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Essay on Japanese Internment
The word internment is generally used to refer to the imprisonment or confinement of people, generally in prison camps or prisons, without due process of law and a trial. It also refers to the practice of neutral countries in time of war to hold belligerent armed forces and equipment which enter their territory, under the Second Hague Convention.
In reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, United States Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 allowed military commanders to designate areas from which any or all persons may be excluded. Under this order all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions to guarded camps in Arkansas, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Colorado and Arizona; German and Italian citizens, permanent residents, and American citizens of those respective ancestories (and American citizen family members) were removed from (among other places) the West and East Coast and relocated or interned, and roughly one-third of the US was declared an exclusionary zone.
Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens would eventually be removed from their homes as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history.
The Japanese American internment was the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were United States citizens, from the west coast of the United States during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called War Relocation Camps in remote portions of the nation's interior.
During the war, an appeal reached the Supreme Court contesting the government's authority to intern people based on their ancestry; the court sided with the government. The U.S. government officially apologized for the internment in the 1980s, saying it was based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership, and paid reparations to....
