Internment

Propaganda during World War II was used as a way to unite public thought in regard to the war effort. However, not all of the propaganda was focused in a positive way. Some of it used imagery that was racially charged, especially against Germans and the Japanese. 

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005fall2010/tag/propaganda/

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definitions/propaganda?cx=partner-pub-0939450753529744%3Av0qd01-tdlq&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=propaganda&sa=Search#906

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=17408

Images like these encouraged a bitterness and fear for the races that were depicted in the posters. Unfortunately, these sentiments did not only apply to the enemies overseas, but filtered down to American immigrants of the same race, notably Japanese Americans.

As a result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Executive Order 9066 was issued. This order allowed the military to go around the constitutional rights of citizens in the name of national defense. This allowed for the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast.  It did not matter that most of these people were legal U.S. citizens, children, or young adults under voting age. They were all placed in facilities which President Roosevelt himself called “concentration camps”. This term usually conjures up images of the camps in Europe which are widely known from their use during the Holocaust. While these ten separate Japanese interment camps were not work camps meant to slowly kill their inhabitants, they were nonetheless difficult and inhumane places to live in.

The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Often deaths occurred at the hands of these guards if they deemed that the prisoners were not following orders. Many of these camps were located in deserts where temperatures could spike to 115 degrees in the summer and plummet to 35 degrees in the winter. Often whole families were made to live in a single room. Showers and toilets were not private and were frequently positioned in the middle of the camps. Inhabitants of the camps were uprooted from their homes and livelihoods mercilessly in the name of national safety, despite there never being an actual incident in which Japanese Americans betrayed the government.  It was not until 1944 that the camps were deemed unconstitutional and their occupants returned to their homes. To say that they returned to their regular lives though, would be an overstatement. Those who returned from the camps needed now to deal with memories of the suffering they had undergone as well as the knowledge that their government had turned against them.

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan, was an attempt to atone for the wrongs done to Japanese Americans during World War II. The Act gave $20,000 to each survivor of the camps and was accompanied by a signed letter of apology from the president. 

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/clinton.html

Another notable effort at recognizing this dark piece of American history is the National Japanese American Memorial which was dedicated in the year 2000. It is dedicated to those who suffered in the camps. Surrounding the twin cranes is a wall with the names of each of the camps that offer quotations which emphasize the Japanese American struggle for equality.

“The identical position of the bronze cranes represents the duality of the universe. Their bodies are nestled side-by-side with their free wings pressed against each other, symbolizing both individual effort and communal support, emphasizing interdependency.” http://njamf.com/index.php/japanese-crane-monument 

Alongside the monument and other historical sources, literature offers a window into the history and emotion of the Japanese internment camps. One of the most well-known novels about life in the internment camps is Farewell to Manzanar by husband and wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. Jeanne Wakatsuki is the daughter of first and second generation Japanese Americans. When she was seven years old she and her family were torn from their home and forced to live at Manzanar internment camp. When the idea of writing about the camps first arose, the pair told a friend who replied that the event was a “dead issue” (Houston ix). James Houston’s response was to assert that he and his wife did not want to write about an issue, but the reality of exactly what happened in the camps: “How many know what actually went on inside? If they think anything, they think concentration camps….And these camps weren't like that at all” (Houston ix). It is for this reason that the genre of novels dedicated to talking about the camps is a significant part of American literature and history. These novels, memoirs, and nonfiction books about life in the camps help to make the experience very tangible. Through these novels, the real people who lived through the camps are given a voice; they talk about being evacuated from their homes and stripped of their civil liberties in a way that the simple reading of this incident in a history book, or even pictures could never convey. In the case of Farewell to Manzanar, the author even discusses her life after the camps and the difficulty she and her family had adjusting to their new lives. As with the events in the camp, literature helps us to understand the aftermath of camp history better than the factual knowledge that each survivor was eventually rewarded money.

Farewell to Manzanar begins with the narrator, seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki learning that Pearl Harbor has been bombed. Although the general sentiment at the time was suspicion towards Japanese Americans and the fear that they could be spies, it is interesting to note that neither Jeanne nor her mother actually know what Pearl Harbor is. Her father, however, is aware that people of his nationality were already being picked up by the FBI. On the same page on which Jeanne learns about the bombing, her father burns the Japanese flag he brought with him from Hiroshima. Unfortunately, this does not matter and the FBI arrest him, claiming that he had been delivering oil to Japanese submarines.

Only a month later, Jeanne’s family is forced to move to Manzanar. They are given numbered tags that serve as their designation throughout their stay in the camp. Jeanne’s description of the camp as they first arrive makes it painfully obvious that this is not a place fit for habitation. The camp is still under construction and the mess hall is not finished. The barracks have gaps in the walls that only get bigger as the green wood they were build with dries out. Jeanne’s family group is assigned only two rooms, sixteen by twenty feet for twelve people to live in. One of the more humiliating aspects of the camp turns out to be the bathroom. “It was an open room, over a concrete slab,” Jeanne describes. “Down the center of the room twelve toilet bowls were arranged in six pairs, back to back, with no partitions” (Houston 22). Jeanne’s mother is a modest woman and has a very hard time accepting the lack of privacy Thankfully an older woman has brought a large cardboard carton with her which she has made into her own partition and she lets Jeanne’s mother use it. Eventually, many of the woman begin to do the same until actual partitions are finally put in. 

“The packed sleeping quarters, the communal mess halls, the open toilets—all this was an open insult to that other, private self, a slap in the face you were powerless to challenge.”--Houston http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3808/

A similar event can be found in Mine Okubo's book Citizen 13660, which was published in 1943.

 http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3808/Miné Okubo's description of this illustration from "Citizen 13660" noted the difficulty many women experienced adjusting to the open toilets: "They sought privacy by pinning up curtains and setting up boards." (Source: Gift of the Miné Okubo Estate, Japanese American National Museum [2007.62])

Before they moved, Jeanne’s family was proud to share meals together; the largest piece of furniture they owned was the dining room table which was big enough to seat everyone (Houston 25). Now in the camp, the family stops eating in the mess hall together and slowly starts to disintegrate. When her father joins his family in the camp after a year under arrest, he is a different man, one who drinks and is prone to abusing his wife. It is the sections like this in the book, which detail the personal trials and suffering of the people in the camps that make literature about this time period important. They turn the stark facts of what the camps were like into a very personal experience that a reader would be hard pressed to forget.

Manzanar Camp http://www.drshute.com/archives/000099.html

Baracks at Manzanar owensvalleyhistory.comMess Hall at Manzanar http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/89manzanar/89visual4.htm

  

Of this time period, Mine Okubu said :

“The war was forgotten during the fifties. People throughout the country were busy rebuilding their lives.”http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3808/

Novels such as her Citizen 13660 or Lawson Inada’s Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience help to make sure that people do remember what happened. The literature that is the result of Japanese internment during WWII brings this piece of history to life in a personal way that is impossible to ignore or deny.

Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/index.html

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3808/

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/faculty/salinas/students/student_sites/Fall2008/1/index.html

Houston, James D., and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. San Francisco:                

        Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973.

Inada, Lawson. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience.         

         Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 2000. Print.

Okubu Mine. Citizen 13660. New York: Columbia UP, 1946. Print.