With the implementation of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were almost immediately relegated to dismal internment camps to prevent the formation of a “fifth column” of Axis support in America. Of the 127,000 –strong Japanese-American presence on the West Coast, approximately 120,000 were incarcerated for the duration of the war, nearly 65 percent of them full American citizens. In 1944 Fred Korematsu charged the act to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples’ civil rights; the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge it as such, setting a precedent for the future that individual liberties could be trampled on in the name of allegedly preventing espionage and treason. In addition to fostering discontent between Japanese-Americans and their government, Executive Order 9066 struck a nerve with Japan itself, a hostility that had been looming since America’s first Japanese-restrictive immigration policies in the early
With the implementation of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were almost immediately relegated to dismal internment camps to prevent the formation of a “fifth column” of Axis support in America. Of the 127,000 –strong Japanese-American presence on the West Coast, approximately 120,000 were incarcerated for the duration of the war, nearly 65 percent of them full American citizens. In 1944 Fred Korematsu charged the act to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples’ civil rights; the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge it as such, setting a precedent for the future that individual liberties could be trampled on in the name of allegedly preventing espionage and treason. In addition to fostering discontent between Japanese-Americans and their government, Executive Order 9066 struck a nerve with Japan itself, a hostility that had been looming since America’s first Japanese-restrictive immigration policies in the early