Japanese relocation camps- why? where? what happened to them in the camps?
Notes:
all Americans of Japanese descent living in military exclusion zones on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes and move to internment camps.
In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 into law which eventually forced close to 120,000 Japanese-Americans in the western part of the United States to leave their homes and move to one of ten 'relocation' centers or to other facilities across the nation. This order came about as a result of great prejudice and wartime hysteria after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.( December 1941)
.
The War Relocation Authority was created to administer the assembly centers, relocation centers, and internment camps, and relocation of Japanese-Americans began in April 1942. Internment camps were scattered all over the interior West, in isolated desert areas of Arizona, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming, where Japanese-Americans were forced to carry on their lives under harsh conditions,
Executive Order 9066 was rescinded by President Roosevelt in 1944, and the last of the camps was closed in March, 1946
Fred Korematsu challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066 but the Supreme Court ruled the action was justified as a wartime necessity. It was not until 1988 that the U.S. government attempted to apologize to those who had been interned.In 1988, Congress attempted to apologize for the action by awarding each surviving intern $20,000.
"Imagine that one day you received notice that you and your whole family must be ready to move within 48 hours. You could take only the possessions you could carry and no one would tell you when you would be permitted to return home. Sound like a bad dream? This happened to over 100,000 United States citizens and legal residents during World War II. Your job is to find out why." ~ Martha Daly
110,000 Japanese relocated.
After Pearl Harbor, American military forces sent Japanese into internment camps all across the US because they were afraid of Japanese Americans spying for Japan. The living conditions of Japanese American internment camps were very hard for the Japanese because of housing, food, and the daily experiences Japanese went through. Japanese citizens were give approximately 48 hours to evacuate their homes, and they were only allowed to take few possessions. About 120,000 Japanese were relocated to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. At the camps, sometimes entire families lived in small, one room cells or barracks. Also, meals were distributed three times a day in mess halls where portions were small and dull. Several people died in these camps due to stress and lack of medical care.
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 (McGill). 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 ("World War II-Japanese"). Mine Okubo describes the conditions of the camps,
“The camps represented a prison: no freedom, no privacy, no ‘America’” (Okubo 2). Internment camps were also guarded by US military personnel (World War II-Japanese), and a barb wire perimeter (McGill)
hospital
Comments