Essay On Japanese Internment

1908 Words8 Pages

On December 7, 1941, a surprise attack on the United States Navy and Army Air Force bases took place at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This attack changed the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese-Americans for the next five years. It killed several thousand soldiers and sailors, and completely destroyed the whole army pack of the Pacific. A few days after, the FBI started raiding businesses, homes, and almost anything of U.S. residents who had Japanese ancestry (Cooper 1). Soon, anybody with even the smallest bit of Japanese ancestry were forced to move to detention camps by the government, and would stay there for the remainder of World War II. Japanese internment was the peak of the government’s racial discrimination towards Asian immigrants throughout U.S. history, as well as one of the most blatant violations of freedom and human rights (4 p. 1). Pearl Harbor was the birth place of the idea for internment camps. After the bombing, people began to fear the Japanese, especially those living on the West Coast since the …show more content…

was made by the Japanese, but it scared the Americans so badly that they began to turn on the Japanese (Cooper 4). The Government began to make restrictions on all Italian, German, and Japanese citizens in the United States. All had curfews and could travel no more than five miles from their house during the day. They were not allowed to leave the country, their bank accounts were frozen, and they could not go near military bases, docks, or power plants (Cooper 6). But the Japanese were actually very important to the country agriculturally. In California during 1940, 1,600 Issei owned farms, and they produced 30-35% of all fruits and vegetables grown in the state. During that time, the average Japanese-American farm value was much higher than an American’s (Fremon 18). The Japanese brought many new products to the market and helped expand the variety of United States’s fruits and vegetables (Sandler