A Broken World

While Ilwon and I were giving a presentation last week about the World War II occurring on the Pacific between the Japanese and the Allies, Mr. Burell gave short information about the Japanese living in America being sent to the internment camps. We didn’t get to talk about it much at that time, but I got interested to it, and wanted to know more about it.
After the Japanese attack at the Pearl Harbor, the U.S.’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed the Executive Order 9066, with the ardent support by the citizens who had anti-Japanese sentiment. This executive order was to send the Americans of Japanese heritage to the internment camps, or the “relocation centers,” that were in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. As a result, approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage were sent to one of the 8 camps around the U.S.

This is a picture of one of the internment camps for American Japanese.

The lives of the Japanese in the internment camps were pretty bad. These camps were pretty much overcrowded and the Japanese were treated very poorly; they were provided not enough food and they had to sleep with whatever they had. Also, the leadership positions within the camps were only given to the Nisei, or the American-born Japanese.

This is a video showing how American Japanese were treated during the World War II in the internment camps. You can see that many people have died because of disease and lack of space and food.

Later, the U.S. allowed the Japanese in the camps to leave, but only if they decided to go to the U.S. Army. This suggestion was not so much attractive to the Japanese, so only about 1,200 people decided to do so.
In 1944, after two and a half years since the executive order was signed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally abolished the order. Later in 1968, the U.S. government started to give compensations of $20,000 to each of the surviving victim of the Executive Order 9066. At that time, about 60,000 victims were still alive and were given the $20,000 compensation money.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.