Japanese Internment Camps Essay

The internment of the Japanese during WWII was a direct effect of racism towards Japanese people. The Japanese had been facing discrimination from the time that they began immigrating into the United States being accused of stealing jobs and land. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and relocation of Japanese Americans allowed for the racism to show. During 1942, Japanese people along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington were uprooted from their homes, farms, and jobs to be placed in internment camps in the Midwest, away from the Pacific Ocean. The location of the internment camps the Japanese were placed in was an environmental decision, choosing deserts far away from any cities and sign of life. This decision changed the way

The locations of the camps were chosen due to their isolation from society and far position from the coasts. Since the relocated were from the vibrant cities and landscapes of the west coast, moving to the barren dusty environments of camps such as Manzanar and Topaz was a move to break their spirit, “Yoshiko Uchida associated exile and uprooting with the desert” (2). The WRA wanted to give the interned the least amount possible to work with and this included their environment, with dusty dry soil that had no life, boiling hot summers, and freezing winters. They had to make do with what they had and were given little to improve their conditions. They had to finish building their barracks and had to repair their camps as they continuously fell apart throughout their time

They did this through gardening, and using their landscapes to create victory gardens, to feed the camps. Many times, the Japanese were allowed to go outside of the camps to work on other people’s farms and get jobs. To combat the isolating feeling of these internment camps, the people turned to nature for an escape. In Manzanar they would sneak out of camp to go fishing, forming what is now known as the Manzanar fishing club. They formed different types of clubs that both broke rules and gave the interned hope for their futures. This gave them a sense of normalcy that could not be achieved without nature. The barren landscapes did not offer much for the people there, the soil was not good to support many different types of vegetables. One thing that many Japanese Americans continued when they were interned was gardening. “In the two decades preceding World War II, Japanese Americans made up 70 to 80 percent of all gardeners in the Southern California region” (163). This allowed for them to transform their environment into something positive and something they could call theirs. The gardens in the camps further proved the environmental knowledge that the Japanese had coming into the camps, they were able to manipulate the soil and make things grow in an environment