UC Press Blog

Disease can spread in close quarters. Inspired by the COVID pandemic and his ongoing research on Japanese American history, historian Jonathan van Harmelen investigates the medical history of Japanese American incarceration. His article, “Nowhere to Go: Epidemiology, Quarantine Orders, and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II” received the W. Jackson Turrentine (Article) Award, presented at 2025 annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch–American Historical Association. 

Q. First, congratulations on receiving the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize! Tell us more about your article.

Thank you for inviting me to talk about my work! My article, “Nowhere to Go,” is a comprehensive study of medical care and quarantine orders within the concentration camps used to detain Japanese Americans during WWII. From 1942 to 1946, the U.S. government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans—the majority of whom were U.S. citizens—without due process in ten camps across the United States as part of a policy of forcibly removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

In my article, I argue that throughout the incarceration process, concerns over the spread of communicable diseases plagued government officials and frightened the confined. Officials realized early on that poor planning could result in mass epidemics of diseases within the camps, and they sought to curtail the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis. While camp officials implemented regulations such as quarantine orders, the nature of the camps as tight-knit quarters encouraged the spread of diseases. As a result, paranoia among the confined led to surveillance of other inmates to monitor the spread of diseases. 

Q. Was there anything that stood out during the research process?

First was the fact that the Army knew that if they were going to detain Japanese Americans en masse, then epidemics could occur. Members of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) testified before the Tolan Committee about the concerns of epidemics within the FSA camps in February 1942, when the question of mass removal arose. This led the Army to institute preventative measures like requiring vaccines for all Japanese Americans before reporting for confinement. 

Second, was that doctors treated the camps at times as a site for medical studies. For example, epidemiologists used the mass incarceration as a means of studying diseases within an imprisoned population. In some cases, the confinement led to unusual studies, such as the fact that two of the camps were located in two areas where valley fever was prevalent. In the case of Tule Lake, a pair of doctors conducted a study on the spread of tuberculosis to see if the Japanese Americans were more prone to contracting the disease. These cases raise valuable questions about the ethics of scientific research on confined communities.

Q. What inspired you to write this article?

There were many factors that motivated me to write this article. First, I have been writing about Japanese American history since 2015. I have always been intrigued by story of the wartime incarceration as one of the great civil rights tragedies of the twentieth century.

I also have a personal fascination with the history of medicine. I grew up as the son of two health care professionals—my father is a pharmacist and dentist, and my mother is a nurse—and their experiences in the medical field have always been a presence in my life. Their work inspired me to write several other short articles on the history of medicine; one of my first stories for the Japanese American National Museum’s publication Discover Nikkei was a study of dentistry in the camps. My father’s work inspired me to write it, and during the research process I consulted him for deciphering government records listing dental supplies used in various camps.

Third, and perhaps the most obvious inspiration, was the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, I was living with my parents for several months during the pandemic. I remember one day my mother came home for her lunch break from the hospital and told me of having to wear a hazmat suit while working with COVID patients. I was also actively following the activism work of Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American community organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights. Early on, several activists put out a call for better treatment of ICE detainees during the pandemic, where inmates had not had the opportunity to quarantine. The lack of proper medical care in those facilities made me wonder what the conditions were like in the concentration camps for Japanese Americans when disease outbreaks occurred. As it turned out, I found out several stories of quarantine orders in in several camp newspapers. 

Q. How did you go about researching this story?

During the pandemic, when archives were closed, I relied on several online databases for sources. While I had some research materials accumulated from a trip to the National Archive’s San Bruno Branch in October 2019, the majority of the sources were located in online archives such as the Bancroft Library, the Library of Congress, and the Densho Digital Repository. The Bancroft’s Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Survey Records—arguably the best collection of records on the wartime incarceration—offered a trove of both government documents and firsthand accounts of the quarantine orders. Finally, I supplemented some of the official records with oral history interviews from the Densho Archive to offer personal accounts of how presence of diseases in the camps like tuberculosis had a psychological effect on the confined. 

Q. What’s next for you?

Currently, I am working on a book, a history of Congress and Japanese Americans from the prewar years through the incarceration and later the 1950s. The Tolan Committee hearings, where FSA representative Lawrence Hewes testified about the concern of diseases arising in camps, is an important part of the project. I am also working with historian Greg Robinson on a book about the queer history of Japanese Americans. 

We invite you to read Jonathan van Harmelen's award-winning article, “Nowhere to Go: Epidemiology, Quarantine Orders, and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of the Fall 2024 issue of Pacific Historical Review (issue 93.4), in which the article appears, as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.

We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.