Was Japanese American Internment Justified Essay

Japanese Internment Camps On december 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. They destroyed seven battleships, 121 aircrafts, and killed 2,400 people. A year after Pearl Harbor the government opened Japanese internment camps. Although the internment camps were for the Japanese, it was just like what Hitler did to the Jews. The internment camps started on February 19, 1942(Velanquez).

The attack ceased after about twenty-five minutes. The second raid, which began around eleven forty-five am involved high altitude bombing of the Royal Australian Air Force base by twin-engine machines. What happened when Darwin was bombed? The bombs hit infrastructures and the town; the Japanese attacked the harbour, military,

December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed American naval base, Pearl Harbor. In 1942, Japanese internment camps were built to restrict the Japanese in America. In response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on August 6, 1945 America bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Hiroshima, by John Hersey, is a journalistic narrative that gives the accounts of six Japanese citizens that endured the atomic bomb. Hersey’s attitude in Hiroshima is to inform others of the consequences of the atomic bomb and the destruction it caused Hiroshima.

Today is February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066. Executive Order 9066 forces all Japanese-Americans regardless of loyalty or citizenship, to evacuate the west. In early 1942, the Roosevelt Administration was pressured to remove people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Roosevelt was pressured to do, this because he felt that some Japanese-Americans were plotting a sabotage against the US, following the bomb of Pearl Harbor. You may be surprised to find out that the count of Japanese-Americans living in the US is at 127,000.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a decision that would change the lives of Japanese-Americans on February 19, 1942, two months following the Japanese bombings on Pearl Harbor. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of over 110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident immigrants from Japan1. Meaning that Japanese-Americans, regardless of their U.S. citizenship, were forced to evacuate their homes and businesses and then proceed to move to remote war relocation and internment camps run by the U.S. Government. The attack on Pearl Harbor had, unfortunately, released a wave of negativity, aggression and blatant racism that some of the Non-Japanese American citizens had been holding in up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Non-Japanese citizens who competed with Japanese-Americans in the business place for wages were fervent supporters of the removal procedures.

In my opinion, the United states was not justified in its policy of keeping Japanese Americans in internment camps. These people were Americans just like those who chose to put them in camps. By singling out these people in camps, the government essentially legitimized racism against them. Most of them had committed no crimes against the United States. Most of them had not involved in the planning of any crimes against the United States.

This then led them to relocate to internment camps, built by the U.S military in scattered locations around the country. For the next two and a half years, many of these Japanese-American citizens endured poor living conditions are poor treatment by their military guards, along with the rest of the country. A very important reason in proving that President Roosevelt 's

Succumbing to bad advice and popular opinion, President Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 ordering the relocation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the interior of the United States. The fear of the Japanese was tangible. Many believed, whether or not they were born here, that all Japanese were spies or they were going to do some kind of harm to the U.S. The Japanese were rounded up everywhere and put into internment camps. These places were almost as bad as the concentration camps in Germany.

Korematsu v. United States: Fred Korematsu’s Case On February 19, 1942, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Executive Order 9066. This authorized the U.S. military to move thousands of Japanese citizens from places deemed crucial to national safety and possibly defenseless against infiltration. The military immediately used this power to issue a ban on all people, “immigrant and non- immigrant,” with Japanese lineage. Following this ban, captivity camps were set up to hold Japanese Americans, extending along the entire West Coast. In rebellion of this, a man named Fred Korematsu, an American born citizen with Japanese heredity, refused to comply with this law and vacate his residence to stay at a camp.

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. Even at the high levels of government, officials share similar prejudices.