Section A: Research Question and Introduction Research Question: Did the internment of Japanese Americans cause an American hero complex? What is a hero complex? For the sake of clarity, the definitions of hero complex that this essay will be using is as follows: twisting a situation to make yourself feel like a hero even though what you are doing is inherently wrong, and/or creating a bad situation and “fixing” it to make yourself seem like a hero. Introduction: During World War II president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 calling for the internment of all Japanese Americans on America's west coast. From that point on over 170,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and interned in 10 camps across the US. Because of this, …show more content…
He wrote it during his experiences from December 7, 1941 (the bombing of Pearl Harbor) to August 31, 1942. He wrote this diary to record the poor conditions in the internment camp and his time there. It is rather short, but it is a valuable first-person perspective of a historical event. It is limited in that Mr. Suzuki is no historian, he is just a regular person. Because of this events may be over or under exaggerated based on the emotions of the …show more content…
What people see and hear repeatedly will almost certainly affect their world view in a multitude of ways. This is what made anti-Japanese, pro-American propaganda so effective. While Japanese Americans were tucked away from the public eye the rest of America was learning to justify their actions by making the victim look like the enemy. One famous example of this is the “Tokyo kid” posters that were published during that time. They featured “Tokyo kid” who was a gruesome goblin-esque depiction of a Japanese person. Influences like these are, ultimately, the deciding factor in what lead to the heroism that most Americans felt at that time; and unfortunately this sort of prejudice doesn't care if you are a citizen or not, it only cares about what you look like, and that meant Japanese Americans were an easy target because of their physical