The lives of Japanese-Americans were drastically changed when, in 1941, Japanese fighter planes attacked the United States naval base Pearl Harbor and plunged the United States into World War Two against Japan. With Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans who lived on the West coast of the United States were forced from their homes to various internment camps located in the wastelands through out the Midwest. In the blink of an eye, Japanese-Americans (many of whom were United States World War One veterans) not only suffered the sudden loss of freedom, but also the detrimental loss of their humanity. The discussion presented is not a timeline of the events of World War Two regarding how the Japanese-Americans were involved, nor is it a list of Reparation acts passed by congress in the effort to compensate the Japanese-Americans. Rather, the discussion presented is an examination of how World War Two and its aftermath altered the Japanese-Americans" actual being; how it changed their entire scope of life. By examining the Japanese-Americans" loss of identity , loss of tradition, and loss of humanity, the reader will see how World War Two changed the very existence and culture of the Japanese-American people.
The identity loss suffered by the Japanese-Americans resulted from various events and attitudes spurred by United States entering the war against Japan. Firstly, Japanese-Americans had suddenly become the face of the enemy to many (in fact, most) Americans. Japanese-American immigrants could no longer identify themselves as future citizens of the Unites States (a right denied to them by then American law); neither could they find solace in their ancestry, as their very bloodline condemned them. One can imagine then the devastation actual United States citizens who were of Japanese ancestry suffered when on "December 8, 1941, the Department of Justice issued the first federal regulation .
