Japanese warplanes bombed the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack led the United States to declare war on Japan. There were a lot of destruction, nineteen ships were destroyed, and two thousand three hundred and thirty five service man were killed. President D. Roosevelt proclaimed this date, “a date which will live in infamy.” As a consequence of the bombing, one hundred and twenty thousand people were imprisoned without committing any crime. Two-thirds of the Japanese were American citizens.
On December, 7th, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. As a result the Americans decided to intern those of Japanese descent on the west-coast of the United States. The Japanese were uprooted from their homes and were relocated to internment camps where they would live their lives. Japanese internment was a horrid act put upon those of Japanese ancestry in World War II, only using the common good as evidence to judge why the Japanese should be interned. The Civil liberties of the Japanese on the west-coast were more important than the common good because there was no valid evidence that the Japanese were planning an attack with their homeland.
Sheets on clotheslines were used to divide families that slept on cots that were surrounded by the smell of horse urine and dung. All Japanese Americans living on the west coast of the continental United States were confined. In the United States, internment of Japanese Americans did not follow the same guidelines as the internment of German and Italian Americans. While evacuation and relocation had succeeded on the West Coast of the mainland, it failed in Hawaii because it was in the middle of the pacific. It also failed because the population of Japanese American citizens was almost a third of the population.
Many of these laws stated that Japanese could not become citizens of the United States and could not hold basic rights. For example many Japanese were not allowed to own land. These laws left a negative impact on the newly arrived immigrants, since many of them were farmers and had little choice but to become migrant workers. It is believed that the beginning of this racism towards Japanese is from a League known as the Asiatic Exclusion Act. This group’s aim was to spread anti-Asian propaganda and influence legislation restricting Asian immigration (Japans Pacific Onslaught).
Japanese ancestry was told to move out of the region themselves. Lots moved out of the “vital coast” areas but suspicions grew from America about the Japanese loyalty and this was the cause of unforeseen difficulties. On March 27, 1942 the army brought forth a forced and orderly evacuation. (Okubo 12) In the near future, the Unites Stated began rounding up the Japanese. They were told to “bring work clothes suited for pioneer life” (Yancey 15) Mine Okubo’s family was one of the first families to be relocated to these internment camps.
The three are significantly different although all faced discrimination, the way it was forced upon them was significantly different. American Indians a racial group that faced discrimination the same as African Americans do. Before the civil rights laws were enacted in certain states you could find three separate drinking fountains labeled “whites, colored, and Indian.” There were three sections in some movie theaters. American Indians were in North America before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1942. Once Indians were forced to leave their land of they refuse and were forced to fight for their land.
Ideally, any public history that addresses the dropping of the bombs should take these factors into consideration, and as a result, most should come to a similar yes-and-no conclusion to Walker’s. Unfortunately, many public portrayals of the event have political motives. In America, this is demonstrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay exhibit; in Japan, it is shown by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/Park. In both cases, the bias mostly manifests itself through lack of context. In Hiroshima Memorial in particular, precious little attention is devoted to context, which results in lack of accountability on behalf of the Japanese.
It happened on an 8 square mile island that took the mane, Iwo Jima (Battle of Iwo Jima, par 1). American troops were told that their goal was to take the airfield of Iwo Jima for the future bombing of Tokyo. The Japanese were assigned to kill ten American soldiers before they had the right to die. The battle lasted from February 19, 1945 to March 26, 1945, which was a little over a month,. In thirty-six days there were nearly twenty-six thousand US casualties, almost seven thousand American troops were KIA (Hama, Erksine and Williams 98).
Jewl Duran Hist 136 11/7/10 Japanese American Internment The Japanese American internment was ingrained anti-Asian racism, nativist and economic pressures from groups in California that had long wanted the Japanese gone, and the panic of wartime hysteria. The decisions to relocate and detain Japanese Americans were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. Ultimately, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry: including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens were taken from their homes without charges or hearings, were excluded from the entire coastal region, and detained in desolate camps for years after any threat of a Japanese assault on the U.S. mainland had evaporated. The financial costs to Japanese Americans
Due to Japans global power and presence, the US did not want to harshly enforce an exclusion act; rather both sides signed a Gentleman’s Agreement that terminated the flow of Japanese laborers, but allowed for the immigration of Japanese woman. South Asian Indians were excluded in 1917 with the passage of an immigration act which established the Asian barred zone, a geographical region, mainly comprising East, South, Southeast Asia, the Asian part of Russia and parts of Persia, from which immigration was no longer allowed. (Walter 2007). In the famous case of Ozawa v. U.S. (1922), Takao Ozawa argues that not only has he lived in the US his whole life, but he also sent his children to American schools and taught them only English, and was not familiar (or familiarized his children) with Japanese customs or language. The Supreme Court ultimately held that Ozawa was not eligible because [T]he intention [of the naturalization acts from 1790 on] was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so