Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it wasPage 2 of 14 constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character Page 3 of 14 How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United Page 4 of 14 States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Page 5 of 14 Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally
"second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the UnitedPage States 6 of 14 —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal Page 7 of 14 apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference Page 8 of 14
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp Page 9 of 14 Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, wasPage arrested 10 of 14 for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees. Page 11 of 14
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November
1945. Page 12 of 14
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
View document
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021. Page 13 of 14 COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407 Literature Connections: Farewell to Manzanar
Activity
The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) draws upon personal memory to relate the experiences of a Japanese American family interned during World War II. Together with her husband, the American novelist James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston looks back on her childhood experiences as a nisei, or American-born child of a Japanese citizen. The story begins where Jeanne's ordinary childhood in Long Beach, California, ends. On December 7, 1941, Jeanne and her family hear the news that Japanese forces have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests Ko, Jeanne's father, who they suspect is supplying oil to Japanese submarines. Although the young Jeanne is distraught by the separation and her mother's tears, these events are less traumatic than what is to come. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans to evacuate their homes and enter internment camps. Jeanne and her family are sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Jeanne recounts both the psychological difficulties her family encounters and the horrors of the camp, like the communal mess halls, foul toilets, and general humiliation. After the war, Jeanne's family returns to Long Beach, and the memoir recounts Jeanne's struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination as she re-enters American society. The story ends in 1972, with Jeanne returning to visit the site of the Manzanar internment camp as an adult. Historical Context
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) describes the experiences of a Japanese American family subjected to internment in the Manzanar camp during World War II, highlighting themes of anti-Asian sentiment in America, confiscation of property, and family breakdown in the camps. The author chose to write about these episodes in her life out of a desire to cast light not just on daily life inside Manzanar, but also to illuminate the lasting trauma the experience of being forcibly interned there had on her family and the disruptive effects it had on their dreams and aspirations.
By the 1940s, there had been immigration to the West Coast from Japan on a significant scale for some 50 years, dating from the last years of the 1800s. Successive generations of Japanese immigrants and their children—from the issei (first generation), to the nisei (second generation), to the sansei (third generation)—bore the marks of greater assimilation to American society. Surmounting anti-Asian prejudice, members of these generations of immigrants had found work along the West Coast in a number of professions and established communities and families. But these lives would be irrevocably disrupted with the advent of World War II.
World War II Internment
The immediate events leading to Japanese internment began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan and began to mobilize its forces as it was drawn into World War II. On the West Coast, fears—which were later revealed to be unfounded—that Japanese Americans were spying for the Japanese government or even making contact with submarines off the coast, led to community hostility, the application of curfews to Japanese Americans, and apprehensions by the FBI—including of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's father.
The next year, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes to camps. One of the nearly a dozen camps was at Manzanar, California, in the isolated Owens Valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the internees were confined to barracks, ate dinner in communal halls, and were subjected to the extreme weather fluctuations in these remote areas. The internment, depriving Japanese Americans of due process, was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutional in the case Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the Korematsu case was never officially overturned, justices have condemned the ruling, widely regarded as one of its worst decisions of U.S. history.
Questions of Loyalty
Despite the grim backdrop, at Manzanar traditional elements of Japanese culture—dancing, gardening, and maintaining religious shrines—coexisted with American culture in the form of sports clubs, Boy Scout groups, and newspapers. These displays of American culture came largely from the nisei in the camp, many of whom were intent on displaying their "Americanness." Many of the men in the camp joined the U.S. Army after bans on Japanese American military service were repealed in 1943. In an effort to replenish the numbers of the 442nd U.S. Army unit, in which many Japanese Americans served in the war, the U.S. government began circulating loyalty questionnaires among the younger Japanese Americans interned in the camps to determine who they might recruit for military service. The questions asked on these forms about whether the internees were loyal to the United States or Japan caused tension within the community in the camps. The divide between first-generation issei and second-generation nisei, with the latter inclining more toward American loyalty, was exacerbated. But the question of loyalty was also a painful one for everyone: how could the Japanese Americans, interned in camps by the United States, be anything but ambivalent in their feelings towards the country that had put them there against their will? As Wakatsuki Houston notes, for many the loyalty oath seemed like the last straw.
When most of the camps were closed in 1945 and families allowed to return to their homes, in many cases they found their property stolen or damaged, or else confiscated by tax authorities. As Farewell to Manzanar highlights, it took many years for these communities to recover. In 1988, more than a decade after the publication of Farewell to Manzanar, legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan, decrying the policy of Japanese internment and awarding $20,000 to all survivors of the internment. Nick Burns
Choose one of the following activities, using the matching Worksheet to organize your information.
Analyzing Character
How did the injustices that the main character, Jeanne, experienced as a child shape her identity as an adult? When you analyze how her character changes over time, what conclusion can you draw about the long-term effects of discrimination?
Analyzing Context
Look up Roosevelt's executive order 9066 and write a paper explaining what this order meant in terms of national security. Analyze how the order violated the rights of American citizens and speculate on whether such an order would hold up today. Why or why not?
Analyzing Theme
Consider the theme of cultural Identity in Farewell to Manzanar, particularly regarding the journey undertaken by Jeanne, and the conflict she experiences as she struggles to exist both as Japanese and as American. What sort of commentary do you feel the author is trying to make about this struggle? Source
Reference
Japanese American Internment
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S government relocated and detained anyone of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) living on the West Coast of the United States. During the Japanese American internment, ordered under the pressure of wartime expediency, nearly 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were uprooted and exiled regardless of their citizenship status.
Lead-Up to Internment
Despite anti-Asian racism prevalent on the West Coast at the time, by the 1930s, Japanese immigrants (Issei), had established thriving communities in all of the major coastal cities from San Diego to Seattle, as well as in the major agricultural areas of inland California, Oregon, and Washington. However, as tensions mounted in the Pacific between the United States and Japan prior to World War II, some in the U.S. government and military saw West Coast Nikkei as a potential security risk. They feared that the Nikkei might supply sensitive information to the Japanese government or sabotage military or industrial centers on the West Coast. In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began compiling a "threat list" of prominent members of the Nikkei community. Meanwhile, the West Coast media fueled racial hostility with widespread characterizations of Nikkei as the "yellow peril."
Within 24 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had taken Nikkei thought to pose the highest risk into custody for questioning; they were later transferred to Justice Department holding facilities. For months, their families had no knowledge of their location or even if they were still alive. Additionally, those not in custody were faced with frozen bank accounts, foreclosed loans, seized property, and an 8:00 P.M. curfew enforced by the military.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the forcible removal from their homes of all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast and their relocation to holding facilities located throughout the western United States. While this order did not directly mention the removal of persons of Japanese descent, its broad language stating "any or all persons may be excluded" allowed the federal government to justify its wholesale internment of all persons of Japanese descent. Though Nikkei in Hawaii were included under the order, they made up a significant portion of the territory's population, and agriculture in the state was dependent on Nikkei labor. As a result, Hawaii's military governor refused to enforce the internment order on constitutional grounds, though martial law was imposed and civil rights were restricted.
Removal and Relocation
The government agency in charge of removing Nikkei from the West Coast was the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The internment took place in two phases: first, the Nikkei were transported to one of 18 quickly constructed assembly centers to be held until permanent facilities further inland were built; they were then transported to one of 10 new, permanent camps to be held for the remainder of the war with Japan. The assembly centers consisted of hastily converted fairgrounds and racetracks, and many families found themselves housed in horse stalls that had been made into living quarters. The permanent internment camps were built further inland under the direction of the U.S. Army. Like the assembly centers, the internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards at the gates and in the watchtowers. The barracks in the permanent camps were grouped together in blocks to serve as the physical and social focus for the interned Nikkei. Each block consisted of 14 barracks, lavatories and showers, a laundry room and ironing facility, one mess hall, and a recreation hall.
The WRA tried to develop "self-government" programs as a way to run the camps more efficiently and win the support of the interned Nikkei. In each camp, a council of Nikkei internees were to advise the camp administration and help implement government policies in the camps. However, the self-government programs never really worked; camp administrations were fearful of giving the councils too much authority, and internees felt the councils were another arm of a government that had imprisoned them and stripped them of their rights.
During the internment, many Nikkei fought to join the U.S. military; almost all of them felt that military service would be the best way to prove that they were loyal to America. In early 1942, Congress had designated all persons of Japanese descent, even American citizens, as "4C," or "aliens not subject for military service." After intense lobbying by the Japanese American Citizens League, Nikkei who were U.S. citizens were allowed to register for military service. Many Nisei—literally "second generation," Nikkei who were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born in the United States —promptly volunteered for service or registered for the draft. As the 442 Regimental Combat Team, internees were sent to Italy along with Hawaii's 100th Infantry Battalion, largely made up of Hawaiian-born Nikkei. The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history.
Closure of the Camps
In 1943, the WRA began a series of programs designed to close the camps and relocate the Nikkei to areas in the East and Midwest. However, many of the Nikkei were fearful of leaving the camps, worrying that they would simply be turned out without any means of supporting themselves. Others feared that outside the camps, they would be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs. Also of concern was the fact that, once outside the camps, the Nikkei may not have the traditional support structure of the community available to them.
From 1943 to 1944, the WRA made the process of leaving the camps easier. By the end of May 1944, all that the Nikkei had to do was sign a statement saying that they were loyal to the United States and would register with the WRA field office wherever they resettled. By December 1945, only the Tule Lake camp remained open (it closed in 1946). Upon being released, each Nikkei family was given a government grant of $100 and several booklets of government-issued food coupons.
Life after Internment
After leaving the camps, many Nikkei eventually returned to the West Coast. What they found there varied greatly. Some had been able to make arrangements with non-Nikkei friends to care for their houses and property and were able to resume their lives with relatively little difficulty. However, most Nikkei found that their houses and businesses had been looted, and many had their property seized by the various state governments for failure to pay their taxes while they were interned.
The Japanese American internment continues to be a black mark on the U.S. government's record. Though there were German and Italian immigrants and German and Italian Americans living on the West Coast during the war, the Japanese were the only ethnic group subjected to internment. In addition, despite the government's concerns, there was not a single documented case of espionage carried out by a member of the Nikkei community during the war. In 1988, based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the Civil Liberties Act contained a provision for monetary reparations for Nikkei who had been detained in the camps as well as a formal apology for the internment. Source
Government Doc
Executive Order 9066
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Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to relocation centers. Source
Reference
Manzanar Internment Camp
Manzanar Internment Camp was a World War II place of confinement for Japanese Americans. Located in California's Owens Valley, Manzanar was about 220 miles north of Los Angeles near the towns of Lone Pine and Independence.
Camp Climate and Development
Located in high desert, Manzanar was hot during summer and cold during winter. The land is dry with little precipitation.
Construction on the camp began in March 1942, and within six weeks most of the major work was completed. A five-strand barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers surrounded the camp. First run by the army's Wartime Civil Control Administration, Manzanar became the first War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp. Around May, there were over 7,000 Japanese Americans in the camp, and by July they totaled over 10,000. Over 90% came from Los Angeles.
Japanese Americans at Manzanar worked to create "normal" lives and conditions in an abnormal environment. To improve their surroundings, Japanese Americans planted gardens and lawns. People organized knitting, sewing, and beauty schools.
Manzanar Children's Village
The camp had a unique feature called the Manzanar Children's Village. Japanese Americans built the village's three one-story buildings in June 1942. Each building had running water, baths, and toilets, and one building housed a superintendent and had a kitchen and a room for dining and recreation. The village was home to Japanese American orphans from the restricted zone, including mixed race children. The girls lived in one building, and the boys in another. There were over 100 children in Manzanar's Children's Village—90% were from California and the rest were from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Manzanar Riot of 1942
The Manzanar riot of December 1942 was one of several significant acts of open resistance in the WRA internment camps. On December 5, Fred Tayama, a well-known leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was beaten. A suspect, Harry Ueno, was arrested for that assault, removed from the camp, and confined in the jail at Independence. The next day at a mass meeting attended by over 2,000, the internees drew up demands for presentation to the camp director by a delegation of five men. These included the unconditional release of Ueno and an investigation into general camp conditions by the Spanish consul (during the war, Spain represented the interests of citizens of Japan). The negotiating committee, joined by about 1,000 people, marched to the administration building to present their petition. Military police armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas blocked their progress. However, they did allow the five men through, and the camp director promised Ueno's return if the crowd dispersed. The crowd did so but reassembled later that evening to demand Ueno's release.
After a night in the Independence jail, Ueno was returned to Manzanar. People outside Ueno's cell were singing the Japanese Navy marching song, but they reportedly did not threaten the soldiers. However, the soldiers began sending tear gas into the crowd. Before the gas cleared, the soldiers started shooting. A young Japanese American, James Ito, was killed and another, Katsuji Kanagawa, was wounded (he later died from his injuries). Nine others lay wounded in the street. Most were shot in the back, indicating they were running away from the soldiers. At the hospital, the Army tried to coerce the attending physicians and nurses to falsify their records to indicate that the bullets entered from the front to justify the military's action of firing into a confrontational mob, according to a hospital staff member. Dr. James Goto, the chief medical officer and surgeon, refused, and the next day he was dismissed and relocated to another internment camp.
Throughout the night bells tolled, and people held meetings while soldiers patrolled the camp. More suspected informers were beaten that night and their families threatened. The next morning, December 7, the military took over the camp and arrested the negotiating committee members and other leaders of the resistance. Despite that show of force, a new committee confronted the military commanding officer to demand Ueno's release, and they, too, were arrested. The WRA sent them to isolation centers at Moab, Utah and Leupp, Arizona. Suspected collaborators and their families were likewise removed from Manzanar for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands to wear while mourning for the two dead and in solidarity with the resistance movement. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of the camp population wore those armbands, showing the extent of the discontent. Long conferences and meetings followed between the camp director and internees.
On January 9, 1943, Ueno and the others who had been arrested were taken by bus and then train to an isolation center at Moab, Utah. The FBI had a special interest in Ueno because as the head of Manzanar's Mess Hall Workers' Union he had lodged complaints about WRA staff stealing from the allocations of sugar and meat for the camp's internees. Sugar, which was rationed during the war, was under government control but was also sold on the black market. FBI agents from Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. went to Moab to question Ueno about his accusation against the staff. After serving time at the Moab isolation center, the WRA sent Ueno to Tule Lake internment camp where he remained until 1946.
Remembering Manzanar
Since 1969, Japanese Americans have held the Manzanar Pilgrimage on the last Saturday in April, an annual visit to the Manzanar camp. Buses leave from Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of pilgrims who clean the campsite, bring presents to the dead, and dance, watch performances, and listen to speeches.
Today, Manzanar is a registered California historic site. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service. The landmark designation marks the site as holding "significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America." In 1992, Congress designated Manzanar a National Historic Site. Gary Y. Okihiro Source
Image
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar
Street scene in winter at the Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California's Owens Valley, the land was leased from the city of Los Angeles for the three-year period of its operation. The camp held more than 10,000 former residents of Washington and California until it closed in November 1945.
Image Credits
Japanese internment camp at Manzanar: Library of Congress
MLA Citation
Hensley-King, Robert. "World War II and the Cold War Era, 1939-1960 Activity: Farewell to Manzanar." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2021, americanhistory.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407. Accessed 5 Oct. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/2256407
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Analyzing Character
The key to analyzing characters in a literary work—whether fiction or nonfiction—is to look at the details that make them distinct and discover what motivates them to make the choices they do in the story. A good plot happens because interesting characters drive the narrative, which means that an effective literary analysis will involve a close examination of that plot’s main and supporting players. Analyze characters by looking at the following: • Physical Attributes • Personality • Actions and Reactions • Thoughts and Emotions Choose one character from the work you’re analyzing and identify the role that person plays in the story.
Character:
Role:
1. Physical Attributes: What does this character look and sound like? What physically sets this person apart from others in the story? Be sure to include some details from the book.
Physical Attribute: Textual Details:
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Analyzing Character Continued 2. Personality: What words best describe this character’s personality traits? Find examples from the book that help illustrate those traits.
Trait: Illustration:
3. Actions and Reactions: Characters are ultimately defined by the choices they make, in terms of both how they act and how they react to events around them. Identify 3–4 specific actions or reactions this character engages in, and explain how that action or reaction affects the plot.
Action/Reaction: Plot Effect:
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Analyzing Character Continued 4. Thoughts and Emotions: We’re not always privy to a character’s thoughts, but when we do get access to what they’re thinking and feeling, we can understand that character better. Identify (and quote) some important observations, realizations, or emotions experienced by the character, and consider what is revealed about him or her.
Thoughts and emotions: What they reveal:
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Analyzing Character Continued Now, analyze! Now that you’ve examined key aspects of the character, look at your findings. When you hold up certain physical details, personality traits, actions or reactions, and thoughts of this character, what do you discover? Select and list character elements below to help you draw conclusions about that character.
Physical Attributes Personality
Conclusion:
Actions/Reactions Thoughts/Feelings
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Analyze Context
In a way, analyzing context is similar to analyzing setting. When we consider setting, we usually look at specific details as well as whether those details are part of a larger setting (a city, nation, or time period) or part of a more concrete setting (a house or room). Context is broader than setting. It involves the beliefs, biases, and values of the larger society in which the story takes place, particularly those that influence what happens to the characters in the story itself. Analyzing context can be especially interesting in a historical novel when we compare the novel’s context to our own to discover what has and hasn’t changed. Use the worksheet below to help analyze context. 1. Start with Setting (Time and Place): First, place the story in its general setting.
When: Where: In what time period does the story take place? In what overall locale does the story take place? (nation, city, etc.)
Beliefs, biases, or values of the time: A.
B.
C.
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Analyze Context Continued 3. Compare Contexts: Now, take the beliefs you identified from the story’s context and compare them to our current context to see what has or hasn’t changed.
Then: Now: A.
B.
C.
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Analyzing Theme
We can consider a book’s theme to be a central idea or topic that the author is examining through the creation of his/her story, a subject about which the author is presenting a point of view. Your teacher may identify a book’s theme and ask you to explore the theme within the context of the story, or they may ask you to look at selected story elements (e.g., important scenes, characters, or symbols) and use those elements to identify themes yourself. Either way, the key is to show you can connect one to the other: explain how selected story elements illustrate the theme. Use this worksheet to help identify and analyze theme by first filling in boxes with the information you’ve been given and then filling out the rest on your own.
Details from the story (Plot, Character, Setting, Symbolism, Tone/Mood):
Why those details are important:
The theme that is revealed:
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