Interment Camps, then and Now

In World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans living nearby or at the attack weren’t seen anymore as hard-working, diligent, perseverant, immigrants, but were made out to be enemy aliens overnight. They were locked away into the "camps" behind barbed wire for months or even years because of circumstantial evidence (evidence based on the possibility of crime without actual physical evidence) of them being spies, still having loyalty to the Japanese emperor, or that they were somehow connected to the attack. "Military necessity- the idea that America needed to protect itself from possible treason and sabotage from its own Japanese minority, was the official reason given by military commanders and War Department officials for excluding the Japanese Americans and permanent legal Japanese aliens from the west coast and ultimately confining them to guarded centers," accord

The Aftermath of the Japanese Internment

In World War II, the camps were quickly put together, often large amounts of dust and dirt would gather inside the buildings, which had one light bulb and crowded rooms. There weren’t enough materials to even to try to fix the poor craftsmanship. People would arrive in buses, tagged for identification, and were lucky stay together with their family. There were normally two bathrooms for an entire block and two small laundry areas. Some work and jobs inside the gates were available, but most of the time they were volunteer work or made very low pay. A Caucasian sentry would stand at a guard tower at the entrance/ exit that had a searchlight going on each night. Barbed wire and fence would enclose the camps. The people inside would be only allowed to go certain distance outside the camps with the supervision of a Caucasian. School was set up for the children, but they were unorganized and non-existent at first. When moving to the camps, people could bring only what they could carry, and were required to liquidate real estate, homes, business holdings, and anything else you were not able to keep up at the camp. Today, men in Camp X-Ray (Cuba) are kept in cells measuring 1.8 meters by 2.4 meters. They arrive wearing goggles, earmuffs, masks, gloves, and hand-cuffed, which is a “safety precaution.” The Bush administration has said it has the authority to hold the internees as enemy combatants, not prisoners of war, because they did not fight according to the Geneva Conventions and can’t benefit from its protections. The government says that the prisoners have been treated more humanly than international law r

Some topics in this essay:
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