Japanese American Concentration Camps

On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was bombed by the Japanese. In 1942, the War Department called for mass evacuation of Japanese Americans from Hawaii. At this time, 37% of the population of Hawaii was made up of Japanese Americans. Because of this population amount, evacuation would potentially worsen the Hawaiian economy. However, 1,444 Japanese were sent to internment or concentration camps. This concentration camps held thousands of Japanese Americans and provided people with little food, unsanitary quarters and no sympathy. The victims of the camps were cramped and surrounded by barbed wire or thick fencing. Children as young as newborns and adults as old as great-grandmothers and fathers were sent away, sometimes never to return. The camps were mostly concentrated in the West or Midwest coast of the United States. For example, Manzanar camp in California, or Granada camp in Colorado.
Anti-Japanese sentiment was published in newspapers beginning in California. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt made an executive order remove people of Japanese ancestry from California, Washington, Oregon and Arizona; 11,000 Japanese were shipped to prison camps throughout the United States without any evidence of subversion. In 1944, Korematsu v. United States determined that this racial segregation was legal in times of military necessity. In 1965, The Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) pushed for government compensating. In 1978, Congress gave payment for reparations of $20,000 to each Japanese American who were previously sent to relocation camps.