Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor Essay

Madeline Van Loon

Mrs. Bricker

English 8

3 March 2023

Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor is an event that most people have heard about, what is not considered is what it was like for the refugees that were treated poorly. After the attack on Pearl Harbor people of Japanese descent got treated very poorly. They got put into Isolation camps and got a lot of hate for the way they looked.

The hate started in the 1930s when people had negative views of what the Japanese were like. The views that people had spread around ruined the reputation of the Japanese. People said they were, “treacherous, sly, cruel, and warlike” (Immigrants and Refugees). Due to these negative views and the attack on pearl harbor, the Japanese were put in isolation camps. Other People had the opposite view of the Chinese; they said they were “hardworking, honest, brave, religious, intelligent, and practical” (Immigrants and Refugees). After the U.S. started putting the Japanese in camps, they had to hire Chinese. The armed forces started recruiting young Chinese Americans. Due to the increasing number of people hiring Chinese Americans, nine bills were introduced in Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This happened because of the attack on pearl harbor and the executive orders from President Roosevelt which forcibly removed Japanese Americans from their homes. One reason given for this was that the states with the largest population of Japanese Americans had military zones created. These states include California, Oregon, and Washington. This order affected over 120,000 lives and the majority of them were Americans, mostly women ages 15 through 30 (What affected refugees during pearl harbor). The incarceration of Japanese Americans was considered “one of the most atrocious violations of American Civil Rights in the 20th century”