This paper examines the shifts in U.S. compensation policies for wartime internment of Japanese Americans since 1945 and aims to document the implicit changes in the concept of the American nation. By contrasting the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, this paper describes the reconstruction of the logic for national integration. Through the investigation of legal materials in the 1990s, this paper also reveals the implementation of the Civil Liberties Acts and aims to contribute to the field of Japanese American studies. The analytical framework is drawn from Anthony D. Smith's argument on the nation. This paper focuses on the extent to which the hierarchical relationship that Smith locates between a nation's core ethnie and subordinate ethnies remains valid in the postwar United States.
The findings can be summarized into two points : 1) the Act of 1948 verifies Smith's theory of hierarchical nation building, as seein in the clear segmentation of ethnies that placed Japanese Americans as a peripheral ethnie in a relatively lower social position; while 2) in the Act of 1988, which was passed following the social reformations of the 1960s and 1970s, some new concepts were explicitly stated to weave the memories and experiences of Japanese Americans into those of the American nation as a whole. The Act of 1988 actually intended to adopt the reconstructed concept of the nation, in which the asymmetrical relationship between ethnies was dissolved. This change can be perceived as a part of the universalization of the concept of the American nation. From these findings, this paper concludes that the primordialist tendency in the prevailing concept of the American nation had been transformed during the second half of the twentieth century.