Japanese Internment Camps Experience

The early 1940’s presented to be a harsh and terrifying time for any Japanese American living on the Pacific coast. The attack at Pearl Harbor brought forth a future so disheartening for Japanese Americans that many have called a nightmare, even ones who had pledged their loyalty to the United States were not spared. During a time such as this it didn’t matter where a Japanese heart lied, all the Americans looked for was the cold face they displayed to the world. Japanese Americans were treated unfairly by being placed in the internment camps; however, their experience was not always completely treacherous. While the Japanese did retain some freedoms, these troubling times affected many Japanese American generations to come. Although these camps were only a response to the bombing and in the best interest of the American people’s safety, it caused many to doubt that the Japanese community would survive through these horrific times at all. In March of 1942, the army issued the first Civilian Exclusion Orders demanding that “all Japanese persons both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated” and moved to relocation camps further inland (Immigration). It was never required of the army to prove that the Japanese placed in the camps posed any real threat, or that these actions made the nation safer from an attack in any way. The Japanese’s ancestry was considered evidence enough for them be placed in the camps. By the end of the war three years later, one hundred twenty-five thousand Japanese Americans had experienced the horrors that even President Roosevelt admitted were concentration camps. Furthermore, half of the people forced to move into these camps were young children who suffered through the uncertainty of life everyday. Once the exclusion was ordered, Japanese were only given one week to register with the authorities, gather all of their belongings they possibly could, and report to the nearest assembly center. Homeowners had little time to sell their houses just as business owners and farmers, but because this was their only option their assets often sold for only pennies on the dollar. These actions are similar to what David Guterson put his characters through in his book, Snow Falling on Cedars. A posting was listed that informed all persons of Japanese ancestry that they were to be relocated in the next eight days and “the Japs had to report to an assembly center at the Amity Harbor dock on March 29, eight a.m.” (Guterson 125). Surprisingly, this act of large scale movement because of the Japanese’s ancestry was accepted almost universally and without question. Moreover, no serious explanations were offered as to why the Japanese Americans on the coast were imprisoned, but not the Japanese in Hawaii. There is also no reasoning as to why no large-scale German or Italian Americans were contrived into internment camps such as the Japanese were; only Japanese Americans living on the mainland had …show more content…
There were watchtowers up everywhere and a large barb wired fence around the entire camp that killed any hope the Japanese once had of freedom. Chosen for their remoteness, the camps were located in Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, and California. The camps mirrored a military set up since the internees were sleeping in barracks, there was no supply of running water, they ate their meals in mess halls, and they disposed of their waste in public. Fujiko in Snow Falling on Cedars, specifically experienced the haunting discomforts of having to eat the awful food at an internment camp and then rid herself of her wastes. If the idea of using the bathroom in front of a line of waiting people wasn’t horrifying enough then the bathrooms themselves were, where “Inside they found a film of excrement on the floor and damp, stained tissue paper everywhere. All twelve toilets, six back-to-back pairs, were filled up near to overflowing” (Guterson 219). This was not the only unpleasantry of the camp though, many Japanese suffered a fate of death that guards were hardly ever scolded for, even if they killed someone without explainable reason. Although physical treatment of the internees was a rarity, the armed guards and snipers always pointing down at them from the watchtowers reminded them of their new destitute