citizen in december six 1941 the country essay
Excerpt from Composition:
Resident
On Dec 7, 1941, the nation of Japan bitten the United States for Pearl Harbor, Beautiful hawaii. This commenced the official participation of the United States on planet War II. While armed forces were overseas fighting the country’s enemies, the usa government was trying to decide whether or not virtually any group of people within America itself could be employed by the other side. Out of this fear came one of the atrocious acts the United States have got ever perpetrated against its citizens. Worrying internal adversaries, the American government signed an buy wherein any individual of Western descent could possibly be questioned, caught, detained, and interred for several camps throughout the American West. It had been a policy of legal racism that dished up no good intended for the government but to instill inside the people the information that the government can make blunders and it is feasible to lose their civil legal rights even in the land from the free. Available Citizen 13660, author My own Okubo writes about her personal experience of returning to the us just before the 2nd World Warfare after spending a scholarly tour in Europe and how the girl came residence to be free from the tyranny of war only to see that flexibility stripped apart by the Usa government.
The graphic book is composed of pen and ink drawings and minimal narration. The images are all the a part of the storyline as the text, perhaps in addition. All the pictures show a stocky, short-haired woman in the midst of the actions. Sometimes this woman is on the periphery of the picture and not getting the action with the dialogue under the picture. Nevertheless , she is omnipresent. In fact , this narrator can be acting as part of the story, but also as a commentator on everything that the lady sees. The narrator from the story implies that from the moment she and her brother heard that it was the Japanese who were behind the attack in Pearl Harbor that there could be consequences for them. “Then on December 7, 1941, while my brother and I had been having overdue breakfast I turned on the radio and read the display – ‘Pearl Harbor bombed by the Japan! ‘ We were shocked. All of us wondered what this would indicate to us and the other people of Japanese descent in the United States” (Okubo 8). At this time, the narrator has indicated that she has a sister and father throughout the state. Her mother just passed away prior to beginning of the internment. The month before the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a secret report by Curtis B. Munson that stated the majority of Western Coast Japanese-Americans were loyal to the Us but that this area was particularly susceptible to sabotage attacks because atteinte, bridges, harbors, and electrical power plants were mostly unguarded (Burton Phase 3). Historians have wondered whether or not this kind of understanding either proves or disproves the validity of internment. Several say that together with the information the government had plus the sense of growing stress in the United States, the internment policy could be construed as understandable. Others think that the insurance plan of internment was totally due to internalized racism.
Naturally , the response was the hunch of any individual of Western descent by the Caucasian majority. Anyone of Japanese or German history was quickly suspected penalized a criminal for the enemy, particularly the Japanese. The racism of 1940s America was given a target in the Japanese-Americans. “The people checked out all of us, equally citizens and aliens, with suspicion and mistrust” (Okubo 12). There were, of course , not any proven connections between Japan and the majority with the immigrant Japan population or their children. Nonetheless the climate of America turned against this group. Okubo writes:
It absolutely was ‘Jap’ this and ‘Jap’ that. Limited areas were prescribed and a lot of arrests and detentions of enemy extraterrestrials took place. Almost all enemy extraterrestrials were necessary to have records of identification. Contraband, just like cameras, goggles, short-wave radios, and weapons had to be flipped over to the neighborhood police (10).
The term enemy alien applied to anyone in america who were certainly not in possession of official documentation proving they were right here legally. It was difficult offered the regulations of the period which explained that any individual of Japanese people descent who was not created in this nation could not be a citizen, although instead was labeled as a legal alien (Burton Chapter 3). Even people who did include these files in their ownership could be held if the community officials announced the documents were forgeries or was acquired unlawfully.
The only action of sabotage ever attributed to Japanese-American citizens was the case of a blood farmer who was refused the right to stay on his farm very long to harvest the berries. According to Burton:
When told to leave his home and to a great assembly centre, one player asked for action to harvest his strawberry plant. His demand was refused, so this individual plowed underneath the strawberry discipline. He was then arrested to get sabotage, because strawberries were a necessary asset for the war efforts (Ch. 3).
In 1942, the federal government of the United States began giving proclamations restricting the liberties and municipal rights of the Japanese-American persons. This started with the placing your signature to of Business Order No . 9066 which usually gave the government the right to select areas of land where “any or all persons could possibly be excluded” (Burton Chapter 3). Among the atrocities against city liberties included a curfew which explained that all Japanese-Americans had to be inside their homes by 8 evening and could certainly not leave just before 6 am (Okubo 14). Also, any individual working more than five a long way away from their home had to have a special permit. People who had been cleared out had to trust in the financial institutions or inside the Farm Security Administration to safeguard their property via opportunists in the community who had not any qualms regarding illegally commandeering said home. This trust was often misplaced and many evacuees shed their homes and their property and were not compensated for losses. This suspicion and criminality was not reserved to first technology immigrants (called Isei); a fantastic portion of the citizens troubled by the racist government policies were Japanese-Americans who had been delivered in the United States and had never turn up to the East (referred to as Nisei). “In most, 110, 000 were transferred out; two thirds of them were native American citizens” (Okubo 16).
Using the camps which the Japanese-Americans were interned in were transformed racetracks and campgrounds with amenities scarcely suitable for human survival. These types of camps had been no more than large prisons, between barbed cable and equipped guards (Okubo 15). Following finally coming to the internment camp, the narrator and her sibling are installed in a stable. Their home for this current moment and then for the foreseeable future was a horse’s stable. With this small square designed for the keeping of horses and donkeys and other such beasts of burden, two adults would have to share their lives. The narrator and her brother had been lucky from this. Most of the fixe were available to larger households wherein fathers, mothers, kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins might have to live in precisely the same small space all together.
A swinging half-door divided the 20 by 9 ft. stall in to two areas. The roof sloped down from a level of twelve feet in the rear space to seven feet inside the front room; under the rafters an area extended the full length of the secure. The rear place had encased the horse and the front room the fodder. Both rooms showed indications of a hurried whitewashing. Spider webs, horses hair, and hay was whitewashed while using walls. Large spikes and nails caught out throughout the walls. A two-inch level of dust covered the floor, but about removing it we discovered the linoleum the color of redwood have been placed above the rough manure-covered boards (Okubo 35).
This kind of place was hardly suit for the animals that it once located let alone individuals. Yet now that is correct the American government saw fit to deal with some of it is citizens with no evidence that they can had perpetrated any offences, without accusation, and without the cabability to defend themselves in a court of law.
In the book Citzien 13660, the narrator’s identity and family history are removed and instead she’s defined by number given to her by the government sign up of Japanese-Americans, the 13660 of the title. Okubo writes:
The woman in charge asked me many questions and filled in several printed varieties as I responded. As a result of the interview, my loved ones number was reduced to No . 13660. I was given several tags bearing the family amount, and was then ignored. At one other desk I made the essential arrangements to have my household property stored by the authorities (19).
In the aftermath in the Second World War, the atrocities fully commited by
