Japanese Internment Camps
By Keith Berrier-Lemna
Japanese Interments Camps
Over 127,000 United States citizens were imprisoned during World War II. Their crime? Being of Japanese ancestry.
Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land. Anti-Japanese Paranoia increased because of a large Japanese presence on the West Coast.
Reasons and costs of relocation's
Evacuation orders were posted in JAPANESE-AMERICAN communities giving instructions on how to comply with the executive order. Many families sold their homes, their stores, and most of their assets. They could not be certain their homes and livelihoods would still be there upon their return. Because of the mad rush to sell, properties and inventories were often sold at a fraction of their true value.
Where were they relocated?
Two months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ordering all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast and move inland towards states with no cities around.
What were camps like?
Housing conditions for Japanese Americans in internment camps were very different from the average home. Japanese were housed in barracks; sometimes entire families live in one room cells. Internment camps were sometimes located in remote areas where weather conditions weren’t always favorable, such as Manzanar and Tulelake in California ("Relocation Camps"). Japanese also had to use communal areas for washing, laundry, and eating. Mine Okubo describes the conditions of the camps, “The camps represented a prison: no freedom, no privacy, no ‘America’"Internment camps were also guarded by US military personnel (World War II-Japanese), and a barb wire perimeter
Bibliography
1. "Japanese-American Internment." Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.
2. "Japanese-American Relocation." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.
3. "Japanese-American Internment Camps." Infoplease. Infoplease, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.