Japanese-American Internment: Issues of Racism and Tension

During World War II, most of the actual fighting was done outside of the United States. The biggest threat to national soil was when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on that fateful day of December 7^th, 1942. That attack turned America upside down, leaving both the government and citizens wondering if the reckless Japanese kamikaze planes would come even further than Hawaii. These strong anti-Japanese feelings that began to form as a result of Pearl Harbor started to lead to not only feelings of dislike towards Japan, but also to suspicions of Japanese-American citizens currently living in the United States. The suspicions were that any Japanese-American citizen could be a spy, or disloyal to the United States, and so every single one was profiled as such. Suspicions kept growing, and eventually the government was led to believe that all Japanese people in the United States were by nature inclined to be disloyal. This was obviously a dire circumstance right after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the government felt like it needed to take action. They decided that the best way to resolve this matter was by removing 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and placing them in, essentially, concentration camps.  In her book entitled “Impossible Subjects”, devotes a whole chapter to the internment of Japanese-Americans. Ngai calls the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II “the most extreme case of the construction and consequences of alien citizenship in American history.” I would have to agree with Ngai, because these people aren’t just first generation immigrants that came to the United States within the last year or so, these are American citizens that had parents born in the United States, maybe even grandparents. And all of a sudden, while they are partaking in their normal every-day life, the government decides that they are not loyal because the country where their ancestors are from attacks the United States. These people were helpless to defend themselves, and were on the receiving end of a brutal racial attack due to their heritage. As is with all big current events happening in the United States, the media became an enormous player in the issue of Japanese-American internment. The media was the fuel for both people that supported Japanese-American internment, and people that were against it as well. Some of the media sources were so blatantly racist that they both reinforced people in support of the internment as well as people that were against it. I argue that during this period of internment some of the most undeserved racism in American history was bestowed on innocent Japanese-Americans, through their loyalty to the United States being questioned, to being interned in concentration camps just due to their heritage, and through popular mass media. This racism led to increased tension in finding housing after they were released from these internment camps. I will show this through the Loyalty Questionnaire, articles in popular American magazines at the time, and then finish with housing discrimination articles to portray the growing racial tension.  Throughout the course of the internment, the tension between white Americans and Japanese was growing at a steady pace. It’s hard to imagine that after a major attack on American soil by Japan that there wouldn’t be any tension, but this interment process only added fuel to the fire.