Japanese-Americans faced a number of serious challenges on the home front during World War II. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they immediately became the object of intense suspicion. Many believed that Japanese-Americans had dual loyalties and were potential traitors who would gladly assist in a Japanese invasion of the United States.

In actual fact, the overwhelming majority of Japanese-Americans were fiercely loyal to the United States, but in the tense atmosphere after Pearl Harbor, prejudices came to the boil. This resulted not just in discrimination and racial abuse but in the wholesale round-up of Japanese-American families, who were subsequently interned in specially-allocated camps.

Conditions in these camps were notoriously bad; the inmates were treated as criminals even though they were entirely innocent, and untried, of any crime. The government justified the policy of internment on the grounds of national security and believed that by removing Japanese-Americans away from strategically important areas such as the West coast, they were making it more difficult for them to act as a potential army of fifth columnists on behalf of Imperial Japan.