How many people in the United States actually know what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II? Do most of us in this country honestly know the cruel and unfair hardships they have faced? On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. This was why America supposedly couldn't trust those who immigrated here from Japan. Because of this mistrust, our government locked them up in internment camps. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was one of these people locked up in an internment camp, a point in her story that changed her life forever. Jeanne's immediate family before the war consisted of twelve members. He had a mother, a father and nine older brothers, as well as his mother's mother who lived with them. The rest of the family on his father's side lived in Japan. However, relatives on his mother's side lived in a different part of the United States. His father's family comes from a long line of samurai, who are just below the level of nobility and above farmers. Farmers, in turn, occupy a higher position on the ladder than the merchants of old Japan. Around 1800 the country began to no longer need samurai, yet his father's family still owned vast lands and was very wealthy. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jeanne's father worked as a fisherman, her mother in a cannery. They lived in Ocean Park, near Santa Monica, California. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government made the decision to place Japanese-Americans in internment camps. When Jeanne and her family were shipped to Manzanar, they all stayed together, except her father who was taken for questioning. After a year he rejoined them at the camp. The first night they would get there, the camera... middle of paper... the citizens would know the truth about what had happened to the Japanese in America. Jeanne said in an interview that in her book “It tells a story about America. For the first time in our country's history, all three branches of government violated the Constitution. They gathered a group of people because of their race and potential danger. They rounded them up and imprisoned them in these camps for one to three years, and no one knew about it. This was a great violation of the democratic values ​​of this country.''Works Cited Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston. Goodbye to Manzanar New York: bantam book, 1973. Print“Full Interview with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.'' Cal Humanities: A State of Open Mind.2014. web. February 19, 2014. Internet "Goodbye to Manzanar." Preceded. com. 2014. Web. 19 February 2014. Internet