Effects Of Japanese Internment

1421 Words3 Pages

This topic of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is interesting because U.S government was in a predicament, they were not sure if Japanese American citizens should be trusted or not. They chose not to trust them and put the Japanese Americans into internment camps. The Japanese shouldn’t have been put into the camps because it was unconstitutional. Their rights were being violated without the government having a reasonable excuse. Like all issues involving race or war, the question of whether or not it was legal and ethical to make Japanese Americans move to relocation camps in early WWII is a difficult and sort of a controversial problem. It might have been controversial because during World War II the United States did not put German Americans and Italian Americans into camps as they did with the Japanese Americans, even though Germany, Japan and Italy were allies. The internment of around 50,000 Japanese citizens and approximately 70,000 Japanese-American people born in the U.S. living in the American West Coast has become known as a mistake. The government even set up numerous projects to apologize to the Japanese American citizens who were wronged by them. Still, at the time that the decision to relocate was made the actions were constitutionally legal and seen by many as not needed. The actions were not based on racist feelings; it was mostly based on safety. However, it was unethical to put so many innocent people through frustration, suffering, and loss of not only their property but also their freedom. The bombing of the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941 by the Japanese marked the start of trouble for the 120,000 People of Japanese ances... ... middle of paper ... ...t in WWII. The rights of the Japanese as American citizens were taken away and this can happen again. This is an important factor in the Constitution, because the government must be able to protect the country and its citizens in times of war even if it means unintentionally making innocent people suffer. Still, what happened to the Japanese-Americans was horrible which was not realized until too late, because they really did not threaten nation’s safety. Their forced internment should have been more carefully planned. The Japanese-Americans were evacuated because of their ancestry, but this does not mean the internment was necessarily racist. It was not hatred of their race that caused their mistaken relocation, but instead their relation to an enemy country. The best that can be done now is to realize what the mistakes were and to learn from them.

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