Alien Intimacies: The Coloniality of Japanese Internment in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.

Abstract

The incarceration of Japanese enemy aliens in concentration camps during World War II was a remarkably transnational phenomenon in Pacific settler colonies. Immediately following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the governments of Canada, the United States, and Australia set in motion the round up, removal, and incarceration of civilians of Japanese ancestry. Australia was first to implement extensive measures, rounding up nearly all Japanese individuals from Australia and surrounding nations within twenty-four hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Unlike Canada and the U.S., a wartime internment policy was already in place under the National Security Act of 1939, which provisioned for the wholesale internment of local Japanese civilians—mostly concentrated in northern pearling towns of Broome, Darwin, and Thursday Island—in the event of a declaration of war with Japan. The U.S., catapulted into war by the events of December 7, responded by seizing Japanese assets, sealing off the Can...

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