Essay On Japanese American Internment

Japanese American internment in the United States during World War II affected thousands of lives for generations yet it remains hidden in historical memory. There have been surges of public interest since the release of the internees, such as during the Civil Rights movement and the campaign for redress, which led to renewed interest in scholarship investigating the internment. Once redress was achieved in 1988, public interest waned again as did published analysis of the internment.

Japanese immigration to the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century had been minimal with only small numbers of laborers migrating to the West coast. In 1868 the first group of Japanese workers migrated to Hawaii seeking employment as farm laborers. When they arrived they found only three Japanese living in Honolulu. These newly arrived immigrant laborers were required to sign long labor contracts. When their contracts finally expired, Hawaii has become a territory of the United

Although President Theodore Roosevelt had tried to maintain cordial relations with Japan, western state governors and their legislatures began to enact measures that threatened good relations. Japanese, like other Asian immigrants, had long been denied citizenship in the United States and western states began to pass alien land laws forbidding land ownership of any persons not eligible for citizenship. California’s Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 and anti-Japanese land laws in other western states aroused indignation in Japan. The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 prohibiting Asian immigration virtually ruptured U.S. foreign relations with Japan. In addition to overt acts taken by western states and the denial of further immigration, the governments of Japan and the United States, with conflicting territorial and trade interests in Asia, appeared on a collision