History Essay Sample about Japanese Internment Camps

Imagine a family living in a small room with weeds through the floor, holes through the roof, and tiny little cots to sleep in. Imagine being forced to leave all your friends and your possessions behind and live somewhere else. That's the experience that 7,500 Japanese Americans had to live through. To begin, an internment camp is defined as “a prison camp for the confinement of prisoners of war, enemy aliens, or political prisoners”. These camps were used to hold prisoners captured during the war all in one place. In the 1940s Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, a military base in Hawaii, and killed 2,500 people. This attack provoked America to go to war with Japan, and as a result, Japanese American citizens were then forcefully transported to many internment camps, leaving their homes, friends, and possessions behind. The Japanese American citizens were negatively treated and faced many injustices like having their privacy violated and being forced to live in terrible housing conditions.

The Japanese internment camps had terrible living conditions that the Japanese American citizens were forced to live and work at. Monica Sone, a survivor of the Japanese internment camps, states “The apartments resembled elongated, low stables about two blocks long. Our home was one room, about eighteen by twenty feet, the size of a single living room. There was one small window in the wall opposite the one door. It was bare except for a tiny wood-burning stove crouching in the center.” (Sone 517). In other words, Monica Sone is telling us the conditions of the housing in the camp, with small bare rooms with tiny cots to sleep in. This piece of evidence indicates how the residents of “Camp Harmony '' were treated horrifically unlike their houses before they had to migrate to internment camps which had running water, furniture, and separate rooms. As a result, many internees had to adapt to their new lives and conditions. The video “Remembering Manzanar” also shows what Japanese American citizens' housing was like in the internment camps. While in the internment camps, the Japanese American citizens were forced to live in a hostile environment. A piece of evidence that Remembering Manzanar, an informational documentary on the Japanese internment camps, portrays is, ”I remember seeing the rows of barracks, dirt all over, no plants or greenery. The first thing that they told us to do was to grab a bag and put straws in the bag. And that was our bed for that night.” (“Remembering Manzanar”). This quote demonstrates that inside their chicken coop-like houses, they have very little compared to their houses before. One of the similarities between the chicken coops and the barracks is that they provided very small living space for the internee, which resulted in little privacy in the camps.

While in the internment camps, Japanese American citizens were negatively treated and faced many injustices like having their privacy violated and being forced to live in horrific housing conditions. A quote from Lila Perl, a past internee at a Japanese internment camp, states, “Incoming letters and packages were subjected to careful scrutiny. Items such as cameras and potential weapons...were confiscated. Cakes sent through the mail or delivered by visitors were cut through to make sure they did not conceal any of these things” (Perl 73). In other words, guards searched through all of their mail and even cakes for potential weapons like guns or knives. Consequently, this results in a violation of the Japanese American citizen's legal rights to privacy, and the right to bear arms. All of these rights are stated in the bill of rights, a document made to protect a citizen's rights. The article “Behind Barbed Wire” also shows some examples of Japanese American citizens' rights being violated. This quote from “Camp Harmony” by Monica Sone, another survivor of the Japanese internment camps, states “The lights came from high towers placed around the camp, where guards with tommy guns kept a twenty-four-hour vigil. I remembered the wire fence encircling us, and a knot of anger tightened in my breast. What was I doing behind a fence, like a criminal?” (Sone 520). To put it differently, the prisoners of the Japanese internment camps were put in a hostile environment with barbed fences and watchtowers around the borders armed with guards who carried guns. As a result, this made the internees of the internment camps feel like prisoners even though they were rightful citizens of the United States and did nothing to break the law.

Since the Japanese American citizens faced many challenges Like having their privacy violated and having to live and work in terrible living conditions, the Japanese American citizens were treated terribly. To begin, the living conditions inside camp harmony were terrible because the housing lacked the simple needs of humans to live their life. Furthermore, the prisoners of the Japanese internment camps had many of their basic rights violated in the camps. If the government does not stop with its prejudices, then an entire race of people will suffer. So we need to look back in history and stop these prejudices so we won’t repeat the Japanese internment camps. The mistakes from the past can lead us to a better future.

Works Cited

Sone, Monica. "Camp Harmony" Holt Literature & Language Arts.Edited by Kathleen Daniels, Harcourt Classroom Education Company. 2003, pp. 319-323. Print.

ManzanarNPS. (2017, February 24). Remembering Manzanar Documentary - YouTube. 

youtube.com. Retrieved November 18, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spo1Khmp2U4.

Perl, Lila. “Behind Barbed Wires” Tarrytown , Benchmark Books, 2003.