From DiscoverNikkei.org

Contents

Incarceration - United States - General Resources

Russell Lee (b.1903). Los Angeles, California. Japanese-American child being evacuated with his parents to Owens Valley. April 1942. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-013297-M1 DLC.
Russell Lee (b.1903). Los Angeles, California. Japanese-American child being evacuated with his parents to Owens Valley. April 1942.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-013297-M1 DLC.
see also Incarceration - United States - Resources by Site
"This site explores a period of U.S. history when racial prejudice and fear upset the delicate balance between the rights of a citizen versus the power of the state. Focusing on the experiences of Japanese Americans who were placed in detention camps during World War II, this online exhibit is a case study in decision-making and citizen action under the U.S. Constitution"
A profile of the on-line exhibition was created by the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Program.
The American Library Association joined with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to develop a travelling version of this exhibition. Among other venues, it appeared at the University of California Los Angeles from October 30-December 18, 1997.
Lists resources of the National Archives related to Japanese internment, as well as significant non-NARA resources.
Draws distinctions, citing law and historical precedents, between the definitions of "internment" and "relocation," and their application to Americans of Japanese and other nationalities subject to internment and/or relocation during World War II.
  • Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Sandra A. Wawrytko, Review. The Journal of San Diego History 43, no. 2 (Spring 1997).
K. Victor Ujimoto, Review. Public Affairs (Fall 1998). (Republished at FindArticles.com)
"Through personal documents, art, and propoganda, Only What We Could Carry expresses through words, art, and haunting recollections, the fear, confusion and anger of the camp experience."
Okihiro, using two short films produced by the Office of War Information in 1943-44, examines the "glaring contradiction among the principles of the 'Four Freedoms,' the conduct of the war, and U.S. democracy." Includes links to the two films: "Japanese Relocation" (1943) and "A Challenge to Democracy" (1944).
Thematic exploration of Japanese American internment incorporating film and video clips from media produced and/or distributed by the NAATA.
Succinct, comprehensive article covering the history and legacy of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Abstract: "This transcript, provided from an interview conducted by Wu and Marco with Mr. Yamamoto offers a unique first hand interpretation of the policy of Japanese Internment in 1942. The interview offers a personal perspective of the hardships that many Japanese-Americans were forced to face at the onset of the Second World War. Yamamoto, a young boy at the time, describes many of the day to day trials that he and his family had to face during the internment."
Research paper by a student at Carbondale Community High School, Carbondale, IL.
Dresner is Assistant Professor of History (East Asia) at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His account is largely based on Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Penguin, 1989).
JARDA Oral histories
Created for the 2001 Day of Remembrance, this timeline covers significant events from the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor through the January 2001 proclamation making the Minidoka War Relocation Center a national monument.
The inside cover of this issue of Mills Quarterly illustrates Ruth Okamoto's painting Summer 1942 (1985), a response to her experience as a child internee at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and Poston (AZ) War Relocation Center.
"Several hundred Japanese Americans who grew up in World War II internment camps gather at a Los Angeles hotel for a reunion. The survivors say they want to tell their stories before their generation dies out."
"Host Bob Edwards highlights a new exhibit at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit offers a window into a unique relationship that developed through correspondence. Some Japanese American children forced into internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor exchanged many letters with a San Diego librarian named Clara Breed."
"The Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project is a multifaceted project to create a permanent Web site which provides enhanced access to the UW Libraries holdings on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II." Includes information on (e.g.) Camp Harmony; Japanese American students at the Univ. of Washington, 1941-42; Japanese Canadian internment.
Review: Tom Devaney, "A Tragedy of Democracy: How the U.S. decided to intern 100,000 Japanese Americans". The Pennsylvania Gazette March/April 2002.
Review: R. Bentley Anderson, S.J., "All the Wrong Reasons". America: The National Catholic Weekly vol. 186, no. 16 (May 13, 2002).
Review by George C. Leef. Freedom Daily (August 2002).
Review: "The consequences of terror". The Economist (September 20, 2001).
  • Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: the Japanese American Internment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Sample chapter: Introduction (Princeton University Press)
Review: Eiichiro Azuma, "From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Reinterpreting the Japanese American Internment in an International Context". American History 33 (2005): 102-110. (Subscription required for access.)
  • Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Review: Tim Alan Garrison, Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 106, no. 2 (Summer 2005).
Excerpt: "Health resources were scarce on the home front. Nearly one third of the nation’s youngest and most energetic doctors entered active duty, and hospital wards shut down for lack of essential auxiliary staff. Nevertheless, more than 1700 interned Axis seamen, 800 German, Italian, and Japanese resident enemy aliens and their families, and 2700 deportees from Latin America and their families all received access to health care."
  • Oral Histories: A wide variety of interviews of former internees, military personnel, people who befriended the Japanese Americans, and Caucasians who worked at the internment camps.
Bodine, a Quaker, worked with the American Friends Service Committee to get students who were interned in American concentration camps released into colleges.
Bibliography of materials in all media and genres on Japanese American internment.
Includes extensive bibliography including photograph and manuscript collections; books, pamphlets, and reports ; newspapers; and periodicals found at the Balch Institute Library and Archives.
Produced in 1946, this U.S. government publication describes the rationale and evolution for the community governance mechanisms implemented at the War Relocation Authority camps. Fully scanned text.
Full scan (.gif image format) of Thomas' pamphlet decrying the incarceration.
Full scan (.gif image format) of the book, the Conrats' appraisal of the hundred most important images related to the Japanese American internment.
Full scan (.gif image format).
Full scan (.gif image format) of an 8-page brochure.
Abstract: This study examines how the United States government treated the Japanese "enemy language" press during World War II by focusing on the policy of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), a federal agency that took responsibility for the management and mobilization of the domestic foreign language press during the first six months after Pearl Harbor. The OFF took a distinctively liberal but realistic approach. The Foreign Language Division of the OFF, which took the initiative in this matter, regarded the foreign language press as a symbol of American democracy and, at the same time, as a useful instrument to facilitate the national war policy. On this understanding, the OFF sought to preserve and utilize the Japanese-language press rather than to ban it. The agency used the Japanese-language press for mainly three purposes, as a messenger of official news and views, morale builder, and shield against the Axis propaganda.
  • Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy, the Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1976.
David V. DuFault, Review. The Journal of San Diego History 23, no. 4 (Fall 1977), Book Reviews section.
  • Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps U.S.A.: The Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
Donald H. Estes, Review. The Journal of San Diego History 19, no. 1 (Winter 1973).
"I will first outline the status of Japanese Americans on the eve of Pearl Harbor, sixty years ago, and indicate how they were deprived of their liberty. Then I will note the various stages through which the reevaluation of the incarceration of the Japanese Americans has passed to assume its present place in the historical canon."
Article about the Japanese American Internment Conference, held in conjunction with the Third Annual Day of Remembrance in Eugene, Oregon.
Brief article about the Utah JACL's establishment of a Day of Remembrance program.
"This groundbreaking traveling exhibition combines for the first time a comparative and multicultural presentation of how the United States government disregarded the civil and human rights of 31,000 German, Italian and Japanese immigrants in the United States and Latin America. Through stunning photographs, narrative texts, and oral history quotes from internees, the exhibit examines the impact of an international crisis on those "enemy aliens" that settled in North and Latin America."
Catherine Brown, "Exhibit Opening -- Sunday, May 18, 2003", reports on the opening of the exhibition during its display at UCLA's Powell Library.
Reports the experiences of four people -- two Japanese-Americans and two Japanese-Peruvians -- who spoke on a UCLA panel marking the anniversary of Executive Order 9066.
  • Allan W. Austin, "Web Site Review". The Journal of American History vol. 92, no. 1 (June 2005).
Reviews three web sites related to Japanese American incarceration: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project, A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution, and Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in WWII Arkansas.
Excerpt: "One of the Army's largest undertakings in the name of defense during World War II was the mass evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast states-from all of California and from the western halves of Oregon and Washington. The decision to evacuate the Japanese was one made at the highest level-by the President of the United States acting as Commander in Chief. What Army plans and recommendations lay behind this decision? With what alternatives was the President presented? To what extent was his decision based on military considerations?"
Excerpt from Chapter 5: Japanese Evacuation From the West Coast: "One of the Army's largest undertakings in the name of defense during World War II was the evacuation of almost all persons of Japanese ancestry from California, from the western halves of Oregon and Washington, and from southern Arizona. The Army also removed persons of Japanese descent from Alaska and began what was initially intended to be a substantial transfer of such persons from Hawaii to the mainland. Many facets of the story of the Japanese evacuation from the west coast have already been related in published works. Here the discussion is limited to the plans and decisions for evacuation and to the nature of the military necessity that lay behind them."
Data files created from textual records gathered by the War Relocation Authority from 1942-1946.
Scope and Content Note: "This series contains personal descriptive data about Japanese Americans evacuated from the states of Washington, Oregon, and California to ten relocation centers operated by the War Relocation Authority during World War II in the states of California (Tule Lake and Manzanar Centers), Idaho (Minidoka Center), Utah (Central Utah Center), Colorado (Granada Center), Arizona (Colorado River and Gila River Centers), Wyoming (Heart Mountain Center), and Arkansas (Rohwer and Jerome Centers). Each record represents an individual and includes the name; relocation project and assembly center to which assigned; previous address; birthplace of parents; occupation of father; education; foreign residence; indication of military service, public assistance, pensions, and physical defects; sex and marital status; race of evacuee and spouse; year of birth; age; birthplace; indication of the holding of an alien registration number and/or Social Security number, and whether the evacuee attended Japanese language school; highest grade completed; language proficiency; occupations; and religion."
"From 1941 to 1946, Occidental College President Remsen DuBois Bird and College Librarian Elizabeth McCloy set out to preserve letters, articles, pamphlets, newspapers, and other publications related to the forced internment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast."
Digital archive organized into the following sections: Letters and papers of Remsen Bird; Assembly center and camp publications; US government publications; Periodicals, articles & newspaper clippings; Civil liberties, community & church publications. Includes a complete on-line finding aid.
"Experience the evacuation and the war effort of the Japanese Americans as the visitor walks through a barrack in the internment camp. Encounter personal recollections of individuals from the community to understand the period of World War II and the Japanese American loyalty and dedication to this country."
Republished on the Dark Childe web site.
"This paper will analyze works by various scholars of the internment, as well as matters of ethnicity and culture in a time frame that brackets the evacuation, and argue that the internment was a complex and rapid undertaking that affected those both behind and beyond the camps themselves."
Undergraduate research paper produced for Dr. Kenneth Marcus' "Approaches to History" course at the University of La Verne, Department of History and Political Science. Explores discrepancies between the War Relocation Authority's published accounts of conditions within the camps, and those of firsthand observers, both internees and visitors.
  • Michelle Black, "A Kibei's Story". Orchard Chronicles: Oral History and Herstory Collected in Santa Clara County, a Journal from Silicon Valley (May 1998).
Biography of the author's grandfather, "the World War II experiences of a Japanese American who was interned in several 'relocation camps' without being charged with any crime."
Scheduled to launch in Spring 2006; includes video oral history interviews of six Japanese Americans, conducted by high school students.
"The following is one of 14 stories of intolerance in America told in Us and Them, the text component of The Shadow of Hate, a free teaching kit that also includes a video by award-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, as well as a teacher's guide with detailed lesson plans. This true story is about the internment of a Japanese American family during World War II."
The story of Tsuyako ("Sox") Kataoka Kitajima and her family's experiences being incarcerated at the Tanforan racetrack and Topaz relocation camp.
"The aim, then, of this article is to provide a better understanding of the official policies that were adopted by the U.S. government to control its population in the 1940s, and to explain what role the national security state has played in the shaping of dominant social values in America."
Based on archival evidence, Robinson asserts that Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy admitted that military security was not a primary factor in the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II.
The Library's resources include Children's Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Plays and Biographies, Poetry and Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Video, Audio, Oral Histories, CD-Rom, Slides and Teaching Aids. The site consists primarily of annotated bibliographic entries.
"Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps."
Section on Japanese American incarceration, within a library exhibition addressing the broader issues of the struggle to balance freedom and security.
"This exhibit examines complex issues that arise in our society from the tension between protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties and the efforts to restrict these freedoms during times of national crisis. The examples offered from modern American history remind us of how contentious the dialogue of dissent can be, even as such issues are once again in the daily news."
"The large-scale Japanese American Internment Project traveling exhibition honors 14 survivors of the Japanese American internment camps during WWII and Japanese American artists whose work has been influenced by the internment experience. The project is based on a series of interviews and creative writing workshops with 11th graders at George Washington High School in San Francisco and has been expanded to include the creative talent of students from CW/W's ROOTS program at Balboa High School and Horrace Mann Middle School in San Francisco. The Japanese American Internment Project honors Dianne Fukami, Philip Kan Gotanda, Sato Hashizume, Chizu Iiyama, Ernie Iiyama, Mary Masamitsu, Sox Kitashima, Ginger Masuoka, Janice Mirikitani, Esther Oda, Ruth Okimoto, Emiko Omori, Toru Saito, Morgan Yamanaka, and Geroge Yoshida."
Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who produce radio under the collaborative name The Kitchen Sisters, explore the foodways of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Their report discusses the abrupt shift away from traditional Japanese foods as internees were fed Army surplus rations; the absorption of non-traditional foods like hot dogs into Japanese-American cuisine, and the clandestine production of sake from leftover rice. Includes extensive links to oral histories, web sites, and recipes.

Revisionism & Denial

"Conventional wisdom concerning this controversial event in American history is that individuals of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and put into American concentration camps in violation of their constitutional rights because the country was overcome with "racism, hysteria and a lack of political will" after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The determined researcher will find that the truth is quite different. A careful review of the documentation in this archive reveals that many Japanese along the West Coast of the U.S. did, in fact, pose a grave security risk to the country."
  • Americans for Historical Accuracy, founded by Ralph Walker-Willis (USMC Ret.), attempts to "debunk" the facts and circumstances of World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
"The purpose of this site is to counteract the ongoing and continuous attempts to 'educate' our school children K thru 12,on the World War II evacuation and relocation / internment of U.S. west coast Japanese."
Excerpt: "Since the end of World War II, Holocaust revisionists throughout Europe have vehemently denied that the extermination of 6 million Jews ever took place. The gas chambers? Zionist propaganda. Zyklon B? A heavy duty delousing agent. But the rewriting of camp history isn't just a European obsession. Over the last two decades, an equally determined band of homegrown revisionists has fought to paint a rosy picture of America's own concentration camps: the ten "relocation centers" where over 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.


Arts in the Camps

Curricula & Lesson Plans

see Education

Parallels between Japanese-American Incarceration and Post-9/11 Treatment of Arab Americans

Retrieved from "http://www.discovernikkei.org/wiki/index.php/Incarceration-United_States-General_Resources"
Personal tools