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Japanese-Americans In Concentration Camps

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The Liberal Era was a time period in the history of the United States that, like the many other important periods in history, had both its ups and downs. It ran from the 1930s to the 1970s and was an age of golden economic equality. However, what was not equal was the way that the people who were not straight, white men were treated according to information from Dr. Barrett. One of the most unfair moments in history is the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps throughout the United States during World War II.
Someone who experienced this firsthand is Masao Takahashi, a man who worked at the Alaska Fishery Company according to the document Masao Takahashi, 1981. Imagine waking up one day and suddenly being …show more content…

Koshiyama told of witnessing fellow students write about the topic of how the internment camps were depriving them of their rights. Mits got the opportunity to learn all the details of the constitution in grade school when he would get sent to detention for fighting bullies that used racial slurs such as “Jap” against him. There he got to learn all about ins and outs of the constitution and as a result, chose to place his faith in the American constitution. “I really believed in the Constitution, and I believed that they should protect me” he said, according to the document Mits Koshiyama, …show more content…

Two of the people that did just this was Floyd Schmoe and Helen Brill. Floyd Schmoe was university professor while Helen Brill was a teacher at an internment camp. Floyd described how he had students of Japanese descent that hid in his apartment, terrified after the event of Pearl Harbor. Schmoe and others attempted to send as many people in danger of being forced to go to “relocation centers” to the east. According to Floyd, “The detainees became prisoners of war.” This one line describes the harshness of the inhuman approach that America took in the unwarranted fear of the Japanese. Helen Brill’s account recalled how she came to be teacher at an internment camp in Manzanar. The conditions were less than ideal. The floor was the place to sleep before the residents were given cots stuffed with straw. The students were not even allowed film to take pictures for their yearbook. These were just people still in school and they had to endure this unrighteous treatment for their race. However there were good men and women in the camps that did try to make life bearable for

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Mary Matsuda Gruenewald tells her tale of what life was like for her family when they were sent to internment camps in her memoir “Looking like the Enemy.” The book starts when Gruenewald is sixteen years old and her family just got news that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japan. After the bombing Gruenewald and her family life changed, they were forced to leave their home and go to internment camps meant for Japanese Americans. During the time Gruenewald was in imprisonment she dealt with the struggle for survival both physical and mental. This affected Gruenewald great that she would say to herself “Am I Japanese?

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How would you feel if one day you were told to leave your whole life behind to live in captivity just because people halfway across the world did something wrong? This horror story was all too true for the thousands of Japanese Americans alive during World War II. Almost overnight, thousands of proud Japanese Americans living on the west coast were forced to leave their homes and give up the life they knew. The United States government was not justified in the creation of Japanese internment camps because it stripped law-abiding American citizens of their rights out of unjustified fear.

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When put into the Japanese Internment Camps, Japanese-Americans were held at gunpoint and forced to leave their homes. After they were released from the camps, Japanese-Americans didn’t have a home to go back to. Not to mention the fact that the Nazi Concentration Camps left survivors mentally damaged and some mentally and physically disabled while the Japanese Internment Camps left survivors in a stable condition. In the Nazi Concentration Camps, prisoners were used as test subjects and those who did survive were left mentally or physically disabled. Even then,

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