RESEARCH PAPER ON JAPANESE AMERICAN SEGREATION IN THE PERIOD OF BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR - Essay Example

For example, the FBI, along with the Office of Naval Intelligence and Military Intelligence Division, wrote Sonia Shah, had conducted surveillance of the Japanese American community since the early 1930s, a decade before the Pearl Harbor bombing. (p. 179) Anti-Japanese immigration has been present ever since in communities and in the media. And, finally, the success of the attack highlighted the “racial inferiority” of the Japanese in the American point of view. Barry Dean Karl (1983) offered us an account: The training of the young Japanese air pilots to fly aircrafts was to crash and explode was taken as an example of Japanese racial character rather than military patriotism.

Suicide was acceptable to Japan… That the attack on Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, was also taken as demonstrating a character defect, and it was presumed to have been necessitated by another Japanese defect: that they were shoddy manufacturers whose equipment could not stand up in a proper battle. (p. 202) Pearl Harbor as the worst defeat ever suffered by the American Navy was unbelievable to Americans. The American racism which fueled the previously outlined American perspective towards Japanese led many people to believe that Japan could not have pulled off their stunning raid without inside help of some sort.

Here, we also see that American prejudice played a role in the base being unprepared: Commanders at the base refused to focus on what the Japanese were capable of doing and instead focused on what seemed to make sense for them to do. 3 Anti-Japanese sentiment eventually obscured any Japanese-American efforts to display loyalty to the United States. Swiftly, only three months after the bombing, President Franklin D. Roosevelt codified the hatred towards the Japanese when he issued Executive Order 9066 which mandated the exclusion and confinement of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps.4