Prior to and during the Second World War, Japanese Americans were seen as the enemy. This is of course due to the fact that Japan was the main antagonist of the United States in the Pacific war theater. In fact, between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in camps in the mainland US, most of them American citizens at the time. Many of them were forcibly relocated from their homes in the US West Coast and moved to relocation areas that were like military camps surrounded by barbed wires from which there was no escape (Ogawa and Fox, 135).
The experience of Japanese Americans during World War II may indeed be compared to the experience of Muslim and Arab Americans after 9-11. As the enemy during the Second World War was the Japanese, then hasty generalizations were made by society (led by the American government) and all individuals of Japanese descent (even if they were bona fide US citizens already), were labelled as the enemy. In the aftermath of 9-11, the Muslim American sector in the US was also labelled as the enemy and were seen as terrorists seeking opportunities to inflict death and damage on the United States and on Americans. People have this self-protection desire such that one would go as far as to label all people of the same race with a certain name or term such that he is just the same as the perpetrators of a crime. Even if one knows that people are different individually, there is this propensity to generalize and label all the rest of the people with the same ancestry with the negative label.
While it is deplorable that the United States resorted to the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II, it did not do the same after 9-11. To do so would create chaos in this modern 21st century world where inclusion and globalization are supposed to be the norm. However, the labeling continued, and it is apparent that the bigotry continues with the recommendations made by Presidential candidate Donald Trump. I think this situation is compounded by the fact that there are almost no positive images of Muslims in the American media. Muslim terrorists also continue to wreak havoc in the US mainland, such as what happened during the Boston Marathon several years ago. Unfortunately, the prediction is that this labeling will indeed continue into the future.
Work Cited
Ogawa, Dennis and Fox, Evarts. Japanese Interment and Relocation. In Japanese Americans, From Relocation to Redress, S. Taylor and H. Kitano, editors. 2013. University of Washington Press. Web.
