The Issei Community Leaders of the West Coast

The FBI had already pre-identified about 2,000 of these Issei men who were the community leaders in the Japanese American communities on the West Coast. Colonel Frank Knox, the secretary of the Navy, had been calling for the internment of Japanese Americans from as early as 1933. At the beginning of 1942, there was no evidence to support his assertion that Japanese Americans were forming a fifth column,. Yet the idea captured the imaginations of politicians and the public. False information spread fast. There were reports of the FBI overhearing Japanese submarines sending radio signals to Japanese American fishermen. It was not true. But rumours like these repeated in newspaper editorials and on the radio created an illusion of a