Japanese Internment After Pearl Harbor

On December 7,1941 Japan raided the airbases across the islands of Pearl Harbour. The “sneak attack” targeted the United States Navy. It left 2400 army personnel dead and over a thousand Americans wounded. U.S. Navy termed it as “one of the great defining moments in history”1 President Roosevelt called it as “A Day of Infamy”. 2 As this attack shook the nation and the Japanese Americans became the immediate ‘focal point’. At that moment approximately 112,000 Persons of Japanese descent resided in coastal areas of Oregon, Washington and also in California and Arizona.3

A large number of Japanese initially migrated to Hawaii in the late 18th and early 19th century as a result of enormous boom in Hawaiian sugar industry. They also entered California as domestic and unskilled labourers. In course of time they acquired land or built businesses. Native born Japanese population grew rapidly and by 1930 were said to exceed those born in Japan by eighty percent.

Japanese immigration created the same apprehension and intolerance in the mind of the Americans as was in the case of Chinese migration to the U.S at the turn of the 19th century. They developed a fear of being overwhelmed by a people having distinct ethnicity, skin color and language that made them “inassimilable.” Hence they wanted the government to restrict Asian migration. Japan’s military victories over Russia and China reinforced this feeling that the Western world was facing what came to be known as “yellow peril”. This was reflected in the media, movies and in literature and journalism.4 Anti-Oriental public opinion gave way to several declarations and laws to restrict Japanese prosperity on American land. Despite the prejudice and ineligibility to obtain citizenship the ...

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...own to that time." As quoted in Weglyn, Michi N. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps, 1976, University of Washington Press ,

21 . Robinson, Greg By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,2003, Harvard University Press

22. Muller, Eric,Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II . 2001, University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition

23 .Roger Daniel, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in the World War II 1993, Hill and Yang.

24. Malkin, Michlle In Defense of Internment U.S. 2004, Regency Publishing Inc.

25.Griffin, David Ray The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé 2008, Olive Branch Press

26. Glover Julian, “Guantanamo piled lie upon lie through the momentum of its own existence” in The Guardian, April 25, 2011