Internment of Japanese During WWII the Internment Essay

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Internment of Japanese During WWII

The Internment of Japanese-Americans During the Second World War

Between 1942 and 1945, the United States federal government forcibly interred more than 100,000 immigrants, most of them American citizens, in what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called "concentration camps." At the time, supporters of the this program argued that this was a necessity because Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans were threats to the American war effort. In reality, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War did not emerge "out of thin air," but rather was the result of outrage over the attack on Pearl Harbor mixed with nearly a century of anti-Asian sentiment.

Undoubtedly, the catalyst for interning was Pearl Harbor but, as TenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson make clear on page 86: "The decision to evacuate all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast… was reached in a context of gathering fear, suspicion, and anger on the part of the American public." Undoubtedly, Americans were shocked at the seemingly unprovoked attack and scared that Pearl Harbor might be the first in a series of attacks against U.S. territory.

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This, in part, explains the greater anger and racism toward the Japanese; the Germans were never able to attack the U.S. territories during the war, so Germany seemed like less of an existential threat than Japan.

However, to focus only on the proximate causes misses the larger racist context in which this policy operated. Just like Adolph Hitler did not invent German anti-Semitism, but in fact capitalized on an existing German animus toward Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped, so too the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized latent American anti-Asian sentiment. In other words, Pearl Harbor did not cause American racism toward the Japanese, it just gave racists an excuse to express their racism. TenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson are quite right to call this chapter the "activation of the stereotype" rather than….....

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