The Japanese Internments

Japanese American internment  was the relocation and internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans.

Japanese discrimination had been prominent In America for decades, mainly because of the high amount of Japanese immigrants, who took jobs and property during the great

depression.

During the first parts of WWII, America had stayed uninvolved, but on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into the war.

On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed military powers to designate any area in the U.S. as an “exclusion zone”, meaning that any and all people could be kept in or out of them. Most races were left alone, but Japanese

Americans were targeted.

The Japanese were rounded up and sent to several different kinds of facilities. The most noted were the Assembly Centers, run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration, and the Relocation Centers, run by the War Relocation Authority, which are typically referred

to as "internment camps.“

The Camps contained very poor conditions; no plumbing, cots for beds, and 45 cents of food daily.

On January 2, 1945, the interment was ended entirely. Relocation camps were left open, however, to anyone who was not able to return home. The freed internees were given

$25 and a train ticket to their home cities.

Beginning in the 1960s, the generation of Japanese-Americans that grew up after internment began the "Redress Movement", an operation whose aim was to receive and official apology from the federal government, along with reparations for interning their

parents and grandparents. They appealed both to the property loss the suffered and the general lack of human rights exhibited. In 1967, president Ford apologized saying that it

was wrong, and a major injustice that will never again occur. In 1988, Ronald Reagan passed the Civil Liberties Act which provided every surviving detainee $20,000. 

Also on October, 1 1993 President Clinton wrote the Presidential Letter of Apology, which was a direct apology from the U.S government to the Japanese people.