Japanese American Internment during WWII - Essay Example

The attack destroyed two battleships, one hundred and forty nine airplanes and sunk four other battleships. The damage caused to Pearl Harbor brought about fresh resentment to the existing bias towards Japanese immigrants. Within hours of air strikes at Pearl Harbor, FBI representatives checked through Japanese American communities in Oregon, Hawaii, Washington and California and arrested community leaders, Christian ministers, Buddhist reverends, teachers of Japanese culture, language or martial arts, businessmen and people with famous political ideas.

The arrests included Japanese Americans with sympathetic relations to Japan. Thousands of Japanese Americans were rounded up, interrogated and shipped to detention camps according to the orders of the Justice Department to Bismarck, Santa Fe, Crystal City and Missoula. Some Japanese Americans disappeared for years. With the entry of United States into the Second World War, anti Japanese reactions strengthened through a number of hysterical stories of sabotage, propaganda and news related to American battlefield fatalities.

Banks serving only the Japanese were closed down and the U.S. Treasury froze the bank accounts of all born in Japan (Inada & California Historical Society p.xi). Apparently, to safeguard individuals of Japanese ancestry from arrest and suspicion, a mandatory curfew was set up initially on Japanese aliens and later on Japanese American citizens and it was mandatory to carry identification. The Army pressurized the Department of Justice and the FBI to perform unannounced searches and seize contraband products in enemy alien homes with specific emphasis to weapons, cameras and radio transmitters that could be utilized to signal Japanese ships floating offshore.

After ten weeks of the Second World War, in February 1942, the Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt. The order authorized to exclude people of Japanese descent; both aliens and