Vuong's Japanese Internment Camp Page
"I remember the soldiers marching us to the Army tank and I looked at their rifles and I was just terrified because I could see this long knife at the end . . . I thought I was imagining it as an adult much later . . . I thought it couldn't have been bayonets because we were just little kids."
from "Children of the Camps"
"Until we can talk about the experience and make a connection with our grief and anger, we will each still be unconsciously trying to get out of our own personal camp. Our experience was unique, but it's an example of the broader experience of racism, how it permeates lives, and how we each attempt to survive it. It's about trauma and suffering, but it also is about our strength."
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States was gripped by war hysteria. This was especially strong along the Pacific coast of the U.S., where residents feared more Japanese attacks on their cities, homes, and businesses. Leaders in California, Oregon, and Washington, demanded that the residents of Japanese ancestry be removed from their homes along the coast and relocated in isolated inland areas. As a result of this pressure, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the forcible internment of about 50,000 Japanese citizens living near the American west coast and their 70,000 American born descendants, virtually all children and young adults. The vast majority of these in c arcerated people had no reason to be deemed guilty, or even suspicious, beyond their ethnicity. Most were ultimately deemed "loyal" and many thousands allowed to leave to live away from the west coast during the war. More than two-thirds of those interned under the Executive Order were citizens of the United States, and none had ever shown any disloyalty. The War Relocation Authority was created to administer the assembly centers, relocation centers, and internment camps, and relocation of Japanese Americans began in April 1942. Internment camps were scattered all over the interior West, in isolated desert areas of Arizona, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming, where Japanese Americans were forced to carry on their lives under harsh conditions. It took several years for the US supreme court to order the whole group released, though they were set free before the war ended. Many, especially the old ( most of the Japanese citizens were quite old), having lost nearly everything in the disruption and fearing war hostility outside, remained in the camps voluntarily until after the end of the war. Executive Order 9066 was rescinded by President Roosevelt in 1944, and the last of the camps was closed in March, 1946. By then the internment has become one of the most widely condemned actions in US history.
This page, although its purpose is to mainly reserved for the project in class, it is also a chance for me, as a student, to fathom as profoundly as I can about the Japanese Internment Camp. It is perhaps one of the darkest events, moments in the history of the United States, certainly not compared to the Holocaust or the Holy War. However, it is the event that touched many people's hearts especially the Japanese Americans when they remind themselves of the event, of the suffering that they've endured in the past. For the younger generations, they would feel uncomfortable in interacting with other Americans, seeing of how badly their older generations were treated by the United States government.
Moreover, this project also gives me a chance to learn more about the technology of making a web page which I have had some brief experiences about it but was never good at it.