. history. But it wasn’t the only one, as the tweet below explains. The gov’t carried out multiple internments in its overseas territories. 1/
Shortly after the West Coast roundup, Japan invaded the western tip of Alaska. In response, the USA converted the Alaskan island chain extending out toward Asia into a war zone and interned the hundreds of Aleuts living on them in southern Alaska. 2/ 
Aleuts weren’t suspected of aiding Japan, they were just in the way. Many camps lacked running water, and were by all accounts profoundly unsanitary. Aleuts were held there for years. Ten percent of them died. 3/
The USA also interned the 30,000-some Japanese-descended people in the Philippines. The internees were pulled from their homes. Some friendly Filipinos hid them in houses, but those Filipinos were punished. 4/
It was unspeakably harsh. Women were raped by civilians and soldiers. We have accounts of guards firing guns arbitrarily into the crowded camps and killing random internees. This went on until invading Japanese forces arrived to liberate the camps. 5/
In Hawai‘i, the US government imposed martial law for years, turning the entire territory into a prison, with barbed wire on the beaches. Residents couldn’t leave their jobs, couldn’t leave Hawai‘i, couldn’t use US dollars, had their communications monitored, etc. 6/
Gov’t enforced absurd laws (month in prison for leaving keys in car’s ignition, year for buying marked playing cards) in juryless, lawyerless military courts with near 99% conviction rates. Gov’t justified this by pointing to racial composition of population. 7/
On Guam, another internment. After USA retook island from Japan, Chamorus were put in camps to keep them out of the way while military razed what was left of their homes to build military bases. 8/
And Greg Robinson just told me at a conference about his research on small but significant internment of Japanese in the Panama Canal Zone. 9/
bit.ly/2KD0M62
bit.ly/2KD0M62
There are whole books about some of these episodes. Hawai‘i martial law handled well in Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets in Paradise; Aleut internment in Kohloff, When the Wind Was a River.
And I document all this, minus the Panama Canal Zone episode, in my book How to Hide an Empire.
