Japanese Internment

The decision to begin a Japanese internment was initiated because of the distrust people felt towards Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This was their first military involvement in the war, and before Pearl Harbor the war probably seemed like something far away that wouldn’t include the United States in battle. When the first affects of Pearl Harbor started to wear off, people become wary of the Japanese. Naturally, the Americans felt a distrust towards them after the government from their home country attacked America. They felt that even though many of these Japanese were American citizens, they could still sympathize with their home country.
This led the people to believe that some may be disloyal to America. They saw Japanese fishermen in a new light- if they lived near water, they could learn about the positions of the ships coming in and out and tell Japan about the navy. If farmers lived too close to an air base, then people were misguided into thinking of them as potential spies. Eventually, the government got involved. In Roosevelt’s executive order 9066, he authorized the military to supervise a huge migration of practically every Japanese person in America- stating they were considered potential threats to the war effort and could not be trusted. This basically meant that the government was agreeing with the idea that the Japanese should be segregated because a completely different country with people of the same race had attacked America.
Although the decision to initiate Japanese internment seemed to be done in good faith, the government wasn’t thinking about how a substantial percentage of the population would react to the issue: the people being put into camps themselves. In Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, he stated that he wants a world where people had the freedom of expression, speech, religion, from want, and from fear. Although the Japanese internment was done in a way that didn’t restrict their freedoms of speech, religion, or