Essay On Japanese Internment

Words: 1209
Pages: 5

“When the gates were shut, we knew that we had lost something that was very precious; that we were no longer free.” (Tsukamoto) This quote comes from Mary Tsukamoto, an ex-internee at an internment camp somewhere in the US. It refers to the feeling of being trapped inside an internment camp, imprisoned without a trial and for basically no reason. These camps detained hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, many who were citizens, simply because they were Japanese. All of this was a result of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese bombed a US naval base in Hawaii, which caused unrest against anyone with Japanese blood. Because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government established internment camps where Americans of Japanese descent were arguably unconstitutionally imprisoned. Conditions varied from camp to camp, and many Americans didn’t know they existed. Many Americans and people around the world did not know of the internment of Japanese-Americans. In fact, lots of people today don’t know what happened to people of Japanese descent in America during World War II. Internees themselves reacted too, most notably with the Hirabayashi vs. US, and …show more content…
This is understandable, especially if the rest of the world was in the middle of one of the biggest wars in history. People would harass people with Japanese DNA, insult them with vulgar names and slur, even hang signs reading, “Japs keep moving, this is a white man’s neighborhood.” There were other reasons, too, one of which is the competition Japanese immigrants posed to farmers. There were also false rumors that Japanese-Americans were plotting against the US, planning terror attacks, and committing acts of espionage. All of this pressured Franklin D. Roosevelt and the government to do something about what was thought at the time to be this huge threat to national