Reference no: EM131534993

The Executive Order 9066 is something I know all too well. It's something that I have understood fairly recently, despite my knowledge of it ever since I was a child.

My grandfather used to tell me stories of his brothers as zero fighters in WWII and my grandmother told me stories of her fleeing Kobe from the Doolittle air raids, all the way to the Kagawa prefecture in Japan. Ironically, even though both of them suffered losses, my grandparents never resented the United States, and always told me that "This is war, and in war we lose ourselves.". This also applies to the internment camps as well.

My grandmother's friend who had a husband that recently passed was sent to Manzanar during WWII and told me that "Japan would have done the same, if not worse to whites during the war", as all whites in Japan right when the war started (mostly English, New Zealand or Australian) were sent to islands in the pacific for slave labour or experimented on through means of torture.

I learned about the internment camps when I was growing up in Japan through my grandparents, and when I came to the States my high school and college classes were the one that showed me all the horrors of WWII (In Japan they only show the Grave of the Fireflies for the section of WWII, and depending on the school some classes would even deny the war ever happened.

My grandfather despised this type of education and took me on annual trips to Hiroshima on the two days the atomic bombs were dropped). Very recently (In fact, this year) I learned through one of my neighbors who went on a road trip, that I had a long lost family member who was sent to one of the internment camps in Topaz, Utah.

My exact feelings on this matter is very cynical. I believe that this is war, and in war there are many things that we, humans do to justify our actions. Through long research on the Japanese side of the war, the incarceration of Japanese in the United States to the internment camps is something very merciful and light in comparison to what the Japanese had done to whites, Koreans, and Chinese during the war.

Those in the internment camps had access to water, food, shelter, and were allowed to communicate with each other and to some extent (Topaz even had a sewer system), had a small community within. Of course the internment camps were nothing of good in nature, but in light of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (Though some would argue Roosevelt saw it coming) its something I believe could not be helped. Though the depressing story about the internment camps were mostly not during the camps, but after the time the camps have ended, most citizens didn't have anything.

Similar to the Jews in Europe, most Japanese had no home to go back to, no money, and all of their assets were frozen or confiscated by the U.S. government. One of the members of the camp said "The conditions after the camp, the camp was much better. The conditions of the camp were much better than what came after the camps".

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