December 7, 1941 was, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, “a day that will live in infamy.” Just before eight o’clock that morning, Japanese naval and air forces launched a surprise attack on Oahu’s naval base Pearl Harbor that had been brewing for months in response to tension over the U.S.’s year-old embargo over Japan. Immediate effects set aside— over 3,500 casualties, a multitude of damaged or destroyed military equipment, and even the declaration of martial law in Hawaii—the greatest impact of this devious attack was inarguably the fact that it pushed the United States of America into entering World War II. America did not take the assault lightly in the slightest. Coupled with a note from the Japanese government terminating relations with the United States, the American government took this as a grievous act of treachery from
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With the implementation of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were almost immediately relegated to dismal internment camps to prevent the formation of a “fifth column” of Axis support in America. Of the 127,000 –strong Japanese-American presence on the West Coast, approximately 120,000 were incarcerated for the duration of the war, nearly 65 percent of them full American citizens. In 1944 Fred Korematsu charged the act to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples’ civil rights; the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge it as such, setting a precedent for the future that individual liberties could be trampled on in the name of allegedly preventing espionage and treason. In addition to fostering discontent between Japanese-Americans and their government, Executive Order 9066 struck a nerve with Japan itself, a hostility that had been looming since America’s first Japanese-restrictive immigration policies in the early
With the implementation of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were almost immediately relegated to dismal internment camps to prevent the formation of a “fifth column” of Axis support in America. Of the 127,000 –strong Japanese-American presence on the West Coast, approximately 120,000 were incarcerated for the duration of the war, nearly 65 percent of them full American citizens. In 1944 Fred Korematsu charged the act to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples’ civil rights; the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge it as such, setting a precedent for the future that individual liberties could be trampled on in the name of allegedly preventing espionage and treason. In addition to fostering discontent between Japanese-Americans and their government, Executive Order 9066 struck a nerve with Japan itself, a hostility that had been looming since America’s first Japanese-restrictive immigration policies in the early