Treatment of Japanese Americans

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Executive Order 9066 made all Japanese Americans get sent to internment camps. Just picture these camps like jails but instead you are with family and you get to keep all your belongings. Why were they sent to the camps, you might ask? Well the U.S government felt like they couldn’t trust the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, even the Japanese-Americans that were born in the U.S had to get sent to the internment camp, too.

About 120,000 Japanese Americans got sent to these camps. These camps were enclosed behind barbed wire and guarded by American military men.  

When it was the day that the Japanese-Americans were getting shipped off towards the camps, it was called Moving Day. The Japanese-Americans were tagged (yes, like the ones the put on your luggage when you go to the airport). Basically, the Japanese-Americans were treated like luggage. They would then arrive at their assigned cabin (which wasn’t a lot of space). A lot of their rights were taken away but kids can still go out to play and women would be the houswives they were at home. Some Japanese-American men would actually join the U.S army so those men would need to go to the camps, they also could’ve visited their families in the camps, too.

You might be asking what is the difference between the American Internment camps and Germay’s Concentration camps. Well firstly, in the internment camps, they wouldn’t kill the Japanese, yes some of the Japanese died, but that might have been from old age, sicknesses, etc. In the concentration camps, though, the Jews would have manual labor and some would even get killed if they couldn’t work (like the elderly and the kids that are very young). The Jews were also used as medical practices and usless jobs (like building walls and digging graves). In internment camps you are kept with your family in a small cabin all to you and your family. Concentration camps are WAY different, You would have to get sorted (elderly, young kids, fair kids, fair men, fair women, etc.) and live in this tiny cabin that is shared by you and maybe 20 other stangers. Lastly, in the internment camps, you get well fed, wear your own clothes and sleep and play when you want to. The concentration camps are very ulike the internment camps. In the concentration camps, you have this stripped uniform, get hardly a meal and work when they tell you to work and sleep when they tell you to sleep.

Well near the end of the war, the Japanese-Americans were set free. Many people, though, still didn’t trust the Japanese. It’s like starting all over like when they just arrived to America.