When Japanese Americans had to report to the camps what did most of the families have to do?
U.S. History
Teaching Japanese-American Internment Using Chief Resource
The day after the early-morning surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Usa formally alleged war on Nippon and entered World War 2. Over the next few months, almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, over threescore percent of whom were American citizens, were removed from their homes, businesses and farms on the West Declension and forced to live in internment camps. Why? The United States government feared that these individuals, only because of their ethnicity, posed a national security threat.
More 40 years later, Congress passed legislation mandating apologies and reparations for violations of the ceremonious liberties and the constitutional rights of those incarcerated during the war. "It's not for u.s.a. today to pass judgment upon those who may take made mistakes while engaged in that corking struggle," said President Ronald Reagan, on signing the 1988 legislation. "Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese-Americans was just that, a fault."
In this lesson, students employ original Times reporting and other resources to investigate the forced internment of Japanese-Americans — and track how the government has gradually apologized for some of its actions over the decades. Students will too have the opportunity to look for echoes in today's globe of this difficult affiliate in American history.
Arrests, Roundups and Internment
Primary sources: newspaper manufactures and editorials
Background: Over time, nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans, regardless of whether they were immigrants or had been born in the United States, were evacuated from their homes and brought to temporary assembly centers earlier being bars to ane of several remote internment camps.
Students will square these events with the sobering findings of this 1983 regime report: "All this was done despite the fact that not a single documented act of espionage, demolition or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese beginnings or past a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast."
Action: Working in modest groups, students should read one or more of these New York Times articles from the time period. Their goal? To figure out what they tin can find in 1940s news coverage that explains why the American government forced people from their homes into internment camps simply because of their ethnicity, and why the residual of the land let it happen.
Students should look for the following:
• explicit or implied reasons given inside the manufactures to justify the roundups
• clues within the writing itself (such equally the words used to draw Japanese-Americans, linguistic communication that reveals bias or an outdated perspective, or sensationalism) that provide insight near contemporary attitudes
• the type of sources for the article (for example, does the commodity rely exclusively on regime sources? Does it include any Japanese-American voices?)
Here'south one case to share with the class:
Headline: "W Declension Widens Martial Law Call" (PDF)
Appointment: Feb. 12, 1942
Newspaper: The New York Times
Explicit reason provided in the article: Raids on Japanese communities yielded large quantities of contraband that "fifth columnists" might find useful.
Clues within the writing: The subheadline is startling: "FBI Raids Internet 38 Japanese, Guns, Radios, Ammunition and Bespeak Devices." It suggests that the Japanese-Americans involved might indeed be guilty of planning an human action of treachery. But information at the end of the article explains that the contraband items were seized from a sporting goods shop "operated by an alien Japanese." In this way, even ordinary activities and businesses can appear threatening if they are said to involve Japanese-Americans.
Sourcing: Only government sources (including the Los Angeles mayor, the California attorney general and an Army lieutenant full general) were provided.
Other Times articles:
Dec. 8, 1941: "Japanese Seizure Ordered by Biddle"
Dec. eight, 1941: "W Declension Acts for War Defense"
Jan. 4, 1942: "Only 2,971 Enemy Aliens Are Held; Rest of the 1,100,000 Being Watched Here Are Unmolested"
Jan. 29, 1942: "West Coast Moves to Oust Japanese / Los Angeles 'Permits' Nipponese on City Payroll to Take Leaves of Absence"
Feb. five, 1942: "California Aliens Face up Inverse Way / Great Areas of the State to Exist Affected by Restrictions or Forced Removals"
Feb. 3, 1942: "Japanese Seized in Raid on Coast / Federal Agents Arrest 200 or More Aliens in Dive on Isle at Los Angeles"
Feb. 17, 1942: "Air Bombs Seized in 25 Coast Raids / Japanese Uniforms and Hush-hush Papers Also Taken, 12 Arrests in Sacramento Area"
December. 5, 1943: "4 Japanese Held by FBI in Chicago / Three Had Been Decorated past Tokyo for Activities Here"
Students can also compare reporting in The Times with accounts and editorials in newspapers on the W Coast, where most Japanese-Americans lived and anti-Japanese hysteria was especially acute. Is in that location a noticeable difference in tone? Explain.
West Declension newspapers:
Manufactures in The San Francisco News (scroll downwards to observe dozens of articles from the spring of 1942)
Excerpts from Los Angeles Times editorials (contained within a contempo editorial)
Chief Sources: Photographs
Background: Dorothea Lange, a photographer best known from her photographs of migrant farmers during the Corking Depression, also documented the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Maurice Berger wrote in Lens:
At commencement glance, Dorothea Lange's photographs of Japanese-Americans, taken in the early 1940s, appear to show ordinary activities. People expect patiently in lines. Children play. A woman makes artificial flowers. Storefront signs proudly proclaim, "I am an American."
But these tranquility images document something sinister: the racially motivated relocation and internment during World War Ii of more than 110,000 people of Japanese beginnings who lived on the West Coast, more than 60 per centum of whom were American citizens.
Activeness: Wait at images taken by Ms. Lange in this slide show (at the height of this page) as well as these photos. What do they reveal about the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans and about life in the camps?
And so imagine you are a museum curator with room for only 5 images to tell the story of internment. Which five images would y'all choose from the slide show? For each paradigm, explain why.
Chief Sources: Start-Person Video Interviews
Video
transcript
transcript
A Return to the Internment Campsite
In an interview from May, Bob Fuchigami remembers the Amache internment camp in Colorado, where he was sent when he was 12 years old.
-
na
Background: Bob Fuchigami was sent to the Amache internment camp in Colorado with 10 family unit members when he was 12 years one-time. In this video, he returns to the camp at 85 to tell the story of his imprisonment.
And, in another video, Hiroshi Kashiwagi shares his memories of life at the Tule Lake internment camp.
Activity: While students spotter one or both of these videos, invite them to consider the following: What tin can you learn about what internment was similar for these people and their families? How did it affect their lives? What is the legacy of internment for them, and the nation, today?
Op-Eds That Connect the Past to the Nowadays
Image 
Background: The actor George Takei, who was 5 years old when he and his family began their internment at Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center in Arkansas, cautions America in his Op-Ed "Internment, America'due south Neat Mistake" to protect American values from "cynically manufactured fear and the deliberate targeting of a vulnerable minority." He writes:
It has been the lifelong mission of many to ensure we retrieve the internment. Our often-repeated plea is simple: We must empathize and honour the past in order to learn from and not repeat information technology. But in the 75 years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of Japanese-Americans, never have we been more anxious that this mission might fail.
It is imperative, in today'due south toxic political environment, to acknowledge a difficult truth: The horror of the internment lay in the racial animus the government itself propagated. It whipped up hatred and fear toward an entire group of people based solely on our ancestry.
And Karen Korematsu, whose begetter's struggle confronting internment ended upwards beingness litigated earlier the Supreme Court, writes in her Feb 2017 Op-Ed, "When Lies Overruled Rights," that Americans should "come up together to decline discrimination based on faith, race or national origin, and to oppose the mass deportation of people who expect or pray differently from the majority of Americans."
Activity: Read these Opinion pieces and consider the arguments being made. Then, write your own Op-Ed using the history of Japanese internment to argue a position on an important issue today. Do you lot see whatever echoes of history in today's current events?
Ideas for Further Enquiry
Research life at the camps using 1940s reporting
Background: Newspaper reporting from the 1940s tin can provide a window into what life was like at internment camps. Anne O'Hare McCormick, a Times reporter, visited the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. She wrote in a Jan 1944 commodity (PDF):
Virtually of all the settlement looks like an oasis in an endless desert of sand, sage, mesquite and giant cacti. Effectually the double cluster of barracks that serve as houses, schools, workshops, mess halls, cooperative stores, offices and hospitals are near 17,000 acres of vegetable gardens, wheat, alfalfa and rice fields and pasture lands startlingly dandy and green in a framework of shallow irrigation ditches.
And a March 1943 Times article reported on white women performing "spartan" duty (PDF), working equally teachers, nurses and secretaries at Tule Lake. But The Times did not publish many articles detailing what life was like in the camps.
Providing valuable perspective, by including voices often left out of the history books, are the newspapers published by Japanese-Americans imprisoned in the camps, such as The Heart Mountain Lookout man, The Tulean Dispatch from Tule Lake, The Denson Tribune of the Jerome campsite in Arkansas, The Minidoka Irrigator from the Minidoka camp in Idaho and The Manzanar Free Printing produced at Manzanar. (Afterward opening each link, gyre down to view the headlines.)
Action: Compare the reporting in The Times and other mainstream newspapers from 1942 to 1945 with the articles in papers published by Japanese internees. Think about how these on-the-scene reports add to an agreement almost life in the internment camps. Consider these questions:
1. What tin can nosotros learn from reading about life at the camps in newspaper articles published from 1942 to 1945?
2. What are the ways the news stories in the camp newspapers, published by Japanese internees, differ from reporting in The Times and other mainstream newspapers?
3. How tin we evaluate the reliability of these various accounts?
Japanese-American soldiers
Background: While thousands were sent to internment camps, American-born Japanese were eventually deemed eligible to serve in World War Two and thus prove their loyalty to the United States too every bit provide needed troops for its state of war effort. The 442d Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit comprised only of Japanese-Americans troops, became i of the almost highly busy regiments in U.Southward. military history, as the Times reported:
The 442d suffered huge casualties; Capt. Daniel K. Inouye, now a United States senator from Hawaii, lost his correct arm in battle. The squad became famous for its rescue of the Texan "Lost Battalion," saving more than than 200 men who had been surrounded past German troops.
Yet after serving in the Regular army, many Japanese-American soldiers who returned to America faced discrimination. Senator Daniel Inouye, who died in 2012, recounted for a PBS documentary how subsequently returning from battle in Europe and seeking a haircut while in uniform, he was told, "We don't cut Jap pilus."
In 2000 President Pecker Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor to 22 Asian-Americans; xx were Japanese-Americans. When George T. Sakato died in 2015, he was the terminal to die of seven Japan-Americans who had lived to receive this honor. In 2011 Congress granted several Japanese-American veterans Congressional Gold Medals.
Activity: Consider whether serving in the military machine would have been easy or difficult to practise when the rest of your family unit was kept in an internment camp. Then write a frank one-page alphabetic character home to your family as a Japanese-American soldier.
Legal challenges to the camps
Groundwork: After Fred T. Korematsu in 1942 defied his military evacuation society, the American Civil Liberties Union co-operative in Northern California took up his case. Simply he lost his appeal and the Supreme Courtroom ruled confronting him in 1944. Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui also separately defied their curfew orders and refused to report for internment, resulting in legal challenges that the Supreme Court rejected.
The 1942 legal claiming past Mitsuye Endo (PDF) that also landed in the Supreme Court is credited by some every bit leading to President Roosevelt's 1944 suspension of Executive Order 9066, as a police professor detailed a 2016 Sacramento Bee stance piece.
In 1981, after the historian Peter Irons requested legal documents from Fred Korematsu'southward 1940s Supreme Court example, he establish a memo indicating that "a government lawyer had accused the solicitor general of lying to the Supreme Court nearly the danger posed by Japanese-Americans." Mr. Irons convinced Mr. Korematsu to challenge the ruling. Karen Korematsu, Mr. Korematsu'south daughter, later wrote in The Times:
Evidence was discovered proving that the wartime regime suppressed, altered and destroyed material show while arguing my father'southward, Yasui's and Hirabayashi's cases before the Supreme Court. The government's claims that people of Japanese descent had engaged in espionage and that mass incarceration was necessary to protect the country were non just false, but had even been refuted by the government'due south own agencies, including the Office of Naval Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Federal Communications Commission.
In 1983 a approximate overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction, "based on newly obtained information revealing that the government had knowingly exaggerated the threat of sabotage and espionage posed by ethnic Japanese on the West Coast." And in 1998, President Clinton gave Mr. Korematsu the Medal of Freedom.
Activity: Choose any of these court cases related to Japanese internment to inquiry farther. What is the background of the case? What were the legal issues involved? What did the courtroom determine? What is the significance of that conclusion?
Investigating the camps and reparations
Background: In the 1980s Congress initiated an investigation of the internment camps. The hearings of the Committee on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, some forty years subsequently the war, produced a report in 1983, concluding that the relocation and internment of Japanese-American citizens and resident aliens in World War II amounted to a "grave injustice." Five years later, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Human activity of 1988, which granted reparations to Japanese-Americans who had been interned by the United states of america authorities during the war.
To locate potential recipients of the reparations, the Justice Department created the Function of Redress Administration; but the process of tracking down eligible people was laborious and time-consuming, and former internees were dying. In September 1989 the Senate tried to speed up the procedure, yet more wrangling resulted, with the checks non to be sent until funds were made available in late in 1990. By 1992, only fifty,000 people had been paid.
Action: Students should read about the conclusions of the 1983 report and discuss the following: What are the well-nigh striking points? Did Congress and the president make the right decision in issuing apologies and paying reparations?
Now imagine having President Roosevelt'south ear at a reception in 1942 for x minutes. What should he exist told nigh the role that Japanese internment camps have played in American history?
Remembering the camps
Groundwork: In 2006 Congress sent President George W. Bush legislation (which he signed) to preserve the internment camps. Two camps are at present National Park Service sites: the Manzanar National Historic Site and the Minidoka Internment National Monument (created by President Clinton's 2001 order).
Activity: Students tin do this exercise on their own: Consider whether an internment camp would be the blazon of identify y'all'd similar to visit and list your reasons. Whatever your response, practise research online about a camp and in your own words create a one-page summary of a tour that could be given there. Or create a museum gallery for the historic site.
Alternately, write an Op-Ed about whether more or less should be washed to preserve these sites for the future.
Invoking the internment case
Background: It'south possible to discover echoes of the Japanese internment controversy in national security debates at other moments of United States history since World State of war II. Even though the official regime attitude toward Japanese internment gradually inverse, not all Americans are in agreement. Explore the following recent incidents when political leaders and activists raised the Japanese internment experience as a chapter to repeat or to avoid:
1. The aftermath of 9/11: After the Sept. 11 attacks, Japanese-Americans voiced concern about bigotry against American Muslims and Sikhs. In 2004, an advisory panel criticized the Demography Agency's move to requite the Department of Homeland Security data that identified populations of Arab-Americans; critics compared the bureau's 21st-century actions to its World War II activities locating Japanese-American communities. (A 2000 Times commodity highlighted enquiry final that the Census Agency, despite its denials, had indeed been highly involved in the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans.)
In 2007 Holly Yasui filed a legal cursory to aid Muslim immigrants who sought to overturn a Brooklyn judge's ruling allowing for the detention of noncitizens; Ms. Yasui's begetter, Minoru Yasui, had in one case challenged a Supreme Court ruling on Earth War II restrictions.
2. Refugees from Syria'southward civil war: In November 2015, a Roanoke, Va., mayor caused a firestorm, explaining his opposition to welcoming Syrian refugees to the U.Southward., maxim the internment of Japanese-Americans had been justified. And so he recanted. For some old Japanese internees, the fence over Syria's refugees has evoked painful memories.
3. Restrictions on clearing by Muslims: On Dec. nine, 2015, The Times reported on an MSNBC interview of Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate:
Mr. Trump cited Roosevelt's nomenclature of thousands of Japanese, Germans and Italians living in the United States during the state of war equally "enemy aliens." He said he was non endorsing something equally drastic as the camps where American citizens of Japanese descent were interned. Instead, he referred to iii proclamations by which Roosevelt authorized regime detention of immigrants, and which led to the internment of thousands of noncitizen Japanese, Germans and Italians.
A few days later Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt'due south granddaughter roundly rejected Mr. Trump'due south ideas, every bit did Representative Doris Matsui, who had been interned in a military camp. A sixteen-twelvemonth-old educatee wrote a contest-winning essay for The Learning Network connecting the internment of ethnic Japanese with excluding Muslims from immigrating to America.
Shortly later his election in November 2016, Mr. Trump reaffirmed his intention to restrict immigration by Muslims. A Trump supporter, Carl Higbie, evoked the "precedent" of the Japanese internment camps in citing the need to foreclose homeland terrorism in a Fox News appearance.
Promptly following his inauguration, President Trump issued a serial of executive orders to limit immigration or travel to the United states past people from seven countries with largely Muslim populations. Legal challenges followed, but in September Mr. Trump responded by imposing a more than sweeping ban; a judge halted it in October. Earlier this week the Supreme Court permitted the travel ban to get forrad even while legal challenges continue.
Activity: Students can select one of the above examples from the past ii decades when political leaders or activists have invoked the legacy of the Japanese internment and determine the following: What are the relevant lessons from the Japanese internment experience that should inform this situation? Explicate.
Additional Resources
Digital Public Library of America | Teaching Guide: Exploring Japanese American Internment During World War Two and Japanese American Internment During World War II Primary Source Set
Densho | Teaching WWII Japanese American Incarceration With Primary Sources
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/learning/lesson-plans/teaching-japanese-american-internment-using-primary-resources.html
0 Response to "When Japanese Americans had to report to the camps what did most of the families have to do?"
Post a Comment