Japanese American Internment Camps: Resistance and Perseverance

Western Oregon University Digital Commons@WOU Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History) Department of History 6-12-2020 Japanese American Internment Camps: Resistance and Perseverance Nicholas H. Sieber Western Oregon University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/his Part of the Asian History Commons Recommended Citation Sieber, Nicholas H., "Japanese American Internment Camps: Resistance and Perseverance" (2020). Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History). 281. https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/his/281 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at Digital Commons@WOU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History) by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@WOU. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. Japanese American Internment Camps: Resistance and Perseverance Nick Sieber History 499: Senior Seminar Professor Bau-Hwa Hsieh May 31, 2020 Sieber 1 “As long as I cooperated, I felt I was doing all I could,” said Tatsuro Yada a Japanese American man who was interned in 1942.1 Members of the Nazi party in Germany were not the only ones who set up concentration camps during World War II, the United States did too. While the horrors committed by the Nazis within their camps surpass the actions taken by the United States with in their camps, it is important to remember, that the Nazis were not alone in singling out a demographic of their population and incarcerating them. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the United States government issued Executive Order 9066, which called for the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans. The government created a number of internment camps, to house Japanese Americans, many of which consisted of substandard housing and other facilities. Internment had a lasting effect on Japanese American familial structure and hierarchy as well as attempting to limit the ways in which Japanese Americans were able to express their heritage and culture. Many Japanese Americans resisted the limitations placed on their ability to express their culture by restructuring their living areas or by attempting to maintain a traditional Japanese family dynamic during internment. Others within the camps, especially women, embraced the option to break with traditions such as arranged marriages. First an idea of the scholarly work surrounding Japanese Internment is needed for a foundation of the topic. Then by examining military documents and newspaper articles, an idea of the racial climate can be gained, and a sense of the prejudice and racism that were the root cause of Japanese American internment will be shown. Lastly by examining oral interviews with Japanese Americans who experienced internment first hand, examples of these acts of resistance and the effects of internment can be better analyzed. Combining the oral interviews with the 1 Tatsuro Yada, interviewed by Taki Masuri, March 8, 1992, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, https://digitalcollections.ohs.org/sr-960-oral-history-interviews-with-tatsuro- yada-by-taka-mizote, 24. Sieber 2 works of scholars such as Roger Daniels, who is arguably the leading authority on Japanese American Internment, and Linda Tamura who was not only a student of Daniels’ but also wrote a book that used oral histories as its basis, the theme of oral histories telling the story of resistance and change can be expanded. Internment affected not only the generations who were interned but had a lasting impact on the future generations. Examining oral interviews with Japanese Americans who experienced internment first hand reveals examples of their resistance. The effects of internment can be seen by analyzing the conditions of the assembly centers and camps, including Japanese Americans first interpretations of them, the ways that Japanese Americans attempted to either maintain a pre-camp life within the camp or use the new opportunities that internment provided to break with unwanted traditions, and how both age and gender shaped their experiences within camp and the events leading up to their internment. There has been a lot written on Japanese internment during World War II in a relatively short amount of time. Most of the literature surrounding the internment of Japanese Americans was not written until the mid-1980s when the redress movement was in full swing. The redress movement, as defined by the Densho Encyclopedia, was a series of Japanese American “efforts to obtain the restitution of civil rights, an apology, and/or monetary compensation from the U.S. government… culminating in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.”2 The reason that the redress movement was so impactful in generating new sources about Japanese American internment was the fact that it broke the silence that many of the Japanese Americans who were interned held. Following the movement many Japanese Americans were more willing to discuss their experiences of internment.3 However this does not mean that there was not any literature 2 Alice Yang. "Redress movement," Densho Encyclopedia, accessed May 25, 2020, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Redress%20movement/ 3 Hansen, “Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation,” 628. Sieber 3 about the internment before redress; it was just significantly less than during and after the movement. Some of the first literature surrounding Japanese American internment came out just a year after Japanese Americans were released from the camps. In April 1947 just over a year after Japanese Americans were released, American Sociological Review published Leonard Bloom’s contribution to the study of Japanese American internment, titled “Transitional Adjustments of Japanese-American Families to Relocation.”4 Much of Bloom’s research focused on discrimination toward minority groups in America. 5 The article focuses on WRA (War Relocation Authority) records and data, as well as case studies of the families that were interned.6 Bloom uses this to form a picture of the impact that internment had on the families such as leading to divorce in one case study or persecution from their peers in another.7 Bloom illustrates the negative impact that internment had on the Japanese American family structure and how internment changed many of the traditional practices that Japanese Americans had. It is likely that Bloom was forced to rely on case studies and WRA documents because for years those were the only sources available on the topic of Japanese American internment. One of the contributing factors to the limited amount of sources available was that even once released many of the internees refused to talk about their internment for a number of 4 Bloom was the second sociologist hired at UCLA, and his research on Japanese American internment during World War II was critical on government policies during the war. 5 Kelli Nakamura. "The Managed Casualty: The Japanese-American Family in World War II (book)," Densho Encyclopedia, accessed March 16, 2020, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/The%20Managed%20Casualty:%20The%20Japanese- American%20Family%20in%20World%20War%20II%20(book)/ 6 Leonard Bloom, “Transitional Adjustments of Japanese-American Families to Relocation,” in “The American Family and Its Housing,” American Sociological Review, 12, no. 2 (April, 1947): 201-209. 7 Bloom, “Transitional Adjustments,” 204. Sieber 4 reasons. A large influence was that compared to the treatment of Jews by Germans, many Japanese Americans felt that their treatment was far less horrific and they therefore had no reason to complain. However, this was not shared by all members of the camps and was mostly exclusive to the older generations known as the Issei or first generation Japanese Americans. The Issei were the initial generation that immigrated to the United States from Japan. The second generation or Nisei were their children that were born in America but were from Japanese ancestry. The younger generation Nisei, most often argued they should work with the government through organizations such as the JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) whereas the elder generations argued against cooperation with the government.8 Arguably the largest shift in literature regarding the internment of Japanese Americans is the change in sources used to analyze the internment. Once the redress movement began in January of 1987 and many of the Japanese Americans had time to process the events that had happened to them they were ready to come forward with their stories. This presented the shift from looking at primarily data-based documents to oral histories and the stories of the interned people the way they told it. Since the redress movement it is hard to find any literature on Japanese American internment during World War II without some mark of Roger Daniels’ works. 9 In Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II Daniels divides his book into three main sections. The first provides background on the Japanese American population and the similarities 8 Arthur A. Hansen, “Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation,” The Journal of American History, 82, no. 2 (September, 1995): 630. 9 Roger Daniels is Professor Emeritus at University of Cincinnati with a specialization in Asian history. Daniels earned his doctorate in 1961 and has since been very active in academia editing over seventy-five articles and founding the Asian American Experience series. “Roger Daniels,” Research Directory University of Cincinnati, accessed March 16, 2020, https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/danielr Sieber 5 between Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans and the ordeals they faced when first coming to America. The second focuses on the process of internment, life during internment and release from internment. The third section of the book focuses on the redress movement and Daniels’ closing thoughts in regards to the overall internment experience. Like Bloom, Daniels focused his initial analysis of Japanese American internment on governmental records such as census data.

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