Japanese American Internment?

Question

they say Pearl Harbor was main cause, but even before this they were suspicious and didnt like the japanease. why is that? Any helpful info for my project?

Answer 1

I did the same project back when I was in high school. I would suggest you look up the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1924 (which included the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origin Formula), and the McCarran-Walter Act. Then check out the Meiji Restoration and Meiji Revolution, "Most-Favored Nation Status" and the other root causes of Japan entering into a war with the US.

What you have to remember is that Japan as a nation was in a self-imposed isolation until Admiral Perry dared sail into Edo Harbor in the mid-1800s. All Japanese immigration to the US was akin to Chinese immigration and they were seen as interchangeable races. Americans didn't trust them because of the horror stories of being "shanghai'd" and sent into forced servitude on Asia-bound ships. Adding the unique asian features and they were seen as a strange and alien race.

Answer 2

It's very easy, from a perspective more than 65 years down the road, to condemn what was done to the Isei and Nisei. For those who were naturaized citizens, it was a violation of their Constitutional rights, no argument. But that is not what they were dealing with in 1942. People were in a panic. No one had really believed that the U.S. could be attacked in the ways that it was. They felt safe, with oceans between us and the wars. Pearl Harbor was the flash point.
Asian immigrants made easy targets. The older ones found English and assimilation too hard, and they stayed in their own communities, without trying to blend. And they were easily identified, physically, which was another reason they were easier to round up. It's not always easy to pick a German or an Italian out of a lineup, especially as those groups HAD assimilated better.
Japanese on the West Coast had been barred from owning land on the coast...they could lease, but not own, and there was great concern over the possibility of signaling lights flashing codes to ships. People were worried about submarines offshore, and those worries were not unfounded. Japanese mini-subs fired on the oil tanks on Signal Hill, outside Long Beach, CA, and another was sunk off Santa Barbara. So don't let anyone tell you that the threat was not real, because it was.
Rounding them up was wrong, but in the light of all out war, understandable. If you had offered a Nisei a choice between Topaz, and a Japanese prison camp for gaijin (white foreigners), however, I think he would have elected to go to Utah as the better of the choices. Japanese Americans were not tortured, starved or beaten in the internment camps.

Answer 3

Race differences was mainly the reason. Japanese looked different than people of German ancestry. It was also largely believed at the time people of Japanese ancestry already set up spy and saboteur rings.

One of the things that freaked people out during that era was people of Japanese decent who ran nurseries had no qualms about buying land that sat under power lines. American growers never would. It was thought they planed on disrupting the power grid.

I'd also be willing to say that the FDR administration didn't really like certain minorities either. It wasn't only the Japanese that suffered, people of Mexican ancestry were targeted too. You've heard of the zoot riots haven't you? Those were dark times.

Answer 4

People have always had suspicions about any other group of people. The Japanese were not singled out: Americans did the same to the Chinese, the Russians, the Irish, the Italians...with each wave of immigrants, gang wars broke out and fights. Of course, the women from the other group always looked better to the men, so they were quickly assimilated.
Long before Pearl Habor, Japanese were a big part of the Hawaiian scene; they were a big presence in many U.S. cities. Although Japanese fought against Japan (Germans fought against Germany, Italians fought against Italy), the ignorant masses could not wait to lauch their attacks against these outsiders. Because there was so much more difference between Japanese culture and American culture (compared to German and Italian), the Japanese were the ones who were sent to concentration camps. (Your "internment" camps.)

Answer 5

Racism.

There was an undercurrent of anti-Asian hatred left over from the battles for railroad jobs between unemployed western whites and immigrant Chinese and Japanese. The failure of the "gold rush" left a lot of whites unemployed in California and they would kill asians who competed with them for those jobs during the so called "Yellow Peril".

The asian community still bears the repercussions of the last 100+ years in America. I listened to a lecture by a Chinese American school superintendent who explained Chinese and Japanese laundries and restaurants as an attempt not to compete with Americans for jobs after world war II. Rather, they did their most menial tasks.

Answer 6

i guess there were some suspicions but at the same time it was because they felt that the Japanese were here as spies so that is why they interned them because the FDR administration did not want to take any chances.