Japanese-American Claims Act
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack sank four U.S. battleships, destroyed 188 U.S. aircraft, and killed 2,403 U.S. citizens within two hours, and led to the United States joining World War II. Once the United States entered the war and anti-Japanese sentiment began to circulate, Americans increasingly reacted with racism and hostility, viewing people of Japanese descent were treated as enemies regardless of whether they were U.S. citizens. The U.S. government expressed concerns about the loyalty of the Japanese people living in America and about Japanese spies sending information to Japan. "The U.S. Department of the Treasury froze the assets of all citizens and resident aliens who were born in Japan, and the Department of Justice arrested some 1,500 religious and community leaders as potentially dangerous enemy aliens. Because many of the largest populations of Japanese Americans were in close proximity to vital war assets along the Pacific coast. The result was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066."
Hisaye Yamamoto
On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese navy, an act of war that was both undeclared by the Japanese and unexpected by the United States. Within four months of the bombing, Japanese Americans numbering close to 120,000 were forced into internment, two-thirds of which were born on American soil. Abandoning homes, farms, and businesses, this forceful relocation movement contributed to a certain physical, social, and psychological uprooting that Yamamoto would repeatedly address in her work. Japanese women leading ephemeral lives in the United States often had no female confidants outside of the family. In spite of the perpetual hardships that they faced, literature and poetry continued to flourish in the new land. In a sense, as a response to the various forms of imprisonment and relocation faced by both Issei and Nisei women, be it jail, internment, poverty, gender, or even marriage, art became the only source of freedom in their lives.