Title: How Pearl Harbor changed Japanese-Americans - BBC News
Headings: How Pearl Harbor changed Japanese-Americans
How Pearl Harbor changed Japanese-Americans
Content: On average, Japanese American internees spent three years behind barbed-wire fencing. image copyright
Dorothea Lange
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The Mochida family waits for a bus in Hayward, California that will take them to an "assembly center" in 1942
Their incarceration is relatively well known, but their struggles didn't end there, especially for Japanese-Americans like Lawson Iichiro Sakai, who was 18 in 1941. "I tried to enlist in the US Navy with three of my Caucasian classmates. They were accepted, but I was not," he said. "I said 'Why Not? I am an American.' But they said I was an enemy alien, so I was no longer an American citizen. "It really felt like being rejected by my own country," the 93-year-old veteran recalled. image copyright
Lawson Ichiro Sakai
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Lawson Iichiro Sakai was initially rejected from the US Army despite being an American because of his ancestry
When the American military needed more soldiers and opened up enlistment to Japanese-Americans in March 1943, Mr Sakai immediately volunteered. More than 30,000 Japanese-American men went on to serve in the US Army.