Tule Lake History

Legalizing Detention

Perhaps the most tragic and divisive issue was created when Public Law 405 was passed by Congress and signed by President Roosevelt on July 1, 1944. This law, directed at Japanese Americans in Tule Lake, permitted an American citizen to renounce their citizenship in wartime.

Passage of the renunciation law began one of the saddest and least known chapters of Japanese American history. Of the 5,589 Japanese Americans who renounced their U.S. citizenship, 5,461 were detained at Tule Lake, where 70% of all adult American citizens there renounced.  At Tule Lake, 73% of families had at least one member who gave up their citizenship.  Of that group, 1,327 of them, including young children, were expatriated to Japan. Most renunciants remained in the U.S. stripped of their citizenship, as powerless Native American Aliens.

The stampede to renounce took place in late December 1944, after it was announced detention was ending and the camps would be closing. The prison-like Segregation Center was swept up in panic, anger and confusion.

Motives for renouncing varied widely.  Many inmates feared they would be forced into hostile American communities with no money, no promise of income and no place to live.  Army personnel told them they could remain safe in Tule Lake until the war ended if they renounced their U.S. citizenship.  Second generation Nisei and Kibei, both children and adults, described intense pressure from their non-citizen Issei parents to renounce U.S. citizenship as a strategy to keep the family together in case the Issei were deported to Japan after the war.

Rumors, speculation, and the lack of trusted sources of information gave inmates little basis for making an informed decision about the future.  Some believed propaganda heard over contraband short-wave radios; they dismissed news of Allied victories as lies and thought that they needed to renounce U.S. citizenship to prepare for life in a victorious Japan.  Some remembered pro-Japan extremists who behaved like agent provocateurs, pressuring others to renounce but not doing so themselves.  Teenagers and young adults who were classified by the Army as 4-C, enemy aliens, renounced to avoid being drafted by the country that imprisoned them and their families. For people with no legal forums available to them, renouncing was a way to protest America’s shabby treatment of them and their families.