Japanese Internment

Giving up your entire life is something that no person can imagine, but in the spring of 1942, Japanese-American citizens living in the Western United States, experienced just this.

The United States government issued an executive order for all citizens of Japanese descent, whether they had ever been to Japan or not, to pack up their things and prepare to move.

The governments reasoning for the “evacuation” was to keep Japanese-American citizens safe, but it is now believed to have been an act of fear that these individuals would attack the US in support of their mother country.

The government set up 10 camps in the Western United States for this “evacuation” but failed to provide more than a tent with Army cot.

The government had hopes that the individuals living in these camps would create their own self-sufficient system on these lands, but when provided with no running water and arid soil cultivation was next to impossible.

The camps were considered temporary by the government, but ended up as the home of thousands of Japanese-Americans for close to a year.

These temporary camps were set up in horse stables covered by tents with partitions separating families and dormitories for bachelors.

There was no running water or place for cooking.

By no means were these Nazi death camps, lives were not taken in mass, but that does not and should not take away from what was taken from these citizens.

The US government took their homes, their belongings and, what may be most important, their rights as citizens in this country.

When it was all over, they gave them nothing back but the freedom that never should have been taken from them, for their protection or not.

In 1988, the US government offered each surviving individual taken from their homes and placed in these temporary homes $20,000 compensation for what they had gone through 40 years prior, but it would seem as though this offering was too little too late to make amends for their suffering.

With the events of the 20^th century and the marked tragedy of 9/11, the idea of another “evacuation” occurring in the US is probable.

People constantly live in fear and although the US government may not be able to create another mass “evacuation,” other US citizens living in fear are capable of ostracizing minorities and making them feel so unwelcome in their own homes that they force them to move.

Preventing another Japanese Internment Camp era would appear to be an easy task, but with a society that strives on fear of the unknown, fear and contempt of strangers will over override the ability to do the right thing with an open mind and open heart.