Due to the pressure from the state leaders mostly in the west coast, on the 19th of February 1942, President Roosevelt signed the “Executive Order 9066”. When this “internment order” was given out, the Americans rounded up and exiled their Japanese American neighbors, without any factual basis of their disloyalty towards the United States. More than two thirds of them were the same citizens of the country and many even fought together in Europe against the Axis Powers. This order resulted in a violent imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese American ancestry, half of whom were children, to relocate into approximately ten remote internment camps located in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
The government’s suspicious
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These bulletin boards warned all residents of Japanese descent to liquidate their job and move out of their homes. The internees had to evacuate their homes on very short notice. Most of them only had less than 2 weeks to lease or sell their property. Many Japanese American farmers owned land but had to give them away. At the time of 1942, an acre on a Nisei farm was worth around $279.96 on average but since they had to sell them away in very limited time, they could only sell an acre at a price as low as $37.94. Such little time given for them to prepare, only allowed them to bring along a small baggage that could be carried by hand, from their entire house. Many people failed to pack appropriate clothing for winter, where the temperature often reached below zero fahrenheit. Before leaving, the Japanese Americans were all summoned by the War Relocation Authority to the control station to register their names, and all family names were replaced by a number, which meant that they lost their identity once these numbers replaced their names. Unfortunately, none of them knew where their destination was because the notice didn’t mention where they were heading