Propaganda For Japanese-American Internment - History

History

After the attack by the Japanese Empire on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, American attitudes towards people of Japanese ancestry indicated a strong sense of racism. This sentiment became further intensified by the media of the time, which played upon issues of:

• racism on the West Coast
• the social fear of the Japanese people and
• citizen-influenced farming conflicts with the Japanese people.

This, along with the attitude of the leaders of the western defense command and the lack of perseverance by the Justice Department to protect the civil rights of Japanese Americans led to the successful relocation of both native and foreign born Japanese.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which recognized specific military sites on the United States West Coast as off-limits to people of Japanese descent. This order gave members of the military the authority to remove Japanese people from the area if their presence there was deemed too close to the military establishment. In April 1942, Exclusion Order 346 was issued to force the Japanese-American citizens to live in assembly centers which were located in various open spaces such as fairgrounds and tracks. By the fall of 1942, the Japanese people had been evacuated out of the West Coast and into inland internment camps built by the United States government to hold over 80,000 evacuees. Propaganda in favor of Japanese-American internment was produced by both the government and local citizens through mediums such as movies and print.