After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, compelling the United States government to forcibly relocate and detain about 120,000 people of Japanese descent. About 65% of them were American citizens. Japanese Americans were held in concentration camps across the western states. Several of these sites, such as Minidoka and Manzanar, are now NPS units.
The story of Japanese incarceration is usually, and accurately, told as one of racial discrimination. But religion also played a role. In doing my research, I used the resources of the DOI Library to consult a recent book by the scholar Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra, which illuminates how religious discrimination against Buddhists was an integral part of the incarceration story as well as how the incarceration experience transformed American Buddhism.