How was the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council created?
The creation of the council was complicated. Although the government decided to incarcerate all West Coast Japanese Americans, citizens and aliens alike, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, pressure soon developed to return Japanese Americans to mainstream American life (outside of the West Coast). This pressure came from various sources, including Milton S. Eisenhower, the first director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), who had misgivings about incarceration from the start. Others in the government feared that the concentration camps would become permanent institutions like Native American reservations. These concerns inside the government were reinforced by university presidents, including Robert Gordon Sproul (University of California at Berkeley) and Lee Paul Sieg (at the University of Washington), as well as other interested citizens, including a number of Quakers, who wanted to help Japanese American college students continue their education. These pressures, in combinati
