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The US did intern German Americans too, in both WW1 and WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

About 36% of all people interned in WW2 were Germans. There were far more Germans in the US (millions) so interning them all was totally impractical, unlike the much smaller number of Japanese (~125,000).

In Hawaii about 1/3rd of the population were Japanese. And again, due to the enormous numbers involved, only a small % were interned.

The policies weren't about racism. They were about practicality.

Antoine Dusséaux 1y ago

Interned Germans were mostly German citizens. From your link: "During WWII, the United States detained at least 11,000 ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly German nationals [...] The government examined the cases of German nationals individually"

OTOH for Japanese: "The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. [...] A key member of the Western Defense Command, Colonel Karl Bendetsen, went so far as to say “I am determined that if they have "one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.""

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Discussion

Peter Todd 1y ago

Like is said, there were far more Germans, making a indiscriminate approach impractical; on Hawaii where there were far more Japanese, the indiscriminate approach was also impractical, and not followed.

There's no racial difference here. Just circumstance.

Antoine Dusséaux 1y ago

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There was racism against people of Japanese descent. However, in Hawaii, rationality prevailed due to practical considerations.

Peter Todd 1y ago

Dude, by that standard there was plenty of racism against Germans too...

The populations of both Japan and Germany at that time were deserving of scorn and hate. They both supported mass murder and had their own ideologies of superiority. Japan in particular was practically a death cult.

Almost everyone alive then is now dead, with the extremists of the time suffering a particularly high death rate.

It's also psychologically healthy to dehumanize your enemy in war. You have to kill or capture them, and more often then not it's the first option. No reason to spend valuable sanity worrying about their humanity when they're trying to kill you. That's especially true with large scale wars like WW2 where the whole population is meaningfully working together to kilk you.