Blog 5: Letters

With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US governments decision to put all the Japanese Americans into internment camps simply because “The Japanese in California, he warned, ‘may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort’ …”(Takaki 389). This shows the part of the reasoning why the government wanted to put the Japanese Americans in internment camps. With the Japanese getting put into the internment camps is where the letters to Violet began. In the different letters over the few year span when she was in the internment camps there were some common things that got brought up over and over again. One of those being how she got sick and had the ‘Valley Fever’ as they called it, but even after going to the doctors it seemed as though there wasn't anything the doctors said that could help. Another thing that came up was how hard it was to buy or get things after they got to the internment camp. This is showed in the letters to Violet and how she would send her money for Violet to buy and send her things that she couldn't get since they weren't allowed to bring much of their personal belongings from their houses with them. 

A big topic that is shown both in Takaki and Bold Words that was in the letters was the loyalty questionnaires that all the internees had to answer to see if they were able to register or for the draft. This is talked about throughout the section in Takaki titled “The Watershed of World War II” and is shown when they first required the internees to answer them, “Five days later the government required all interns to answer loyalty questionnaires” (Takaki 397). This just shows that they made the internees answer the questionnaires. How the Japanese Americans answered the two questions determined if they were eligible to register for the draft. But there were a lot of people who answered no to the questions with “Some 4,600 or 22 percent of the 21,000 Nisei males eligible to register…”(Takaki 397). This shows that there were a lot of Japanese Americans who didn't feel loyal to the US and weren't willing to serve in the armed forces. But the people who answer no to both questions got the name No-No Boy. These men that answered no to both the questions didn't get treated well. “…with reasons just as flimsy and unreal and they had all gone to prison”(Okada 168). This shows that the US government took this questionnaire seriously and for the people that decided to answer no ended up in prison and afterwards they weren't able to get jobs especially if they wanted a government job.