Fear From Japanese Americans
Title: Untitled (News of Pearl Harbor)
Date: 1942
Format: Painting oil on canvas California
Institution: Digital Public Library of America
Link: https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/tf4b69n6tj/
After the attack at Pearl Harbor, propaganda would soon appear. The “News of Pearl Harbor” is a painting that is directly towards Japanese Americans. In the painting, you have a Japanese American family in Hanford, California listening to the radio about the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor. A bearded man is sitting at the table tuning the radio as a woman sits right next to him, leaning against her arm with a worried expression. A little boy stands across the table looking outside pointing to a bird flying into what looks like a winter landscape. The window above however, is covered in a cloud like scene overlapping the worried family scene, with two warplanes flying toward a sinking, burning battleship (USS Arizona). Just like in the painting, Japanese Americans after the attack began to worry and start to live in fear of what could happen next to them. Japanese Americans being descendants from Japan, many Americans accused them for potentially being a Japanese spy giving top-secret information to Japan for Japan's advantage against the United States and for being responsible for the cause of the attack at Pearl Harbor. After analyzing the painting, you get a sense of the reactions/ possible reactions many Japanese Americans must have been going through listening to the news about Pearl Harbor. However analyzing the painting a little deeper, the little boy can be seen or come across as the one pointing/sending Japanese warplanes to bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet, making not only Japanese Americans worried, but making Americans worried the the Japanese are planning to take over and destroy the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 where about 120,000 Japanese Americans (men, women, and children) that lived on the west coast of the United States, 2/3 of them being U.S. citizens, would be sent to “interned” camps, often in the most unclean of conditions (History Today). Wouldn’t be until December of 1944 that the Japanese Americans would be set from after the United States defeated Japan.
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- The Attack at Pearl Harbor Michael Carey
