Effects Of Japanese Internment

On September 1st, 1939, the second World War was officially declared. This war would last for 6 years, killing roughly 3% of the overall populace, approximately 2.3 billion people. World War II claimed millions of lives for racism alone, and decimated the rights of different ethnicities with the claims that one race was superior. Germany was not the only racist country, with North America particularly subject to racial acts of injustice. One of them was the Japanese internment camps created in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The 'relocation centers' were the most hypocritical act of WWII, a war fought because of prejudice and racism. These camps denied the Japanese rights and freedoms of other citizens of non-Japanese descent, and
Not only was WWII fought against racism, but North America is a continent mainly comprised of immigrants of European descent, and some of the racism towards the Japanese was rationalized because they were immigrants. By the end of WWII, Mackenzie King gave the Japanese an ultimatum in Canada; go to Japan or east of the rocky mountains. Therefore when America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of the dead might have been American and Canadian citizens, which would be ironic considering racism against the Japanese escalated because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Government officials were not sympathetic at the time. “Take them back to Japan. They do not belong here, and here, and there is only one solution to the problem. They cannot be assimilated as Canadians for no matter how long the Japanese remain in Canada they will always be Japanese.” Thomas Reid, Member of Parliament for New Westminster said on the matter. (Quotes, Canadian Japanese Internment Camps) "And at school, we began every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I could see the barb wire fence and the sentry towers right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words 'with liberty and justice for all,' an innocent child unaware of the irony." George Takei stated of the hypocrisy of the camps. (Dvorsky, Gizmodo) Final control over the Japanese was not fully lifted until 1949, years after the official end of
The camp conditions were bad, and often over-crowded. Though the Japanese Americans and Canadians had done nothing wrong, they were persecuted because of their ethnicities and the way they looked, much like the Jewish people in Germany. Japanese Americans were transported to the internment camps via railroad cars with armed soldiers as escorts. The camps were surrounded with barbed wire and sentry towers. These were rather violent shows of power for people who had done nothing wrong. "We saw all these people behind the fence, looking out, hanging onto the wire, and looking out because they were anxious to know who was coming in. But I will never forget the shocking feeling that human beings were behind this fence like animals [crying]. And we were going to also lose our freedom and walk inside of that gate and find ourselves… cooped up there… when the gates were shut, we knew that we had lost something that was very precious; that we were no longer free." Mary Tsukamoto says of her arrival to an internment camp. (Our Story, Daily Life in the Internment Camps) Mary Tsukamoto touches on her first experience of an internment camp, and the experience sounds like it might as well have been based in the Jewish concentration camps. In fact, the way the Japanese were treated could've been based on the early ways of the National Socialism Party. "BC politicians were in a rage, speaking of the