Japanese Internment Essay

Lilly Mulhern

Mr. Skea

Social Studies

May 26, 2023

Japanese Internment

Japanese American internment was not a good solution that the United States had gone with. The Attack on Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941, and the Japanese military did a surprise attack on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii where 2,403 people died. The main reason for this attack was because the United States cut off Japan's access to their oil. 2 months after the attack, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which started the internment of Japanese Americans. They were taken to internment camps and kept prisoners, and this was to prevent sabotage. This was the wrong thing to do, especially because almost all of the 120,000 people in the camps

The things they should have put more energy to were their other rivals; Germany and Italy. As Harry Paxton Howard talks about in his periodical from 1942, “From a military point of view, the only danger on this coast is from Germany and Italy…But the American government has not taken any such high-handed action against Germans and Italians – and their American-born descendants – on the East Coast, as has been taken against Japanese and their American-born descendants on the West Coast.” Instead of setting up internment camps and putting Japanese Americans through all of this terror, the United States should have put their time into rivals and other problems going

This makes it fair to keep them in internment camps for the safety of the United States, since they may help Japan and sabotage. According to the representative Leland Ford’s statement, “As justification for this, I submit that if an American born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and wishes to make his contribution to the safety and welfare of this country, right here is the opportunity to do so, namely, that by permitting himself to be placed in a concentration camp, he would be making his sacrifice, and he should be willing to do it if he is patriotic and working for us.” However, Leland is wrong. He said it himself; Japanese Americans are citizens, the same as everyone else, just with a different race. They care about the United States and they would not do anything to help sabotage their home. As the Commission said in their Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, “The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan.” The real reason the government put Japanese Americans in internment camps was because of their race, and they were just mad at Japan.