The president of America Franklin D.

Roosevelt ordered the establishment of Japanese

internment camps during World War II in reaction to the Japanese military attack on Pearl
Harbor.
The U.S. government adopted a policy to confine Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens,
to remote camps, where more than 127,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to these
detention camps.

Conditions in these detention camps were overpopulated and provided substandard,

unsatisfactory and underprivileged living conditions, as per the reports published by the War
Relocation Authority in 1943.
In these relocation centers upto to 5 families had to share a single simple constructed barrack
with almost no privacy. These barracks were uninsulated due to which they remained cold in the
winters and hot in the summers and the conditions of cooking and plumbing facilities were not
up to the mark as well.
The people in the camp tried to build some kind of community consciousness. Residents were
allowed to set up schools, churches and farms and children played sports and participated in
various activities.
Adult internees were allowed to work and earn wages, where the rate at which they were paid
depended upon the skills of an individual and the nature of the work performed. For example a
technical worker usually was paid $16 per month, $12 per month was paid to skilled workers,
whereas the lowest rate was paid to unskilled workers and laborers of $8 per month. However in
contrast to these pay rates the Japanese americans used to earn a lot more than they did in
these camps and hence obviously the living standard before was way more better.

On the contrary the justification that US government had regarding its internment program of
placing families of Japanese ancestry in to remote camps was that its War Department had a
suspicion that these Japanese Americans especially the large population living along the West
Coast would remain loyal to Japan and would act as spies for the Japanese government.
This anti-Japanese paranoia where Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk, despite
a lack of hard evidence to support this view and in addition to the bad advice and
recommendations from political leaders given to the president Franklin D. Roosevelt led to the
passing of orders of creating Internment camps and detaining innocent civilians.
This decision was also presented as an action to avoid a sneak attack from Japan and an
overall strategy of winning war against Japan.

Usually in democracy the principle of "majority rule and minority rights" is practiced, where the
decisions made by the majority are followed by ensuring that these decisions would never affect
the basic rights of the minorities.
Similarly the democratic system of the United States is based on freedom and equality, however
the policies adopted in world war II were based on suppression and exclusion as Japanese
Americans were confined and deprived them from their fundamental rights.

However almost 46 years later a Civil Liberties Act was passed by the US Congress in which a
formal apology was issued and $20,000 each was granted to more than 80,000 Japanese
American families as compensation for unjust treatment that they had faced due to the
government's policy.