Essay About Life In The Internment Camp

So the hysteria was understable. The question was whether or not to do anything about it, and for an angry, grief stricken America, internment camps were the answer. Mass hysteria of the Japanese caused the urge for government issue of executive order 9066 to satisfy the anti-Japanese groups and to rid of all the fear. The order was based on a false claim. The day of, Japanese Americans were given 48 hours to leave their homes a... ... middle of paper ... ...f American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan.The Japanese attempted to fight back and prove their innocence.The most famous case, Korematsu v. United States shows that.

Laws were passed to keep people of Japanese descent from becoming citizens or becoming property owners. Their entire lives were modeled by anti-Japanese laws in the early 1900’s it got so bad that they could not even marry in the U.S. unless it was to another person of Japanese descent. So by the time WWII came around the anti-Japanese agenda had a large following. Perl Harbor was just the push it needed to gain backing my Politicians publicly and it spread like wildfire. The Japanese came to this country for a better life and were discriminated against the entire time.

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought that the Japanese Americans were associated with the surprise attack. The United States government decided to create concentration camps to hold them in. These concentration camps denied the Japanese Americans the American dream by excluding their freedom, the conditions of the camps, and how they were treated in the camps. Japanese Americans had lost their freedom after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor because the American government was suspicious of the Japanese currently living in America. In the story “Japanese Internment” the author states “They feared they were spies, and made the Japanese hand over all of the electronics they owned, their rights to own guns, and they had to live under a curfew with travel limitations”(1).

We were so afraid because our father was the only one in our family, so they came to our house and took my dad with them. I have never seen my dad for seven years. Sometimes when my mother used to tell stories, tears drop off her eyes; when I see that I used cry loud. After we ate our food my mother started to tell a story she started: About six years ago when you were little, I left both of you with my mum and I went to register my name, as I do every year. When you were small you used to crawl out the home.

In shirt there was a combination of racism and anger that lead Japanese Americans into the horrors of the internment camps. There are no cities or states like this in United States anymore. It was very heart breaking situation but this should always be included in United States history, so that our next generation will never forget what Japanese Americans had to go through. At this point in history of United States, what we can see is that white people are discriminating, ignoring Japanese people. They are following racism.

Each night spent on Iwo meant half of everyone you knew would be dead tomorrow, a coin flip away from a bloody end upon a patch of sand your mother couldn't find on a map. Or maybe ask a Vietnam vet who spent years tortured in a small, filthy cell unfit for a dog. Or a Korean War soldier who helped rescue half a nation from Communism, or a Desert Storm veteran who repulsed a bloody dictator from raping and pillaging an innocent country. That flag represented your mother and father, your sister and brother, your friends, neighbors, and everyone at home. I wonder what they would say if someone asked them permission to burn the American flag?

If the shop owners were being difficult, the white vendors would threaten the shop owners’ families, knowing that no one would be able to stop them. This economic loss devastated all Japanese people. What would they do with such little money? There was no other choice, however, as they couldn’t take their merchandise with them (63 O’Brien). Based on necessity, the War Department took responsibility for the removal for Japanese ancestry from the west coast.

The American people, along with the government, wanted nothing more than to destroy Japan, and win the war. In the Monica Sone document, I belief that the frustrations that the Americans were feeling are expressed in their entirety. The American people were so angry with the Japanese people, and so afraid that the Japanese would attack again, that the Americans basically rejected anyone that looked Japanese. To the Americans, regardless of whether you were native born, if you looked Japanese you were the enemy. The American government did not want to take chances, so they gathered all the people of Japanese decent and made them live under military law.

Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic is at heart a novella about the establishment and destruction of an immigrant identity in America. Upon arrival, the Japanese immigrants must create a new identity for themselves to integrate with the American population or be branded as outsiders. However, even the most willing to assimilate can never truly leave the outsider status behind as they will always be considered as 'other'. When fear begins to accumulate, this outsider status will leave the blame on the Japanese people's shoulders. Particularly, in the chapter "Traitors," Otsuka highlights the ever-present anonymity and otherness of the Japanese immigrants that leads to the erasure of their collective American identity.

Although many of these Japanese people were US citizens, based on misconceptions that they could endanger our country even our President was fooled. Again when citizens weer shown by prominent figures in the community that seperating races and passing judgement on them was approved it provides the fuel for racism to continue. The survival of race in the twentieth century was influenced by the confortation provided by the elimination of seperation between blacks and whites within the United States.