Eventually,
those internees that were considered “loyal” were let back into society. They
were once again recognized as American citizens and given back their right to
liberty. There was one problem though: they had just been locked up in prisons
for the last two years! How can you expect innocent people that were just
locked up in their own country to just act like nothing happened? At the same
time, many Americans were wary of these people being released because they had
all been considered disloyal in the past. This distrust from the white
Americans coupled with the past few years of anger and tension was enough to
cause major issues while Japanese-Americans were attempting to settle back into
society, and it showed through housing discrimination. In an article from The
Chicago Defender in 1945 entitled “L.A. Housing Fight Looms as Japs Return”,
there is a lot of talk about the crowded living space in Los Angeles and that
once the Japanese returned it turned into a race battle. Current tenants of the
quarters faced many court battles for their property that was formerly owned by
Japanese-Americans, and now that they were returning they wanted their property
back. The army even got involved by “permitting evacuated Japanese-Americans to
return to their property on the West Coast”, forcing many people to vacate
their property. As you can imagine, this created major turmoil between the
current tenants of the property and Japanese-Americans. In another article in
The Colorado Times, it describes a “Need to Pioneer” by these
Japanese-Americans being released from camps. Those that are returning come
with the knowledge that there will be pioneering to do, maybe even more than
their first generation parents went through. (Colorado Times 1945) This was a
ridiculous comment in my opinion, how can people that already had lives in
America previous to the war have the need to “pioneer” all over again? They got
placed in these camps, they should be placed right back where they were after
they got released. This outrage is shown in the same article, how there are
many returnees threatening to take the law into their own hands to get their
homes back. (Colorado Times 1945)
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Figure
3: Japanese family after release from
internment
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