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Essay On Japanese Internment Camps

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The internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States during World War II was a horrific act of forced relocation and confinement in camps in the inner western states of the country. Between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast were subjected to the internment. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, war hysteria and a fear of the Japanese spread across the nation. President Roosevelt worked to counter this by issuing Executive Order 9066, thereby forcibly removing all Japanese-Americans from their homes and relocating them to internment camps outside of the restricted military zones. As his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt would write, “They were marked as different from other races and were not treated on an equal basis. In one part of our country, they were feared as competitors, and the rest of our country knew them so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think about the principle that we in this country believe in - that of equal rights for all human …show more content…
Internees were forced to live in fairground sheds or horse stalls until they could be moved to permanent wartime residential centers. Four or five families were squeezed together into shared barracks, which were uninsulated and furnished only with cots and coal-burning stoves. Internees were forced to share common bathrooms and laundry facilities. The camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences, patrolled by armed guards who were instructed to shoot anyone who tried to leave. Despite all this, many Japanese-Americans still tried to establish a sense of community. They set up schools, churches, farms, and newspapers, and children played sports. Unfortunately, however, the unfamiliar routines and sudden shifts in social and cultural patterns that dominated internment took its toll on Japanese-Americans, who spent three years living in “an atmosphere of tension, suspicion, and

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