Assess the Impact of the War on Civilians in Territories Occupied by Japan in South-East Asia.

Have you ever questioned why and how the US government decided to drop those two nuclear bombs in Japan in the World War II? It is still a universal concern while many disapproval have made toward its humanity. In a book that I’ve read recently, from the point of view of an eyewitness, Yamaoka Michiko, the author of story “Eight hundred meters from the Hypocenter”, shows how humanity was exchanged with the ambition of a nation by reviving a heartbroken experience when she witnessed her hometown was destroyed by such a terrific violence in the war.

The U.S. internment of people of Japanese descent during the 1940s was a major event in U.S. history, but it is often overlooked by many. It affected hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent, whether they were citizens or not. The incarceration of those placed in camps was affected mentally and it caused many of the internees to develop PTSD or otherwise commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder (Potts, 1994, p. 1). The camps affected how the Japanese were viewed in society during the time period of the camps and following the liberation of them. It also changed how the Japanese viewed society. This paper will focus on the cultural and social aspects of the Internal Improvements.

While coming up with a topic for this paper, one of my questions dealt with war and cultural groups. I will be the first to admit, Racism was the last thing on my mind. The original question being, “How does war affect a Social Culture and how does it stand today?” When I started thinking about Cultures that had been so deeply affected by war, one of the first that came to mind were the Japanese in World War II. Then I recalled what one person had told me of their younger days at college, when they were attending school. Their name will remain anonymous; I do not want to make the victim’s name public as it has a very personal nature.

The Fifteen-Year War was a time of great turmoil and uncertainty in Japan. Various facets of the country were tested and driven to their limits. During the occupation, race and gender began to evolve in ways that had not exactly be seen before. War had a tremendous impact on every part of the life of a Japanese citizen. Both men and women began to fill roles that were completely novel to them. Race became a part of the definition of who people were. As the war progressed and American troops landed on Japanese soil for occupation, more drastic changes occurred. Economic hardship and rations befell the people of the Land of the Rising Sun. Prostitution began to rear its ugly head and rape transpired. Through memory, research, and vivid

While World War II had been ongoing since 1939, Japan had been fighting for the Axis powers, against the United States. In 1941, when Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States government had assumed the viewpoint that the Japanese were not to be trusted, and that the Japanese-American citizens of the United States were much the same. As such, they had resorted to establishing internment camps, or preventive labor prisons, so as to keep them in check and ostensibly to prevent further Japanese sabotage. However, the government’s actions were not fully justified, as several factors had interplayed into the circumstances that directly contradicted the intentions and visible results of the internment of the Japanese-Americans, in the social, political, economical, and cultural aspects. On the whole, the internment camps served as drastic measures which were not wholly without reasoning; contrarily, those factors in support of the internment camps did not override those which had gone against it, since the United States’ own legislation, in the form of the Constitution and other laws, had explicitly prevented the depriving of human rights, privileges, and pursuits, which had doubtless applied in light of the Japanese-Americans’ universal citizenship along the Pacific Coast in the early 1940s. As such, while the internment camps were not completely unjustified and without purpose from the viewpoint of the government, they did not align with standards of law and

How has the results of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing affect the lives of the survivors?

Imagine being a part of a minority that was blamed for the disaster that was out of their control, and as a result were forced to leave behind everything. This was a nightmare that became a reality for the Japanese when President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which allowed the government authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Over 120,000 innocent citizens of California, Arizona, and Oregon faced unjust and unconstitutional treatments by their own government, who was supposed to protect citizen’s rights but made the Japanese feel the complete opposite. The internment camps impacted the Japanese-American citizens tremendously in the areas of finances, social status, and physiological well-being.

In the book, War without Mercy, Race and Power in the Pacific War, by John W. Dower and Published by Pantheon Books in 1986, the author powerfully illustrates the extreme racial tensions of Japan and the United States and how they affected policies in both countries. During World War II, the altercations between Japan and the United States were often overlooked, since Germany was taking all of the attention away from the world. But, as described by Dower, the ugly racial battles between Japan and the United States obviously point out that there was more friction between the two countries than most people believe. Another overlooked aspect of

These camps made men feel powerless, and the women felt violated of their privacy. It made them also feel stripped of their civil rights ("Psychological effects of camp"). It also caused many families to be split apart for meals. Instead of the families eating together, the men would sit and eat with each other while the women sat alone and fed the young ones. (“From Citizen to Enemy: The Tragedy of Japanese Internment”). Along with these things, it caused violence to arise between the Japanese Americans and other races. It also created the separation of the races, which took out a whole part of society.

During WW2 many efforts were performed to make the Japanese-American internees and American POWs in Japan feel invisible. There was more than 140,000 prisoners of war, and about 120,000 Japanese that were put in internment camps, during WW2. Although, they were made to feel invisible, each group found a way to resist the efforts. The POW’s were made to feel invisible by they had no contact home,they were made to feel that they lost their dignity,and they were beaten and starved. The Japanese put in internment camps were innocent people that were made to feel invisible by they had to leave their houses,other belongings, and they were disconnected from the outside world.

In conclusion, the Japanese are a resilient and honor bond people who know when they are beaten. This along with all the other statements mentioned in this paper goes to show that Japan would have surrendered if the bombs were not dropped. Although funding the War would have been much harder to do. Many more Americans and Japanese soldiers would have died as well. But, in the end the bombs didn’t need to be

There were rumors of the Japanese and Germans committing gruesome acts against children.” As a result of the war a collective effort was required to maximize war production, the U.S. enacted rationing on massive proportions. “Food, meat, gas, and shoes were rationed, as well as butter and lard. Families were given a certain amount of food stamps, and this was the only way to obtain food. Gas cards were also distributed and this allowed you buy a certain amount of gas each week. Whatever you could get with them was what you got; you had to wait until the next week to get more rationing stamps.” There were some ill effects of rationing, including the formation of black markets local to their respective communities. “The black market sold cigarettes, butter, sugar, canned goods, and other rationed supplies.”

In his work “Right to Kill, Right to Make Live” Takashi Fujitani compares and contrasts the Japanese treatment of colonialized Koreans leading up to World War II with the American treatment of the Japanese residents following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This work highlights how both the Japanese and the Americans treated the Koreans and Japanese Americans, respectively, and offers several different viewpoints. Thus, this work is exceptionally important and provides incredible insight into both cultures and the harsh reality of wartime. Additionally, Fujitani also explains how the Korean and Japanese populations are still influenced today.

During the Occupation event which introduced a number of changes to the Japanese society, economy, and government, it is apparent that the changes to social aspects of self-expression proved to be the most effective in Japanese society. According to the video segments of Reinventing Japan, the experience of censorship and civil suppression under the Hirohito regime made many Japanese citizens eager to accept the new reforms which offered more opportunities for free speech for a variety of groups (e.g. women, intellectuals, etc.). Changes to the economic system of Japan by Western Powers from the Occupation proved to be short-lived or remained in a formal sense due the ineffective plans that were present to fix the nation’s budget and the perpetual

By the end of the war, the U.S. forces had pushed the Japanese far back into their country, leaving them no access to any resources from the Indies. Japanese cities and