Daniel Grossman, a WVU researcher, found low birth weights are one of the negative health outcomes still reverberating for Japanese Americans decades after the incarceration camps and forced migrations they experienced during and after World War II. (Submitted Photo)
West Virginia University research has revealed negative intergenerational reproductive health effects from the Japanese American detainment camps of World War II.
Women who had likely been incarcerated in the camps as children eventually gave birth to less healthy babies than Asian American women who weren’t incarcerated, according to health economist Daniel Grossman.
Grossman, associate professor of economics in the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics and a faculty associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, found Japanese American mothers born up to a decade after the camps closed were subject to the increased likelihood of poor outcomes like low birth weights for their children.
The Journal of Public Economics published the findings by Grossman and his coauthors. Their paper illuminates the health effects of in utero and early life shocks, and the ongoing reverberations generated by events like forced migrations.
“This study demonstrates that early life trauma hurts not only those directly affected, but also the next generation,” Grossman said. “Our work establishes long-term negative consequences from one of the largest forced displacement episodes in the United States, when individuals of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were abruptly incarcerated. For example, we show that more babies with low birth weights were born to women incarcerated in the camps than to non-incarcerees — one additional low birth weight baby per 100 births, the equivalent of a 15% increase.”
He explained that, in 1942, under the guise of national security concerns about Japanese sabotage and espionage, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order that would be used to justify the forcible evacuation of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes to prison camps where they remained for an average of more than three years. They endured dust storms, extreme temperatures, inadequate food supplies, underequipped medical facilities, and regular epidemics of diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid and tuberculosis — living conditions that likely weakened reproductive health.
Before World War II, 90% of individuals of Japanese ancestry living in the continental U.S. resided in California, Oregon and Washington. Roosevelt’s order led to the removal of nearly all of them from their homes and into prison camps.
However, in Hawaii, the Japanese population comprised over a third of the islands’ total population, Grossman said. That fact convinced U.S. officials mass incarceration would disrupt the Hawaiian economy.
“That’s why just 1% of the population of Japanese descent living in Hawaii was incarcerated, versus the almost complete imprisonment of people of Japanese ancestry in the mainland U.S.,” he said. “That fact gave us an ideal comparison group of non-incarcerated Japanese American mothers against which we could measure the incarceree group.”
Grossman discovered Japanese American mothers born on the West Coast before 1946 — women likely incarcerated in camps as children — gave birth to babies 81 grams lighter on average than babies born to the comparison group of Japanese American mothers from Hawaii, who likely weren’t incarcerated.
He also compared against non-incarceree West Coast Asian American mothers. The effect was less than when comparing against mothers from Hawaii, but still significant: babies born to mothers incarcerated in the camps were on average 59 grams lighter than the babies of Asian American mothers who lived on the West Coast during World War II but weren’t incarcerated.
To explain why non-incarceree mothers on the mainland tended to have babies with lower birth weights than their counterparts in Hawaii, Grossman pointed to maternal trauma from “persistent anti-Asian biases on the West Coast: prejudice, hostility, prohibitions against intermarrying with white people or owning land, ineligibility for citizenship for those born abroad, segregation in housing and education, rent discrimination, physical attacks and anti-Asian political campaigns.”
After the camps closed, the government warned former incarcerees against publicly congregating or having Japanese neighbors, so large numbers of Japanese Americans resettled throughout the U.S. in a forced mass migration. Stripped of their assets, they struggled to find housing and work.
To gauge whether the long, turbulent resettlement period contributed to additional negative health outcomes, Grossman extended the analysis from the original group of Japanese American mothers born in and before 1946 to mothers born within the subsequent ten years.
For Japanese American mothers born between 1947 and 1956, he documented slightly diminished but still substantial negative reproductive health effects from the harsh transition process, when families were on the move with few possessions and no steady income.
“Forced migration uproots communities,” Grossman said. “The trauma, loss of assets and displacement have long-lasting effects. Most research so far has focused on the labor or political outcomes of forced migrations or incarceration, but the health consequences are understudied, despite deep ripples across generations. Decades after exposure to incarceration, the nutritional, psychological and economic deprivations incarcerees experienced still harm their offspring.”
-WVU-
mm/5/29/25
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