Japanese Internment Camp Effects

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In 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor which marked the start of the World War II. This war affected many different types of people on both sides of the war. On example was Louie Zamperini who was a very fast Olympian runner when the War started. The War caused the upcoming Olympics to be canceled which caused Louie to join the Army Air Corps. He was assigned the job of being the bombardier of the plane. One day he was sent out on a rescue mission, where his plane malfunctioned and crashed into the sea. Several weeks later he was found by the Japanese and put into POW camps. During his stay in the camps he had to endure horrible treatment from the Japanese guards. On the other side of the world, the Americans were in fear of sabotage and …show more content…
Roosevelt declared that all Japanese Americans had to be relocated to internment camps. Mine Okubo was a talented Japanese American artist who was put into an internment camp during the war. She used her art to show the horrible conditions of the camp and the treatment that all the internees got. Both internment camps and Japanese POW camps try to turn the people within “invisible”. You can become “invisible” literally and figuratively. Becoming literally invisible, you would have to be isolated from everybody else. Becoming literally invisible you would need to be dehumanized and stripped of your dignity. Both types of invisibility could heavily affect a person, but some people find ways to resist and keep their identity. Both Mine and Louie were treated very similarly, but they both resisted dehumanization and isolation very …show more content…
She was able to resist the solitude and disconnection that the camps tried to force on her. When Mine was able to leave the internment camps, she wrote a book that showed the experiences that all the Japanese internees had to go through. She wrote, “We were close to freedom yet far from it… Streams of cars passed by all day. Guard towers and barbed wire surrounded the entire center.”(Okubo,81) She described how she was put in a remote camp, most likely next to a highway in a desert and she also recalled the camp having barbed wire around the camp like it is some kind of prison. Also when she was put inside the camps, they did something that objectified her family. She said, “my family name was reduced to No. 1366. I was given several tags bearing my family number, and was then dismissed”(Okubo, 19) Her family name was replaced with a random number and that erased her identity within the camp. To deal with the separation from her friends, she started writing letters to her friends back home to regain that connection with her community. In an article written about Mine; wrote,” She continued chronicling the internee experience, as well as writing letters to friends back home.”(Lesson 4, pg.15) When she wrote those letters to her friend, she was able to connect with her community and resist isolation from the camps. Within the
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