United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt once proclaimed that the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is “a date that will live in infamy.” The events that transpired that fateful morning not only led to the United States declaring war on Japan the following day (subsequently prompting Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States three days later), but also proved to be a traumatic and seminal event in history of Japan. Japanese Americans. The aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombings prompted Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which subsequently paved the way for the internment of Japanese Americans. In Hawaii, where Japanese Americans made up a third of the population, only between 1,200 and 1,800 were interned. On the mainland (particularly on the West Coast), over 100,000 Japanese Americans were interned. Despite widespread outcry in Japanese American communities, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these exclusion orders in the landmark 1944 case Korematsu v. United States. The horrors of internment continued until 2 January 1945 when the expulsion order was canceled and in 1946 the last internment was closed. Although they had been released, the hardships and material losses suffered by the Japanese-American internees were far from over. Many internees who survived this traumatic ordeal not only suffered from psychological problems, but also lost their property and income. Although the U.S. government has issued a public apology and compensated surviving former internees under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, it is still unclear whether this adequately compensates former internees for the long-term economic hardship that followed the internment. . An estimated 110,000 Japanese ... half the paper ... money can bring deceased family members back to life or reverse the deep psychological scars that remain in some for the rest of their lives. The internment of Japanese Americans ultimately teaches us that “we are all people, no matter what color or race.” Bibliography1. "Life after the nightmare." Oracle ThinkQuest, 2011. Web. .2. I lie, Aimee. “Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Japanese American Internment.” Houston: Department of Economics, University of Houston, 2004. 1-25. Print.3. Rawls, J. J., & Bean, W. (2008). California: An interpretive history (9th ed., pp. 189-276). San Francisco, CA: McGraw Hill.4. Wright, Steven. “The Civil Liberties Act of 1988.” Dartmouth Education, n.d. Web. .