Japanese Internment Camps

A few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt who was under significant pressure from the mass hysteria that ensued after this bombing issued an order to round up the Japanese population on the Pacific Coast. This moved the Japanese population of those states inland to internment camps until after the war ended. Many of those Japanese who were rounded up to these camps were American citizens. This order resulted in much of the population being displaced post-war and is a dark stain on American history. Through photography and visual analysis, we can get a deeper sense of these dark times and see what these people had gone through with our own interpretations of these images which sympathise with the Japanese. …show more content…
Which creates an authoritative feel for the soldier and an oppressed feeling for the child. The soldier is positioned powerfully above the child with his full uniform while the kid looks defenceless and little compared to every other human figure in the frame. Other details that were noticed include the focus and depth of field effect on the photo. The child and soldier are crisp in focus in the photo while there is a subtle depth of field in the background with the train being hazy. This depth of field helps reflect the viewpoint of the child to an extent he is stuck in focus of the soldiers and others around him looking around as those are his immediate thoughts wondering why they are all gathered here. While the haziness of the train represents the hazy future of every Japanese person headed inland to the internment …show more content…
An example of this is the child's coat being one of the darkest parts of the image which draw attention as well as his eyes being nearly black to draw attention the fact that he is looking at the soldier's direction and to show the fear in his eyes. There are also very few instances of brighter white and one those few is the tag is a brighter white. These tags were used to identify the Japanese families and every single family had to have a tag on them the contrasting bright white on the child's black coat brings attention to this fact. Another example of a whiter part of the image is the white shirt in the basket next to the kids. This is interpreted as a way to bring attention to the size of the kid compared to everyone else as well as showing how few belongings the Japanese were actually allowed to take with them to the