When the Japanese were put an internment camps in America, what happened to their possessions or if they paid rent or a mortgage how did they pay rent without being able to work while they were in the camps?
When the Japanese were put an internment camps in America, what happened to their possessions or if they paid rent or a mortgage how did they pay rent without being able to work while they were in the camps?
Comments
Long story short? They mostly lost it all. There are a few very notable exceptions where neighbors stepped up and worked the land and kept the payments up, but those are exceptions.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-world-war-ii-farmer-risked-everything-help-japanese-american-neighbors-180985441/
They were told to immediately sell their property. In most cases at far reduced prices since they didn’t have time to look for a market-price buyer and the market was saturated with other Japanese-Americans selling their houses and businesses.
Their vehicles were requisitioned for the war effort.
Whatever property they didn’t carry with them to camps or were able to give to friends/neighbors for safekeeping was lost.
Still better than in Canada: Canadian government just straight-up seized their houses without compensation.
The simple answer is that they got screwed. But, “Who cares… They are not us!” sentiment seems much stronger now.
We did this to the southern immigrants in the 1970’s. It was brutal and destroyed lives. That’s why we stopped doing it.
But this administration seems determined to make every mistake America has done again, doubling down, and developing a few new mistakes to remember him by…. Their leader idolized a gangster that was so stupid he chose to live and die by syphilis when there was a cure.
They were forced to sell, or it was repossessed. A partial driving motivation for internment may have been economic reasons, Japanese Americans were competing with white American farmers and they got pissy.
This is not a stupid question, this is a very interesting question and you should search AskHistorians for more questions like this.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6257&context=doctoral
https://densho.org/catalyst/the-wwii-politics-of-farms-and-labor/
Densho.org has a bunch of very good articles about internment/concentration camps in North America. Canada also participated in Japanese imprisonment. “Obasan” is a historial fiction book about it. It is fiction, but it is heavily based in fact.
Jackie Robinson’s family looked after the house of their neighbors who were sent to the camps, but that seems to have been the exception.
“During the war, while Shig[eo Takayama] and his older brother served in the US military, their father, Shichitaro Takayama, was incarcerated at Gila River in Arizona. In the family’s absence, neighbors including the Robinson family helped care for the Takayama home. Facing mass incarceration, many Japanese American families turned to their neighbors to help safeguard their properties. Many were betrayed. Hasty promises were broken. Some properties were robbed or vandalized.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/15/jackie-robinson-pasadena-los-angeles
Honest American citizens took advantage and bought the land at a discount.
Their neighbors took their shit. Only a few times there were nice neighbors that “held on to it” for them
They lost everything.
My x-GF’s grandparents sold their house and business to a white neighbor for $1000. The neighbor kept the property and business secured until they returned and sold it back to them for $1000.
My great grandparents’ house was auctioned off by the government. Some of their sons went to fight for the US in Europe while they rotted in camps. When it was all done, they had nothing.
Unless they had neighbors or friends able to hold onto their possessions for them, they were left with no choice but to sell their possessions to Americans for pennies. Many Americans gladly took advantage. Others left their possessions in the homes they owned, if they were able to hold onto the property (usually by selling to a trusted friend, maybe descendant of mixed heritage) only to return to find looters had taken everything.
(Japanese first gen immigrants weren’t allowed to own land or property so there was some creativity around that. For example Japanese Americans born in the USA and adopted by white families could own property so sometimes a white family friend would legally adopt a kid so he could own the family farm).
In the Northwest, many Japanese Americans were farmers. Unless a neighbor was able to tend to their animals, crops, and land, they would return home to find the farms they’d worked hard to build up overgrown and desolate, the animals dead or gone, the fields overgrown, etc.
Possesions and property stolen and sold.
I’m reading a book right now called Infamy by Richard Reeves. He interviewed a lot of people for it. Japanese families had short notice to sell their belongings. White people would offer like $250 for an entire store worth $25,000. Some people would go lie to a family that they had one day to pack, then their friends would swing by a couple hours later to buy things on the cheap. The state of California was also legally able to seize “abandoned” property.
There were a couple stories about people who managed their neighbors’ farms and held portions of the profit for them upon return. But that was rare.
There were two women mentioned who had random white men come up to them while they were trying to pack and deal with their houses. The men would be like “I’ll give you $10 for your china set worth $250.” These two women took every plate out of its velvet bag and smashed them on the ground rather than take that insult.
I’m only ~100 pages in but people also had to buy things in the camp. If you wanted clothes, books, good bedding, you had to mail order it or have someone on the outside who could help do it for you. So not only did these people lose generations worth of property and wealth, and have their bank accounts frozen in many cases, they also still had to have money inside the camps.
In Washington State there is a very wealthy man who’s wealth came from his father buying up internees’ farms for very cheap. They ended up owning most of what would become downtown Bellevue.
At the Panama Hotel in Seattle, there’s a cut out in the cafe floor that let’s you see into the cellar where piles of luggage was saved for internees who couldn’t carry all their stuff. The owner at the time allowed people to store their stuff there with the idea they’d come back for their things, but obviously many never did.
Finally, down the block from the Panama are several buildings that were owned by internees and sold quickly and clearly during the internment process. In at least one case a Jewish family bought a building with the started intent of holding it for the internees until they returned, and so that building is still owned by a Japanese family but the rest aren’t.
Seattle s Nihonnmachi used to spread all the way to where Harborview Hospital is today…at least a mile…but now it’s just a few blocks. Those families, mostly US citizens, lost everything.
There’s a tofu factory in Portland that is the oldest in the US, now, simply because their landlord left everything as it was and gave it back to the family when they left the internment camp. The landlord didn’t make any money during that time.
https://www.otapdx.com/our-story
Keep in mind that the alien land laws out west meant that mortgages weren’t on the table for a lot of these folks – they legally couldn’t own real estate as Issei OR Nisei. So when they left, their landlords usually sold off everything they left behind and found a new tenant. People with reliable white friends could sometimes work something out – e.g. “The Egg And I” author Betty MacDonald spent a time living in the Seattle apartment of a Japanese family she knew after they went to the camps, house-sitting style – I think she was paying rent as well but I don’t recall. If you could get someone trustworthy to hold it down for you then you might have something to come back to, but that was the exception and not the rule.
They didn’t. There’s a book about it, Strawberry Hill. They lost everything unless they had friends that helped them or bankers that cared about them. Possible in small towns, but elsewhere…they came back to nothing. Even if they had time to get rid of everything, sell it, whatever, it didn’t mean it was still there later.
They were Americans.
Yup forced to sell. My grandmother’s family had a farm and general store. They had to sell everything and what they couldn’t sell was looted. Also, those who were in school, like my grandma, never graduated.
Many lost homes and businesses with zero recourse.
They were usually just taken and sold/kept. Lots of families lost property, heirlooms, and valuables.
While the US concentration camps didn’t have ovens and gas chambers, it wasn’t a good experience for the Japanese. The Germans apparently had a less terrible time.
Stolen.
It was either bought up at rock bottom prices by white Americans, or just outright stolen.
More than one parallel with what was going on over in Europe.
If you’re in the Bay Area, I highly recommend a visit to the Japanese American Museum in San Jose. It’s built in Japantown, which in turn is built on former farmland formerly owned by Japanese immigrants.
The museum has a full-scale model of an internment camp room. It was as you would imagine. Very thin walls, zero insulation, wooden boards with gaps for floors. They looked hastily made because they were hastily made: Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941 and all the Japanese Americans were being rounded up by the spring.
Each bed was a cot with thin blankets, about 4-6 cots per room. In the middle was a furnace to keep you warm. A lot of the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling so anyone inside would be hit with the elements all day. Some of these were in Central California so there were a lot of dust storms too.
Walking into that model in the photo was a bit surreal. Every time I took a step, I could hear creaking. And the gaps on the floor were ridiculous. I mean obviously you need gaps, but those are usually reserved for outdoor decks
My grandfathers lost most of their possessions (boat, two small properties, ancestral swords, to name some big things).
The display of unclaimed possessions at the Panama Hotel in Seattle is very moving.
https://seattlerefined.com/lifestyle/panama-hotel-tea-and-coffee-house-also-serves-as-the-japanese-american-museum-of-seattle-internment-history-national-historic-landmark-japantown-pnw
But they also lost farms and businesses.
A whole lot of white people bought a whole lot of extremely well managed farms for fire sale prices… it destroyed a good chunk of Japanese-American generational wealth.
I heard a story where I grew up around Hood River, Oregon that a Japanese family signed their property over to another farmer family in the area they trusted on the promise they would give it back, but the story goes the farmer family kept the property even when the Japanese family came back. That’s really all the details I know.
Did you see how ICE confiscated and kept all the money, computers, and most valuables they took from that American family whose home they raided because they didn’t know the previous occupants had moved away?
Yeah, something like that except there was no hope of getting anything back. Very much like how cops steal, I mean confiscate, over a billion dollars each year. One man recently was pulled over on his way to buy a new truck. The cops took the $40,000 he had with him even though he did nothing wrong. After almost 3 years because of a lot of press, he was one of the few who got his money back. Cops target musicians leaving the clubs they play and people leaving casinos who may have large sums of cash they can confiscate and keep themselves or their precincts.
They lost it usually. There was no way for them to maintain their properties from inside the camps. In some instances neighbors or community groups maintained the properties for them and then transferred it back when they were released.
However, unfortunately, this didn’t always happen. Some conmen would even do these deals and then just tell the original owners to gtfo when they got back.
This is actually considered to be a driving factor in imprisoning them as wealthy investors could then swoop in and buy large swaths of land for very cheap.
Keep in mind that several studies at the time showed that Japanese Americans were as loyal, if not more so, to the US than native born citizens. There was no reason to fear these citizens other than racism and greed.
Recently came across a great YA Book about a family that did the internment camps, then moved to Japan. Told from the eyes of a 12 yo girl who was 8 when they were sent to a camp. I learned so much. The audiobook has a great reader, if you want to listen vs read. A Place to Belong by Cynthia Kadahota.
Likely seized or “purchased” at fire sale prices by their non Japanese neighbors. There is a cafe in the international district in Seattle that has a glass floor looking down on possessions stored for the interned that never returned. Bainbridge Island also has a memorial that recognizes the farmland lost by local Japanese-Americans.
My family they knew something was coming. They were farmers in Cali. Their bank accounts became frozen. They sold everything they could before it was taken. I inherited an Obi that was not sold.
Here is a rare spot of decency… Robert Emmett Fletcher ran the farms of multiple Japanese families while they were interred and used the profits to cover land taxes so their farms would not be seized. It sounds like this was very much the exception and not the rule.
They lost everything. Only a few who had actual friends who cared acted to save their farms or their homes or businesses for them. At the end of the war some refused to leave the camps because they had nowhere to go.
The sold what they could, the rest was stolen.
George Takei (Star Trek) and his family were interned. He published a graphic novel about it.
To be clear, many of those interned were American citizens. Idk but isn’t it kinda funny how the “loyalty” of immigrants descended from Western Europe isn’t questioned but everyone else is vulnerable to it.
Also the U.S. were strong supporters of Japan (same side during WWI) because apparently the U.S. thought they were good role models for colonialism. (The Chinese, Koreans, and others would beg to differ and charge the Japanese with genocide and war crimes but hey, no such thing as genocide before the U.S. decided there could be such a thing (1948).)
They were forced to sell property, often for a dime on a dollar to their white neighbours. Or simply lost almost everything they could not carry on themselves.
They were finally awarded $20,000 each in redress for the harms done in 1990’s during Reagan’s administration, half a century later. Which was ridiculously small sum for the harm they endured. But at least they got something, and it came with government officially admitting wrongdoing.
OTOH in Hawaii where a third of the population was of Japanese descent, they were differently treated. While falling under closer scrutiny and living under curfews, most were able to remain in their homes and continue working.
If you are not familiar, the all Japanese 442nd Infantry Regiment is the most decorated unit in US military history.
Both of my in-laws, 2nd generation Japanese-Americans living in California, were interned with their families losing everything. As were many of the interned J-A men, my FIL was given the opportunity to show his loyalty to the US by joining the Army in exchange for his release. He served as Occupation Forces, actually entering Hiroshima.
Japanese-American, not Japanese. The distinction is that these were American citizens and residents, different from the Japanese that America was at war with
I think there should be a name assigned to this atrocity. So many are completely unaware this was done to Americans.
It would have to be something that captures the atrocity without offending the Jewish population though (cant appear to be competing with the Holocaust).
Maybe “The Betrayal.” How does that sound?
Reading these comments infuriates me.
Those poor people.
My family lost everything, both sides all of the extended family. My mom was 3 my dad was 6 when they were Interned in Topaz and Minidooka respectively from Florin CA and Seattle WA. My maternal grandmother was born in Seattle 1909, paternal great grandfather immigrated 1889. Some neighbors looked out for those Interned property, most was confiscated especially in northern California. It’s like being in jail they couldn’t do anything. Then before the war ended and they realized maybe these people aren’t our enemy after all they let them go with a train ticket. The army told my family to go east, no ones likes you back “home”. They went to Chicago which was a very welcoming city at the time and is where I am now
Just as an interesting side note: in Seattle’s International district there is a hotel with a tea room, and in that tea room there is a glass floor that looks down into their basement. That basement is loaded with personal belongings left by Japanese residents heading off to internment and never recovered. Some didn’t have the means to return, some died, most had no home here anymore and never came back.
It’s extremely sobering.
About 15 years ago I lived next door to an elderly couple who had both been interned. They had about 13 acres (if I’m remembering correctly) that he had inherited from his family. It had been in the family for three generations. The neighborhood had saved their farm for them, but also paid themselves by taking some of their land, leaving them with the thirteen acres in the end.
Most people were just plain robbed.
Except for those helped by the Quakers and like minded folks, they just “lost” their homes and businesses. In some cases neighbors helped them. But that was the exception, not the rule.
My grandparents had Filipino friends that looked after their house and farmland while they were away. Because of that they got to keep both after the war.
However, those “friends” also dug up all their valuables they’d hidden in the basement, including the family katana…
Short answer: 99% of them lost everything, except what they could fit in their suitcase. Once they left the camps, most started over from zero.
Japanese Americans. They were US citizens.
Their stuff was stolen and sold at auctions.
If you can ever make it, go here: Japanese Americans at Manzanar – Manzanar National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)
You’ll learn a lot about this shameful period in US history.
They lost their homes, businesses, and savings. Most had 48 hours to evacuate. Mortgages went unpaid, possessions were stolen or sold for pennies, and the government offered zero protection. imagine being imprisoned by your own country for your ethnicity and coming back to nothing. That’s what happened.
Most Japanese Americans lost their homes, businesses, and belongings. They had to sell everything in a hurry for pennies or leave it behind. While they were in camps, they could not work conventional jobs, so it was almost impossible to pay rent or mortgages many lost their property through default.
There is a cool novel about this called Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and it’s about the Panama hotel near the International District in Seattle. When the hotel was reopened after many years they found many possessions of Japanese families who were allowed to store them there in the basement and you can see them through some plexiglass in the floor there still.