In 1942, the United States government unjustly incarcerated over 120,000 Japanese Americans. Anti-Asian American racism and fear of economic competition with white-owned farms and businesses have been widely documented as the main causes. Traditionally, Japanese American incarceration has been told through the U.S. government's narrative. Students study from textbooks, government documents, and even photographs and films that the government created to portray a "sanitized" version of what happened. I hope this post can support teachers in telling a different story that centers Japanese Americans, their voices, and their experiences. I start by telling the story of my in-laws, who were incarcerated as children, followed by a discussion of incarceration language, a document-based lesson plan, and additional resources.
We need the teaching of history to better humanize the experiences of
people in the past. Moreover, we need to center the experiences of
people who experienced difficult events of the past, rather than those
who caused the difficult events. In the case of incarceration, we need to center the
Japanese American community in how we remember what happened, rather
than the U.S. government who did the incarceration; too often, Japanese
American incarceration is told through the perspective of the U.S.
government, the media who was complicit, and white Americans'
unsubstantiated fears, and not Japanese Americans who resisted, survived, and persevered despite such difficult conditions.
My Family-in-Law's Story
Above: (Right) The Hashimoto family in a picture taken at Tule Lake Segregation Center in Newell, California. (Left) The Nakai family in a picture taken in Berkeley, California at a house where they lived with several other family members after being released from Tule Lake. In this case, Japanese American incarceration is a personal topic for my family and it is important that I begin this post by telling their story. My father-in-law was incarcerated when he was 3 years old (above left is a picture from Tule Lake around the time of his family's release; Frank is on the right) and my mother-in-law was born at Tule Lake (above right is a picture from about a year after her family's release; Daphne is on the left). Growing up, my wife would hear occasional stories from her grandparents and parents about life in "camp" (there is a great amount of sadness and anger about the incarceration, so many Japanese Americans rarely share their stories). Since my daughters were little, they have also known that their grandparents were in prison camps as children and routinely ask them questions about it. They know the importance of never forgetting what happened. A few years ago, when they learned that migrant children were being imprisoned at the southern U.S. border (see the Tsuru for Solidarity movement), they demanded that we do everything we could to help stop it (because it was similar to their grandparents' experiences).
My in-laws and their families have heartbreaking, but also remarkable, stories. Daphne Nakai's grandmother and grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800s. They would migrate back-and-forth to Japan a couple times likely for work and personal reasons. They would eventually settle in San Francisco. In the early 1920s, Daphne's father Steve (who was one years old) moved to Japan with his mother and siblings. His father would stay behind to work and send the family money. Tragically, he would die in a car accident in San José. As a teenager, Steve would return to the U.S. in 1938 and he was living in Berkeley, where he was a servant to a wealthy white family. When the word came that the U.S. government was "evacuating" Japanese Americans from the West Coast, he moved with his fiancé and her family to Lodi in the Central Valley to avoid it (Lodi is also where they would get married, so they would not be separated during their imprisonment). They would eventually be incarcerated at Rohwer in Arkansas.
Frank Hashimoto's grandfather and grandmother immigrated to the United States in
the early 1900s (after the war, they would open what we think may have
been the first Japanese market in Alameda, California; see below). Due to restrictive Asian immigration laws, Frank's grandfather took a ship to Mexico and crossed the U.S. border with a group of about 30 other Japanese men at Eagle Pass, Texas (where there were fewer immigration restrictions at the time). He then made his way from there to Southern California and eventually would settle in the Bay Area. His children were kibei, meaning that they were sent back to Japan for their education. When
Frank was born, his father had returned to the U.S. and was teaching at a Japanese language school
for farmer's children in Pescadero, California (see below). My father-in-law was named Franklin by his parents, after Franklin Roosevelt, because before moving to Pescadero, his family was able to secure public housing through the New Deal. However, since the time of his incarceration, he has only gone by the name of Frank, as it was FDR who signed the Executive Order 9066 that imprisoned him and his family. As World War II broke out, the Hashimotos moved back to the East Bay to be closer to family members. They were eventually imprisoned at Topaz in Utah.
Above: (Bottom) The Japanese School in Pescadero, California. (Top) Hashimoto Foods in Alameda, California.
Japanese Americans found numerous ways to resist their incarceration. People like Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, Mitsuye Endo, and Min Yasui used the legal system (sadly, they and others were denied their rights through the decision in Korematsu v. the United States). Others protested through attempting to move eastward, engage in civil disobedience and draft resistance. For example, Frank's future sister-in-law's family would famously hang a "I Am An American" sign outside their Oakland grocery store (see below), which they were forced to sell due to incarceration. Some Japanese Americans were able to find non-Japanese American accomplices who would "hold onto" their homes, stores, or land while they were incarcerated (yet, others lost their property to dishonest people or unfair selling prices).
All of my wife's grandparents were what are referred to as "No-nos," meaning when the government forced them to complete a loyalty questionnaire in 1943, they answered "no" to questions 27 and 28 (asking about their willingness to serve in combat and renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan). As a result of their answers to those questions, the Nakai and Hashimoto families were moved to Tule Lake Segregation Center in California. For many years after incarceration, families who answered "no-no" were stigmatized for not being loyal to the United States. However, today, some in the Japanese American community have elevated their stories as the resisters of incarceration. Since they were seen as the most disloyal by the U.S. government, many families (including the Hashimotos and Nakais) were not released from camp until 1946. Both families struggled to find work after camp. The also faced redlining and racist housing discrimination in the Bay Area (similar to the experiences of African American and Latinos at the time). Incarceration also effected people's health during and after camp; 1,862 people died from medical problems while in the concentration camps and at least 7 were killed by guards. For example, my mother-in-law's brother Dennis would acquire tuberculosis at Tule Lake and
spent several years at a sanitarium after the family's release (about 1 in 10 deaths in the prison camps were a result of tuberculosis).
Language
The language that we use when we teach Japanese American incarceration is important. As Densho states, "government officials and military leaders used euphemisms to describe their punitive and unjust actions against people of Japanese ancestry in the United States. ... Today, these decades-old euphemisms persist in textbooks, news sources, and other platforms—meaning that most Americans learn about this history through a distorted lens that diminishes the harsh realities of Japanese American WWII incarceration." Below, I have underlined the terms that many Japanese American organizations prefer be used.
Japanese Americans vs. Japanese:
During World War II and after, Japanese Americans were routinely referred to as the Japanese (or worse by racial epithets) to "other" them and to imply that they were not "Americans" but foreigners in their own country. Moreover, 2/3rds of those incarcerated held American citizenship and the remaining were Americans by choice. For these reasons, it is important to describe those who were incarcerated as Japanese Americans.
Incarceration vs. internment:
Internment, as Densho describes, is the legally permissible, but ethically and morally questionable, practice of imprisoning "enemy aliens" during wartime. This term is misleading, as a majority of those people incarcerated were American citizens and the term of internment has long been part of falsely justifying their incarceration as "enemy aliens." A more appropriate term would be "incarceration," which means to confine in a prison. Moreover, internment has an underlying suggestion that Japanese Americans were likely to commit espionage, sabotage, or other acts against the Unites States. Which is false, as there is no credible evidence of Japanese Americans engaging in sabotage or espionage during the war.
Forced removal vs. relocation:
The U.S. government preferred to use relocation to describe Japanese Americans' forced removal (see this propaganda film), because it implied it was for their own good (such as an evacuation during a natural disaster. Forced removal better describes how Japanese Americans were taken from their homes against their wills.
Concentration camps/prison camps vs. internment camps/relocation centers:
During the period, the government used the terms relocation centers and concentration camps to describe the incarceration of Japanese Americans (There are documents showing that FDR himself used the term concentration camps). After the war, internment camp became a standard academic term to describe the prison camps (see above problems with the use of internment). As Densho states, the "use of 'concentration camp' is intended to accurately describe what
Japanese Americans were subjected to during WWII, and is not meant to
undermine the experiences of Holocaust survivors or to conflate these
two histories in any way." Moreover, Holocaust scholars themselves often distinguish "concentration camps," where people were held, from "death camps" or "extermination camps," where Jewish people and others were systematically murdered.
A Lesson Plan
Based on a lesson that I used when I taught high school history, below you will find an activity that I use as a teacher educator today working with future teachers. While it includes several important government documents from the perspectives of white people, it attempts to highight how Japanese Americans experienced and resisted their incarceration. It also shows how Japanese Americans sustained their culture in camp. I have included it in PDF and Word, so teachers can edit the documents to best work for their students.
PDF: http://www.christophercmartell.com/JapaneseAmericanIncarcerationActivity.pdf
Word: http://www.christophercmartell.com/JapaneseAmericanIncarcerationActivity.docx
Additional Resources
Below is a list of excellent resources that center Japanese Americans within incarceration. Most are created and maintained by Japanese American organizations.
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project (Primary and Secondary Sources)
Densho: WWII Incarceration (Storyboard)
We Hereby Refuse (Graphic Novel)
TedEd Talk: Ugly History: Japanese American Incarceration Camps (Short Film)
Unfinished Business (Film)
Resistance at Tule Lake (Film)
Children of the Camps (Film)
Japanese American National Museum (Museum; Includes Online Exhibits)
Uprooted! (Museum Exhibit)
The Art of Gaman Exhibit (Art)
The Suyama Resisters Project (Primary and Secondary Sources)
KQED: Japanese American Incarceration and Indigenous Dispossession (Article and Map)
Facing History: Japanese American Incarceration (Resources)
National Archives: Japanese American Incarceration (Documents)
Then They Came for Me (Photographs)
