In 1942, hysteria broke out after the bombing of Pearl Harbor removing 120,000 people from their daily lives. This is not the first time hysteria broke loose in history, such as when the Salem Witch Trial occurred in 1692. The hysteria of the internment of Japanese-Americans occurred because when people feel threatened, they usually take action. The Salem Witch Trials and McCarthy Trials were not the only occurrence of hysteria in history. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, hysteria struck again. “The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country.” (Crawford 1). After the attack, the government felt threatened by the Japanese. Therefore, they could not trust any, even the ones living in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps or military camps where they were not allowed to leave. The movement of the Japanese was to prevent …show more content…
“Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American mainland, Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk.” (U.S. History 2). Everyone in society is panicking because they are still recovering from the bombing. People want to take action against Japan and do not want to take risk so they relocated most Japanese into camps. The US did not learn from the past because the Salem Witch trials happened hundreds of years ago, therefore it did not cross people’s minds. With the mass panic in Hawaii, there was no time for thinking, only action. Who knows, maybe hysteria will strike again in the future, which means the US did not learn from previous
Eventually, the United States took over in order to keep the order in place. Many of the Japanese descendants were relocated more than once. There were camps for Japanese who proved themselves loyal and segregated ones for the "disloyal" Japanese people. Through this relocation, many family members were separated. In many camps, friends were separated as well and had strict visiting time.
As opposed to righteous view that America was safeguarding its position in the war, the Japanese American internments were created out of resentment and racial prejudice fostered by other Americans. As the article “Personal Justice Denied” stated, the internments were led by “widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan” (Doc E, 1983). It may seem like a precautionary cause to make internments but there aren’t any other extreme measures for other fronts. Caused by a hatred stirred by media and society’s view, many people disdain the Japanese.
By being taken from their homes and brought to camps and staying there an uncertain amount of time it could possibly leave the Japanese people with nothing to come back to. Both these pieces of evidence help illustrate the similarity that happened during this time and how both targeted groups were taken and placed
The internment of Japanese-Americans was justified because there were Japanese suspects. Between ten internment camps in Arizona, California, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas, about 250-300 people in each camp were suspects under surveillance. Only around 50-60 people were actually considered dangerous. “It is easy to get on the suspect list, merely a speech in favor of Japan being sufficient to land one there” (Munson 2). Clearly, America was taking extreme precautions.
The Japanese Internment camps were a product of discrimination. This is the same for the Concentration Camps in Europe. One would cause the deaths of millions of people. The other would cause the government to apologise to the people in the camps, and give 20,000 dollars in reparations. Executive Order 9066 was one of the reasons that Internment camps were out in place.
These guys felt the blunt force of discrimination during this time. Japanese-Americans were forced into one of ten permanent camps. This was the result of Executive Order 9066 and Pearl Harbor. These camps were given the name internment camps. The point of internment was to test the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans were fearful of further Japanese attacks on the West Coast and also of Japanese Americans. In response to this fear, President Roosevelt passed an executive order relocating all people of Japanese descent from the West Coast inland. Similar to the fear of the American people, the witch hunts in the novel The Crucible by Arthur Miller led people to believe that girls in the town were being bewitched. Mass hysteria caused multiple arrests for accusations and even death for the so called “witches”. The theme of fear in both the Crucible and the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII caused people to be easily persuaded with the use of pathos and logos.
The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was not justified. After Pearl Harbor, many Americans were scared of the Japanese Americans because they could sabotage the U.S. military. To try and solve the fear President Franklin D Roosevelt told the army in Executive order 9066 to relocate all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. They were relocated to detention centers in the desert. Many of them were in the detention centers for three years.
Japanese Crucible Clarence Drewa Hour: Last Over 127,00 U.S. citizens were imprisoned during World War 2 just because of having japanese ancestry. Putting the Japanese Americans into internment camps shows how there was hatred and unjust behavior towards one another in America. This is also shown in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible”.
How would you feel if one day you were told to leave your whole life behind to live in captivity just because people halfway across the world did something wrong? This horror story was all too true for the thousands of Japanese Americans alive during World War II. Almost overnight, thousands of proud Japanese Americans living on the west coast were forced to leave their homes and give up the life they knew. The United States government was not justified in the creation of Japanese internment camps because it stripped law-abiding American citizens of their rights out of unjustified fear.
Japanese Relocation The relocation and internment of the Japanese in America is often seen as one of our nation's greatest mistakes. For many, the quest is to now understand why we committed such an atrocious act. The most common explanations include racist attitudes, military ‘necessity’, and economic reasons. Japanese relocation was a disgracefully racist act that the Government of the U.S committed, an act that was virtually unnecessary and unjustified.
When I heard the word “racist” for the first time, I didn’t know what it meant. I heard the word in a lot of classes but I never paid attention to it. After reading Farewell to Manzanar, I learned about racism and it’s actual mean. In Farewell to Manzanar written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Jeanne and her family faced racism after Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was a place where the Japanese bombed.
People were so full of fear that they would do anything to eliminate their anxiety. The McCarthy hearings of the 1950s reenacted the hysteria of the Salem witch trials of 1692 by spreading mass fear of prosecution, creating false accusations, and blacklisting people. The Salem witch trials were considered to be America 's most notorious episode of witchcraft hysteria. Many innocent people were killed as a result of false accusations, and many other women were put through trials to determine if they were witches.
Throughout the history of our country hatred has been common, as Immigrants enter our homeland they are looked down upon and thought of people who are “destroying” this nation. All these new people coming in are only seeking new opportunities but are discouraged by other because of their ancestry. Humanity’s unjust behaviors can be seen in two different aspects of America 's history, we first see it in the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII and the period of the Salem Witch trials. Arthur Miller’s dramatized play, The Crucible can be correlated to the event of Pearl Harbor because of the similarities between the Japanese Americans and the characters in the play; they both demonstrate the lives of civilians being ruined, a mass hysteria caused by fear of their neighbors, and lack of a just court system. To being with, it was the year of 1692 when the “witch hunts” had officially began, fellow citizens were being accused of being involved in witchcraft.
Thesis statement: Though many speculate that the act of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) while not doing so on Europe (Germany and Italy) was racially motivated, racism played little to no role in these bombings. The United States of America and her allies were willing to end World War II at any cost, had the atomic bombs been available they would have been deployed in Europe. In the 1940’s there is no doubt that the United States of America was engulfed by mass anti-Japanese hysteria which inevitably bled over into America’s foreign policy. During this period Japanese people living in both Japan and the United States of America were seen as less that human.