Japanese American Internment

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 authorised military exclusion zones in the United States. More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, were removed from homes on the West Coast and confined in government camps without individual findings of disloyalty. Families lost property, employment, education and freedom through a policy driven by wartime fear and racial prejudice.

Conditions varied between camps but included harsh climates, inadequate privacy and the pressure to prove loyalty to a state that had imprisoned its own citizens. The exclusion orders ended before the war was over, while later legal challenges, historical investigation and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 formally recognised the injustice.

In The Hidden Flower, the Japanese heroine’s father has returned to Kyoto after facing the threat of internment in America.