The Japanese American Internment Camps: A Psychological Analysis

During the midst of WWII, when most Americans were focused in liberating Europe and winning the Pacific battlefronts, a group of American citizens was persecuted at home. Japanese Americans were forced to move out of their homes to relocation centers to, according to the government, participate in the war effort for the greater good of national security. Although the treatments of these two groups of people differed greatly, the psychological effects of relocation were equally detrimental. The Japanese American Internment Camps treated the Japanese Americans as potential spies and enemies, which imbued the Americans to reject the Japanese from the community, stripping away their identity in the process. In Julie Otsuka's novel When the Emperor

When the daughter came home she asked her mother if there was something wrong with her face. Clearly, she was being made fun of at school. She was unsure about her identity after some schoolmates pointed out her Japanese appearance. Puzzled by the discriminating comment, she asked her mother if she was alright: “‘Is there anything wrong with my face?’ she asked…’People were staring.’...If there was something wrong with my face,’ the girl asked, ‘would you tell me?’” (Otsuka 15). The daughter wanted to belong in the school and be accepted. She thought something was wrong about her so people stared at her hostilely. However, nothing about her has changed yet. Her classmates started to generalize all Japanese people as enemies of the state and began to alienate Japanese Americans. Her Japanese appearance was something that she could never change, and that very aspect of her identity antagonized her from her classmates because the US was at war with Japan at the time. Since the daughter does not want to feel left out of the community, she started to change her identity. She began to doubt who she was and who she should be. After the incident, the daughter tried to become someone who she was not, abating her Japanese identity little by

She kept a low profile out of guilt after she returned to school. However, the daughter merely conceded her Japanese heritage and appearance in order to survive. Most of her character was already Americanized after the relocation camps. She had to conceal what was left of her Japanese identity to avoid conflicts with the racist neighbors and schoolmates. Due to peer pressure, she ate American food, spoke only in English, and did not share her ideas in class: “We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we knew the answers. We followed the rules. We took tests. We wrote compositions...What I Would Like to Be When I Grow Up (a fireman, a movie star, I’d like to be you!)” (Otsuka 122). The daughter followed the guidelines that the war relocation gave her. However, she had lost pride in her Japanese heritage and did no want to be Japanese. While the siblings’ classmates wanted to become movie stars and firefighters, they just wanted to be their classmates. They would rather become somebody that they never were than to embrace their own culture and heritage. One’s identity is not innate and ethnicity only makes a small portion of