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Japanese Internment Camps Essay

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Japanese Internment Camps Essay
The Internment of Japanese Americans by PBS goes into detail about the struggles Japanese-Americans faced during WW11. Japanese-Americans were forced to leave their daily life along the West coast and relocate to internment camps throughout the West side. The cause of their imprisonment was the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the American fear that grew from it. This lead to Executive Order 9066, which order people of Japanese descent to be put into camps. “All across the West, relocation notices were posted on April 30, 1942. All people of Japanese ancestry – including those with only 1/16th Japanese blood – were given one week to settle their affairs” (8). Racism increased since the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Americans treated the Japanese-Americans …show more content…
Japanese-Americans also had to sell their shops or ask their neighbors to take care of their farms, but this only lead to others taking advantage of their situation and Japanese-Americans feel in financial ruin. After getting the notice of relocation, “110,000 Japanese Americans up and down the Pacific coast were assigned numbers and herded to ill-equipped, over-crowded assembly centers at stockyards, fairgrounds, and race tracks, from which they then would be reassigned to one of ten internment camps” (11). They forced away from their homes and jobs and put into living situations that can only be compared to prisons. In the internment camps, Japanese-Americans tried to adjust to the barrack living system by creating jobs and rules, essentially their own mini-democracy. Finally in 1945 all internment camps were released and by 1948, the American government gave money to those who were in the camps. Asako Tokuno said, “The government made a mistake, and they apologized” (17). The government was embarrassed of treating their own citizens in such racist and unfair ways. By 1988 the American government paid each living survivor a sum, due to the fact that they wanted to make things right again. During WW11, Japanese-Americans faced a racist and harsh country that treated them as enemy

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