Summary Of Japanese American Incarceration

Devastated, impoverished, confused, heartbroken. These words represent just some of the many emotions Japanese Americans felt during the 1940’s. On December 7, 1941, Japan dropped a nuke on the Pearl Harbor Navy Base. In response, America initiated Executive Order 9066, which rounded up all Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. The article "Betrayed by America” by Kristin Lewis, dives into the bad experience of Bill’s family going to internment camp. The other article “Japanese American Incarceration” by the National WWII Museum, shows the perspective of American leaders who initiated the act. The poem “Children of Camp” by Lawson Fusao Inada, portrays how the living conditions of Japanese Americans affected their views on life.

“Japanese Americans had not yet been caught plotting an act of sabotage.”(Brooke 2) Most people in America believed that Japanese Americans were just spies waiting to attack the country. This is extremely unreasonable considering 23 of Japanese Americans are native to the country. Ideas like this are what promote capturing them for safety reasons. The living conditions of the camps strongly affected the mental state of Japanese Americans. In the poem, the narrator talks about how the living conditions changed their view of the world. “There was no poetry”... “Unless you can say blood is poetry.” (Inada 1) The conditions Japanese Americans lived in were so disappointing, that there was no true poetry to be found. Instead, they only had bad things such as dust, blood, and injustice, to experience. Any amount of money supplied couldn’t replace the mental destruction they went through. Interment camps set up for Japanese Americans for financial failure. In the article “Betrayed by America” it states “They gave up the lease on their store and hotel.”(Lewis 7). When Bill’s family was in the process of getting taken to camps, they had to let go of their successful