The U.S. rulers imposed martial law in their Hawaiian colony after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, wiping out constitutional protections for working people there, including the right of habeas corpus. Planning for this began shortly after the end of the first imperialist world war.
The U.S. occupation of Hawaii decades earlier was largely engineered by sugar barons, led by Samuel Dole, who set up highly profitable plantations there. They organized to overthrow the indigenous government of Queen Liluokalani and bring in U.S. military forces, leading to Hawaii officially becoming a U.S. territory in 1900. This seizure, along with the U.S. rulers’ entry into the so-called Spanish-American war and colonization of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines, marked Washington’s entry into the imperialist epoch.
Tens of thousands of Japanese now labored on Hawaiian plantations, or as farmers or fishermen.
After a major strike in the fields by Japanese and Filipino workers in 1921, the newly formed FBI, along with Naval and Military Intelligence, began drawing up lists of union leaders and other targets who they considered a likely fifth column. By 1941 there were 158,000 ethnic Japanese on the islands, far more than on the U.S. mainland.
The capitalist rulers had no intention of shutting down sugar production when war broke out, so internment or shipping the Japanese to incarceration on the mainland wasn’t an option. That was reserved for those on their lists of political and labor radicals and other community leaders.
Exploitation of labor on the plantations, enforced by strict surveillance and harsh punishment for absenteeism or low production, filled the coffers of the sugar barons. As the war wore on, and Japanese military forces pushed back, some legal restrictions were lifted, but none of those covering labor and working conditions were touched.
Military rule was oppressive. All mail, phone calls, newspapers and radio were censored; hospitals, food and liquor sales, traffic and prostitution were all put under military control. Public schools were closed for two months, then reopened on a four-day week, so on the fifth day students could work in the sugar fields.
Japanese Hawaiians were barred from meeting in groups larger than 10, farmers were ordered to abandon their farms, fishermen were barred from working. All flashlights, portable radios, cameras and other potential “tools of espionage” were systematically collected.
Jury trials, habeas corpus and due process were quashed, replaced with military tribunals. The tribunals heard 55,000 cases during the war, in trials that lasted an average of five minutes, and 99% of the hearings in Honolulu ended with guilty verdicts. This regime brought in over $1 million in fines and hundreds were imprisoned.
The 37,000 Issei — the first generation that left Japan and settled in Hawaii — were barred from U.S. citizenship. They were declared “enemy aliens,” likely agents of Tokyo.
With all of the U.S. military spying, restrictions, abrogation of rights and forced labor, not a single one of the ethnic Japanese placed in internment was found guilty of overt acts under U.S. laws. None were even investigated for sabotage, much less convicted.
In March 1946, almost a year after the war ended, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a challenge to the treatment of the Japanese, in Duncan v. Kahanamoku. It held that the imposition by military tribunals and martial law were invalid, but refused to say any violation of the Constitution had occurred.
The only Japanese Americans who could challenge their treatment during the war were a small number of Nisei — those of the second generation, born in Hawaii and eligible for citizenship. When some Nisei were labeled as dangerous and shipped to the mainland for internment, 19 of them were summarily returned. This was to prevent them from taking advantage of the fact that once they were no longer under martial law in Hawaii, they regained the right to invoke habeas corpus and challenge their conditions.