From the mid-1800s through World War II, the San Francisco Bay area was in constant turmoil with people of Asian decent. This conflict eventually permeated the surrounding areas and made its way to lawmakers in Washington D.C. During the Second World War, fear and hysteria led to an eruption with the unwarranted relocation of close to 110,000 Japanese-Americans. Many of these people were born in the United States and had never stepped foot outside of America or visited Japan. Some had children and siblings fighting in the war. The poet Dwight Okita had family who lived in the internment camps and migrated to Chicago after their captivity. Living in a large Japanese-American community, Okita was likely told of his family heritage and their plight during World War II. He wrote a poem through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl called "In Response to Executive Order 9066." This poem expresses the feelings of the many people who were forced to move away from the only lives that they knew and to live in the camps.
Just before the turn of the century, there was an increased number of Japanese immigration to the United States. Fifty years before this, many Chinese immigrants arrived to take advantage of the Gold Rush in California. Their arrival and the mining skills they possessed seemed to some "an infringement upon the fruits of Manifest Destiny"(Conrat 16). The Chinese faced many challenges and many laws were put into place to give mining advantages to the whites. One of these laws was the Miners" License Law (1850). The limited numbers of licenses were primarily given to the white miners in the area. The Chinese were seen as cheap labor on farms and in factories and the labor unions resented it. By the time the Japanese arrived in the 1890's, anti-Oriental sentiments were high and they received the same bad treatment as the Chinese. From 1905 to 1924, California lawmakers attempted to pass many laws to control the Japanese population.