Incarcerated Japanese Americans returned to find property seized by others

Evidence

Executive Order 9066 had enacted true and irrevocable harm on the Japanese American community. When those incarcerated were released after the end of the war, many left the prison camps with nothing but the twenty-five-dollar allowance given to them by the government. The homes and businesses they had been forced to leave behind years before had fallen into disrepair or worse—they were now in the hands of people who refused to return their ill-gotten gains. The Masuda family took their property back, though it is not at all clear how they managed to do that. Many others were not as “lucky.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 199

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of dispossession during forced relocation — property transferred to hands that refuse return — mirrors the intergenerational wealth-loss mechanism Brown must document for the enslaved.