Japanese American internment , the forced relocation by the U. War Department suspected that Japanese Americans might act as saboteurs or espionage agents, despite a lack of hard evidence to support that view. Some political leaders recommended rounding up Japanese Americans, particularly those living along the West Coast, and placing them in detention centres inland. A power struggle erupted between the U.

5 Japanese innovations that changed the world



Propaganda in Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II - Wikipedia
When war broke out in Europe in September , the Japanese, despite a series of victorious battles, had still not brought their war in China to an end: on the one hand, the Japanese strategists had made no plans to cope with the guerrilla warfare pursued by the Chinese; on the other, the Japanese commanders in the field often disregarded the orders of the supreme command at the Imperial headquarters and occupied more Chinese territory than they had been ordered to take. Half of the Japanese Army was thus still tied down in China when the commitment of Great Britain and France to war against Germany opened up the prospect of wider conquests for Japan in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. Since Great Britain, single-handedly, was confronting the might of the Axis in Europe, the Japanese strategists had to reckon, primarily, with the opposition of the United States to their plans for territorial aggrandizement. When Japanese troops entered northern Indochina in September in pursuance of an agreement extorted in August from the Vichy government of France , the United States uttered a protest.


Propaganda in Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II
The World at War: Economic Background While the United States was still struggling to emerge from the Great Depression at the end of the s, and would do so partly because of the war, Japan had emerged from its own period of depression, which had begun in , by the mids. Many of the young soldiers mobilized into the Japanese army by the early s came from the rural areas, where the effects of the depression were devastating and poverty was widespread. Their commitment to the military effort to expand Japanese territory to achieve economic security can be understood partly in these terms.




The European war presented the Japanese with tempting opportunities. After the Nazi attack on Russia in , the Japanese were torn between German urgings to join the war against the Soviets and their natural inclination to seek richer prizes from the European colonial territories to the south. In Japan occupied northern Indochina in an attempt to block access to supplies for the Chinese Nationalists, and in July it announced a joint protectorate with Vichy France over the whole colony. This opened the way for further moves into Southeast Asia. The United States reacted to the occupation of Indochina by freezing Japanese assets and embargoing oil.