Pearl Harbor and the Internment Camps

Friday, December 07, 2007


Photograph by Dorothea Lange

While this is the same day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, where veterans and those who lost their lives are remembered, let's also remember that this was the start of Japanese Internment where so many U.S. citizens' lives - because of nothing more than the color of their skin and where they were born - were also lost, were also taken.

PBS Children of the Camps

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted the military to circumvent the constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense. The order set into motion the exclusion from certain areas, and the evacuation and mass incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast,most of whom were U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens.
Japanese-Americans Internment Camp Photograph Exhibit

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. The photographs in this exhibit represent a sampling of the available resources in the Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, and other private collections, which were generously lent for this exhibit.
Internment camp memoir released

Yasutaro Soga was a 68-year-old newspaper editor when he was detained after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. He would spend the next four years in internment camps and publish a Japanese-language memoir, "Tessaku Keisatus," in 1948.
The 'enemy' within

She was an all-American teenager attending church in San Francisco that Sunday morning 66 years ago when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. For Hatsue Kuwada Okamoto, Dec. 7, 1941, is a date that lives in infamy. It took away her rights as a citizen and changed her life.