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Excerpt from I Am an American: A True Story of Japanese Internment

Published in 1994

When the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japanese fighter planes on December 7, 1941 (see Franklin D. Roosevelt entry for more information about Pearl Harbor), approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans resided in the United States. Japan's surprise attack on U.S. forces plunged the United States into World War II (1939-45). Within a few months, more than 115,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of them born in the United States—were forced to leave their West Coast homes. (At the time, about ninety-five percent of the Japanese in the States lived in the coastal states of Washington, Oregon, and California.)

Americans of Japanese ancestry were easy targets of discrimination because of their distinctive Asian features. "We looked like the enemy," noted Japanese American author...