The draft policy for Japanese American men in incarceration camps

The draft policy for Japanese American men in incarceration camps made military service a demand imposed on people whom the government had already excluded from ordinary enlistment on racial grounds. Its progression—from restricted access to segregated service to compulsory drafting of men over eighteen—frames Jim Shimada’s refusal as a response to both racial discrimination and the dispossession of his family.

Background and Changing Policy

After Pearl Harbor, Jim, then seventeen, tried to enlist in the United States military. He was not allowed to serve because of his Japanese ancestry. In 1942, he and his parents were sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where the government confined Japanese Americans from California. The novel contrasts this treatment with the absence of comparable mass confinement for people of German or Italian ancestry, including those whose countries were also at war with the United States.

The policy changed in stages. As overseas casualties rose, Roosevelt reversed course on Japanese Americans serving in uniform, and Japanese American men were permitted to leave camp by enlisting in segregated battalions. That limited invitation was followed by a broader requirement: all boys in all camps over eighteen were drafted. The change did not erase the initial exclusion or offer equal terms of service; it made compulsory service the next condition imposed on people still held in the camps.

Application to Jim Shimada

A loyalty questionnaire administered to internees at Manzanar in 1943 formed part of the pressure surrounding the draft. It asked whether men would serve in the United States military if allowed and whether they would renounce loyalty to Japan. The second question caused particular anxiety because internees feared that answering yes could be treated as an admission of prior allegiance to Japan. The questionnaire and the later draft requirement were distinct measures, but together they placed Japanese Americans under suspicion while demanding declarations of loyalty and, eventually, military service.

For Jim, the new rule became personal when the government extended the draft to boys over eighteen in the camps. He refused. Rather than accept induction, he asked the government to return his parents’ house and fruit stand and reimburse the income they had lost; only then, he said, would he consider serving. His refusal tied the question of military obligation to the property and livelihood taken from his family. He was tried and convicted of draft evasion, then transferred to a federal prison.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Jim’s conviction did not end with his imprisonment. President Truman quietly pardoned Japanese American draft resisters in 1947, and Jim was released. The sequence exposes the policy’s unequal terms: Jim had first been barred from enlistment because of ancestry, then faced compulsory service after his family had been confined and deprived of its livelihood. His conditional refusal makes that contradiction explicit without treating the draft as an isolated dispute over military duty.

The policy also becomes part of Jenny’s account of her father’s history. She explains that Japanese Americans, including citizens, were confined because the government suspected they might be spies, while German and Italian Americans were not subjected to the same policy. In the novel’s later treatment of Jenny’s imprisonment, her favorable classification and privileges as a so-called model minority form a different but related instance of race shaping institutional treatment. The draft rule thus belongs to a longer family history in which official demands for loyalty, confinement, and apparently lenient treatment all operate within unequal racial conditions.