Cultural Boundaries and Japanese-American Internment During WWII

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This investigation will explore the question, “How did cultural boundaries and differences in America during World War 2 have an effect on Japanese Americans?” It will focus on why the Japanese-Americans in the West were interned and why other war enemies like the Germans and the Italians weren’t. The first source that will be evaluated is Greg Robinson’s Book, “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans” written in 2001. The origin of this source is important because the author is a college professor therefore allowing him to have background knowledge on this subject and further abilities to do research. This source is very valuable in the sense that it can, in some ways be a secondary and a primary source. There …show more content…

mainland from the early 1930s.[4] In early 1941, President Roosevelt secretly commissioned a study to assess the possibility that Japanese Americans would pose a threat to U.S. security. The report, submitted exactly one month before Pearl Harbor was bombed, found that, "There will be no armed uprising of Japanese" in the United States. "For the most part," the Munson Report said, "the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs."[3] A second investigation started in 1940, written by Naval Intelligence officer Kenneth and submitted in January 1942, likewise found no evidence of fifth column activity and urged against mass incarceration.[5] Both were …show more content…

The thing about them though, is that they were targeted as individuals whereas The Japanese-Americans were targeted as a whole. One reason for this is that there were significantly less numbers of Japanese-American’s than there were people with German and Italian ties. Germans and Italians as a whole were not seen to be a significant threat to America at the time. Germany was for the most part the country that declared war on the United States. (Expand this thought and fix where it goes, it doesn’t fit

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