N
Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Recovering Japanese
American Experiences
for the EFL Classroom
Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
1 Historical and Cultural Contexts
Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Asian Americans
suffered from Anglo-American prejudice, practically since their arrival in the United States
in the late nineteenth century. They were victimized by discriminatory public policies such as
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which marked the first step toward the US government’s
controversial quota legislation of the 1920s. To better control Asian immigration, Angel
Island, the “Ellis Island of the West” or the “Guardian of the Western Gate,” was opened in
the San Francisco Bay in 1910. While Ellis Island as the entry point for European immigrants
is part of American cultural memory, many Americans have never heard of Angel Island.
By 1920, an estimated 20,000 Japanese “picture brides”1 had been processed through
the immigration station in the San Francisco Bay. Unlike European immigrants, Japanese
immigrants were not allowed to become naturalized American citizens in the nineteenth
and in the first half of the twentieth century. The status of Japanese immigrants as aliens
ineligible for citizenship provided the alleged reason for various anti-Japanese laws. In 1923,
the US Supreme Court upheld a California law limiting the rights of Japanese immigrants to
own land. California had passed an alien land law as early as 1913. The National Origins Act
of 1924 completely prohibited Japanese immigration.
1
The picture-bride system relied on the traditional practice of arranged marriage, where prospective bride and
groom would exchange photographs. The “picture marriage” was successfully transplanted to the Japanese
American context as it offered a way for Issei, first generation, men to marry and raise families in their adopted
land without the expense and trouble of returning to Japan.
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The widespread racial stereotypes of the time were increased by the fear which spread
after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Forces within the military, the press, and among
politicians, as well as so-called ‘patriotic’ associations such as the Native Sons and Daughters
of the Golden West pressed the executive branch of the US government to order the removal
of all ethnically Japanese people from the West Coast. The US government authorized
extensive searches of the homes of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans as they
suspected them of committing acts of sabotage or treason. However, no evidence for any
such activities was ever found, and it has been proven by scholars today that race prejudice,
war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership led to the wartime incarceration of Japanese
Americans. At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detained respected elders,
community leaders and heads of household, people who were desperately needed at the
time to stabilize and possibly mobilize the frightened Japanese American communities on
the Pacific West Coast.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.2 The
order gave Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, the power to ‘evacuate’ from specific military
areas any residents who were considered risks to national security.3 The reason given to enact
the order was a need for “successful prosecution of the war” (qtd. in Muller 23). Although
the order did not mention any specific ethnic group, it was appliedÑalmost exclusivelyÑto
Japanese Americans. The western parts of the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and
Arizona were designated as ‘Military Area No. 1.’ In California eventually all Japanese and
Japanese Americans were relocated, those in the eastern parts of Washington, Oregon, and
Arizona were allowed to remain.4 In Hawaii, the situation for Hawaiians of Japanese ancestry
was different. Despite their relatively large number, no internment policy was implemented
there. Possible reasons for this are a less prevalent racism, as well as economic dependency
on Japanese laborers
Voluntary relocation to inland areas was offered and encouraged by the US military. Yet
Japanese Americans were not any more welcome farther inland than on the Pacific Coast.
Yoshiko Uchida, for example, describes in her book Desert Exile that her family learned of
“arrests, violence, and vigilantism encountered by some who had fled ‘voluntarily’” (58).
The possibility of voluntary relocation was altogether terminated on March 18, 1942, when
President Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to facilitate and
coordinate what was to be called the evacuation (Executive Order 9102).
The Japanese American community almost as a body complied with the removal program.
This might be understood as a continuation of an obedient attitude adopted by Japanese
American immigrants, who were enduring racist citizenship laws, alien land laws, and
2
Today, this is the date that Japanese Americans memorialize each year as their Day of Remembrance. “E.O. 9066”
is also the title of books, poems, and a musical piece.
3 The euphemistic language needs to be problematized in the context of the classroom, e.g. ask the students what
“evacuation” means to them.
4
A map of the “Original Evacuation Zones, March 1942” may be found in Roger Daniels, Asian America 215.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
exclusion laws. The phrase ‘shikata ga nai,’ meaning ‘it cannot be helped’ or ‘it must be
done,’ best describes the attitude that had been instilled in the Nisei by their Issei parents.5
Considered a virtue and distinct feature of Japanese culture, the acceptance of what could
not be changed should, however, not be overstated. Three young Nisei men, Fred Korematsu,
Gordon Hirabayashi, and Min Yasui challenged the evacuation orders in court. All of them
lost their cases and were convicted of violating the exclusion order (Korematsu, Hirabayashi)
and the curfew order (Yasui). When their cases were reopened in the 1980s, their convictions
were eventually overturned.
Between March 1942 and March 1946, when the last camp officially closed, 120,000 men,
women and children of Japanese descent were interned, two thirds of whom were Nisei,
American citizens by birth. Although the camps are sometimes referred to as concentration
camps, which is actually the technically correct term (cf. Yoo 692; Dubel 97),6 they were by
no means comparable to German death camps; a critical distinction must be made between
the two. In the spring of 1942, Japanese Americans were only given a few days to leave their
homes and report to local pick-up areas from where they were taken to ‘assembly centers’ or
directly to designated ‘relocation centers.’ Allowed to take with them “only what they could
carry,” most had to sell their homes and businesses, and other property they might have
been able to acquire despite restrictive land laws for unreasonably low prices.
The ten relocation camps were situated in desolate areas of California, Arizona, Colorado,
Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Arkansas.7 The living conditions in the camps were miserable,
especially during the first year of internment: tar paper barracks that lacked adequate
heating and offered little to no privacy; meager job opportunities for adults (monthly
wages ranged between $8-19 per month); minimal educational opportunities for children.
The dismal conditions were among the factors that led to open conflicts. By the end of
December 1942, several disturbances occurred in Poston, Heart Mountain, Tule Lake, Topaz,
and Minidoka. A mass uprising in Manzanar in protest of camp conditions led to the jailing
of one of the community leaders. The ensuing Manzanar incident on December 6, 1942, left
two internees dead and ten more wounded.
5
First generation Japanese immigrants are called Issei; their American born children are called Nisei, or second
generation.
6
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, concentration camps are camps “where civilians, enemy aliens,
political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.”
7
Most people spent up to six months in one of the sixteen assembly centers before being transferred to the
permanent camps. According to Taylor, “[t]he pattern of distributing the Japanese American population among
the sixteen assembly centers was not totally random, and most people from one area went to the center and
camp together” (60). A map of assembly centers and relocation camps may be found in Taylor 59; Inada 418;
Daniels, Concentration Camps 96; it may also be downloaded at <http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/wracamps/
map.html>.
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
In 1943, the exclusion of Japanese American citizens from the armed forces, which had been
in effect since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was lifted. President Roosevelt even announced
the organization of a segregated combat team for Nisei who would volunteer their service.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team became a model combat unit, the most decorated unit
in World War II. In January 1944, Nisei became subject to the draft.8 A year before, the WRA
had begun to distribute a so-called loyalty questionnaire labeled “Application for Leave
Clearance” to all internees over seventeen years of age. The questionnaires were used as
the reason for separating the ‘loyal’ from the ‘disloyal’ and segregating the two groups. Socalled No-no Boys were sent to Tule Lake Relocation Center, which was then designated a
segregation camp for disloyal evacuees. On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court in Endo
v. the United States ruled that the WRA had no authority to detain loyal Japanese American
citizens. With the exception of those that had been singled out to be ‘disloyal,’ release from
the relocation centers began on January 2, 1945. The judges, however, shied away from
addressing the fundamental question of the constitutionality of internment and merely
affirmed that the Constitution posed no barrier to the decision to detain American citizens
on the basis of race.
The internment experience continued to affect Japanese Americans, as individuals and as a
community. Japanese Americans not only often found their property gone when they finally
returned, but their internment was also the pivotal traumatic experience of their lives. Most
suppressed their memories, and public statements about relocation and concentration camp
life were rare in the period directly following the war. The injustice of the internment was not
acknowledged by Congress until the 1980s, when Japanese Americans, mostly Sansei (third
generation) and a few Yonsei (fourth generation) pressed for a formal apology and redress.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the Yellow Power Movement in particular, seems
to have legitimized such ethnic protest. In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act awarded the 60,000
former internees still alive $1.25 billion; $20,000 in compensation were given to each survivor.
The Act furthermore called for a formal apology written by the president, which President
George Bush signed in October 1990. The Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, established
under the Civil Liberties Act, was mandated to finance projects that would educate the
public about internment, sponsor research activities, and award national fellowships. As
a result, a wider knowledge about the internment, a recognition, understanding as well as
discussion about Japanese American experience and identity ensued in the 1990s.
8
The PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution excellently traces the story of young Nisei who refused
to be drafted from the Heart Mountain relocation center. An accompanying web site (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/
conscience/) features the story of resistance to wartime relocation. It offers background information on the film
production as well as books, web links, and study guides for educators. Other recommendable documentaries on
the internment experience include the award-winning Days of Waiting: The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo, as well as
Rabbit in the Moon and History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige.
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2 Visualizing the Japanese American Internment
Given the ever-increasing significance of visuals for the teaching of American cultural studies
in the EFL-classrom (cf. Hebel and Moreth-Hebel, “The Pictorial Turn”), the present article is
focused on visualizations of the Japanese American internment. Japanese Americans have
been creating visual narratives of their internment experience from 1942 onwards. Although
they were not allowed to take cameras with them when they were evacuated in 1942 since
photographic equipment was considered contraband, some internees were able to smuggle
cameras or mere lenses into the camps, and in the beginning films and photographs were
made surreptitiously. Later, as restrictions were lifted, photographs and films were made
openly. Manzanar had a resident photographer, Toyo Miyatake, an internee who had worked
as a Los Angeles portrait photographer before he was removed to Manzanar. At Topaz, Utah,
Dave Tatsuno, one of the internees and a home movie hobbyist, filmed scenes on a 8mm
camera he had smuggled into the relocation center.
The imprisonment of Japanese Americans was also documented in pictures of a different
kind: Ansel Adams was asked by Manzanar’s second director, Ralph Merritt, to make a
photographic record of camp life in the fall of 1943; and the WRA sent photographers
such as Dorothea Lange and Clem Albers into the camps from the outside. The intention
of these photographers was obviously different from Toyo Miyatake’s and Dave Tatsuno’s,
who used their cameras as private tools for making private documents. Tatsuno used 8mm
Kodachrome, and the color lends a freshness, immediacy and authenticity to his material
that is gripping. The effect and quality stand in contrast to the black and white photographs
and home movies with which today’s viewers tend to associate temporal detachedness.
In January 1997, Tatsuno became ‘enshrined’ with his collected home movies, now named
Topaz, when his filmed material was added to the Library of Congress National Archives
Film Registry.9 The video production Something Strong Within, which was created for
the exhibition “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American
Experience” at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, ends with Tatsuno’s
poetical images of colorful sunsets, arid earth, peacefully dancing snowflakes in front of
barracks, and a graceful ice-skater who is sliding past the same barracks. Dave Tatsuno’s
words are superimposed on the screen: “Despite the loneliness and despair that enveloped
us, we made the best we could with the situation. I hope when you look at these you see
the spirit of the people; people trying to reconstruct a community despite overwhelming
obstacles. This, I feel, is the essence of these home movies.”
9
Dave Tatsuno’s Topaz is only the second home movie document that has made it onto the Library of Congress’s
list after the Abraham Zapruder film (of the murder of Kennedy). It is also the only such movie originating from
an American ethnic community.
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Director Scott Hicks used the image of the woman on ice skates in the film adaptation of
David Guterson’s award-winning novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994; 1999) (fig. 1).10 Snow
Falling on Cedars makes for a significant visualization of the Japanese American internment
and is especially suitable for the use in EFL classrooms. In the movie, a young German
American fisherman is found dead in the nets of his boat in the Puget Sound of the Pacific
Northwest. What follows is a story about love and war in which a war veteran and journalist,
Ishmael Chambers, his first love, a Japanese American woman named Hatsue, and her Nisei
husband, Kabuo Miyamoto, the accused murderer, must come to terms with their past. The
immediate action is centered around the murder trial that provides for the structure of the
film. Although this makes for a rather conventional narrative technique and composition,
the film is not only a courtroom drama in which the viewer is to find out what happened
to the dead fisherman, but it is also a filmic investigation of the treatment of the Japanese
American community during the war. The film also focuses on the impossible relationship
of two young people from different ethnic communities, with each of the two protagonists
facing racism within their own community. During the trial, the viewer is offered bits and
pieces of information that are presented in flashbacks of the past of different characters.
Thus, the movie is about remembering and examining the past. The courtroom where past
and present intersect serves as the springboard to finding out what happened. The film is
like a mosaic that the viewers—including especially the students addressed by the project
suggested here—have to put back together again. The very structure and technique of the
film thus support the didactic emphasis on making students recover Japanese American
experiences.
Fig. 1: Film still from Snow Falling on Cedars.
10
For a reading of Guterson’s novel see Paul.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Fig. 2: Bainbridge Island Evacuees Boarding Ferry under Army Guard, 1942.
Two scenes in Snow Falling on Cedars lend themselves particularly well to classroom
discussion: the evacuation scene and the arrival scene. During the evacuation scene we
hear the beating of drums in between long silences. The whole scene has a documentary
quality to it: everything is revealed only slowly; the audience is watching through windows
and keyholes; individual people come into view; they are wearing their best clothes and
carry suitcases, children are clutching teddy bears. The tags that every Japanese American
is wearing are also revealed gradually. The director and the cinematographer conducted
extensive photo study before shooting the film; they incorporated actual photographs taken
by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in the movie. In the special case of the evacuation
scene, the shots also mirror actual photos taken in 1942: e.g. the grandfather with young
children, all wearing tags, and the evacuees boarding the Bainbridge Island ferry under army
guard (figs. 2-4). In the arrival scene at Manzanar, students will find out where Hatsue and
Kabuo actually went; we see Japanese Americans on a bus, shades are drawn, but parts of
a desert landscape with Joshua trees are visible. A girl on the bus sings the “Star Spangled
Banner” very quietly when they reach the camp. Hicks then intercuts original stills as well
as Tatsuno’s home movie into his film in order to establish the scene: Adams’s photo of
the entrance sign to Manzanar (fig. 5), Tatsuno’s graceful ice-skater who is sliding past
the barracks, a still of two children wearing their tags, a photo of the Jive Bombers Band
at Manzanar, Tatsuno filming young people dance, and a still of a young mother with her
baby daughter. Such visualizations certainly stir questions about what happened to whom
and why. The following online research tools support the search for answers to these
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Fig. 4: Dorothea Lange,
A Grandfather Awaits Evacuation Bus,
1942.
Fig. 3: Dorothea Lange, Hayward, Calif.—
Grandfather and Grandchildren Awaiting
Evacuation Bus, 1942.
Fig. 5: Ansel Adams, Entrance to Manzanar, 1943.
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questions: “Japanese American Exhibit & Access Project” of the University of Washington
(http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/harmony/), the Smithsonian Museum of American
History site (http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/), and “Exploring the Japanese
American Internment through Film & the Internet” (http://www.jainternment.org/) provided
by the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA). The pictures and
stills illustrate the “Civilian Exclusion Order,” and the “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese
Ancestry” are also available at these web sites.
Ansel Adams is probably best known as America’s premier landscape photographer.11 However,
few people are aware of his photographs documenting the Japanese American internment
experience at the Manzanar Relocation Center. A selection of Adams’s photographic work at
Manzanar was published in 1944 by U.S. Camera in a 112-page book, Born Free and Equal.
The magazine-style volume contains sixty-six illustrations and, at the time, was met with
public disapproval: “the words and pictures in that book did not convey a welcome message
to much of the uneasy American public in 1944. Copies were publicly burned in protest,
making Born Free and Equal a rare book today” (Armor and Wright xviii). According to the
Library of Congress’s American Memory web site, however, “[t]he book received positive
reviews and made the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list for March and April of 1945.”
In November 1944, an exhibition of 61 photographic prints by Ansel Adams opened at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. A traveling exhibit of the photographs, on the other
hand, was never realized. Adams’s Manzanar photographs found new audiences when the
civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s. In 1965, Adams offered his collection
to the Library of Congress as a “historical document,” acknowledging the suffering of the
Japanese Americans and admiring their community building skills:
The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great
injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense
of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid
(but magnificent) environment. [...] All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an
important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use. (“About this
Collection”)
Ansel Adams’s Manzanar photographs raise a number of issues and questions. How were his
photographs conceived and framed at the time? How did Adams choose to document the
Japanese American internment experience? How did Adams, like the other photographers
of the WRA, respond to possible restrictions? For instance, Adams was “forbidden to
photograph the guard towers, the guards, or the barbed wire. Yet Adams worked all three
into his images” (Armor and Wright xx). The photograph Manzanar Relocation Center
11
Adams’s photographs are available at the Library of Congress’s web site <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/
aamhtml/aamhome.html>. The Prints and Photographs Division presents side-by-side digital scans of both
Adams’s 242 original negatives and his 209 photographic prints within the Library’s American Memory Collection.
A chronology, bibliography and further resources are provided as well.
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from Tower (fig. 6) is thus governed by the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the background
that dwarf the barracks as well as the barely visible, anonymous people in the midground.
The mountains reach the edge of the frame. The existence of the guard towers is implied
because Adams’s perspective is from above; the photograph was actually taken from a guard
tower. A miniature guard tower can be made out at the opposite end of the camp street.
Adams, however, does not only imply the constant presence of an overseer, but he seems
to look over the camp toward the mountains, thus isolating the viewer from the reality of
the camp. The almost pastoral setting of View South from Manzanar to Alabama Hills (fig.
7) seems to show the typical Ansel Adams landscape. One has to take a closer look to see
the barbed wire emerge from the row of shrubs and trees across the center of the picture.
In the photograph depicting the entrance to the Manzanar Relocation Center the presence
of guards is suggested by the small sign at the left of the photograph, which reads “Stop.
Military Police” (fig. 5). It was this very photograph that was used by Scott Hicks to establish
the camp location in his adaptation of Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.
Fig. 6: Ansel Adams, Manzanar Relocation Center from Tower, 1943.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Fig. 7: Ansel Adams, View South from Manzanar to Alabama Hills, 1943.
A majority of the more than 200 photographs that Ansel Adams took are portraits. The
internees are depicted as individuals and thereby re-legitimated visually. Adams’s images
also show people at work, thus conveying the impression that they are able to pursue
normal lives and activities. Useful examples would include the photographs of nurse
Hamaguchi (Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi, Mother Frances Yokoyama, Baby Fukomoto) and Roy
Takeno, editor of the Manzanar Free Press newspaper (Roy Takeno Reading Paper in Front of
Office) (fig. 8, 9). In the second photo, Adams does not only portray Takeno under the office
signÑFree Press, ironically enoughÑbut he also depicts the rows of barracks that contradict
the message of normalcy and freedom. On the one hand, the telephone poles and lines give
the scene a sense of modern convenience; on the other, they could also figure as symbols
for the barbed wire barring communication with the outside world. Furthermore, Adams
documented agricultural scenes and sports and leisure activities including baseball and
volleyball games (fig. 10). Finally, his landscape photos draw on myths of the American West
and thus open the field for far-reaching discussions of the power and pitfalls of American
ideologies of freedom and opportunity. Reading Ansel Adams’s photographs as documents
of the internment experience might also lead to discussions of Adams’s possible compliance
with and implicit approval of the restrictions he pictured. Asked about the phenomenon of
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Fig. 8: Ansel Adams, Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi,
Mother Frances Yokoyama, Baby Fukomoto, 1943.
Fig. 9: Ansel Adams, Roy Takeno Reading Paper in Front of Office, 1943.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Fig. 10: Ansel Adams, Baseball Game, 1943.
smiling internees in his home movies, Dave Tatsuno replied in a way that might also help to
understand Adams’s photographs in their deeper implications: “While many of the internees
in the video have smiles on their faces, [...] many times they only look happy because they
could not show the sadness and bitterness that they were feeling” (Akizuki 1). Such issues of
artistic integrity and the limits and responsibility of visual representations obviously remain
didactically relevant until today.
Besides Adams, the most prominent example of outsiders coming in to document the camp
experience is that of the WRA photographers, among them Dorothea Lange.12 During the
Great Depression, Lange had been involved with the migrant farm workers program and had
documented displaced farm families and migrant workers. Soon after President Roosevelt’s
order, Lange was hired by the WRA to document all aspects and phases of the internment,
from life in Japanese neighborhoods to assembly centers and to the camps themselves.
Lange had “strong negative feelings toward the injustice done to the Japanese Americans,”
but took the job offered by the WRA because she “knew that her work would not only belong
to the Government but also be subject to its control” (Robinson 25). Not surprisingly, many
of Lange’s photographs were censored by the federal government.
12
Lange’s photographs for the WRA can be downloaded from “War Relocation Authority Photographs of
Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement,” Online Archive of California (OAC). Most of the photographs
are well captioned with information on place, date, people, and activities featured. The archive provides an
excellent finding aid: http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf596nb4h0. Material on Lange can also be
found online at the Museum of the City of San Francisco <http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html>, and at the
Library of Congress <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html>. See also Partridge.
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Among Dorothea Lange’s most powerful photographs are those taken at Raphael Weill
Elementary School in San Francisco in April 1942. The photographs of children in the school
yard, during lunch hour and during flag pledge ceremony document values of friendship and
patriotism (fig. 11, 12). The innocence of the children is contrasted to the reality of wartime
San Francisco that is expressed in Lange’s captions:
Fig. 11: Dorothea Lange,
Lunch Hour at the Raphael Weill
Public School, 1942.
Fig. 12: Dorothea Lange,
Flag of Allegiance Pledge at Raphael Weill
Public School, 1942.
San Francisco, California. Lunch hour at the Raphael Weill Public School, Geary and
Buchanan Streets. Children of Japanese ancestry were evacuated with their parents to
spend the duration in War Relocation Authority centers where educational facilities will
be established.
San Francisco, California. Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill Public School,
Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children in families of Japanese ancestry were evacuated
with their parents and will be housed for the duration in War Relocation Authority
centers where facilities will be provided for them to continue their education.
Especially the series of photos showing first-graders during flag pledge ceremony leaves
ample room for a comparison with “The Pledge of Allegiance”: “I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, [one nation under
God, indivisible], with liberty and justice for all.”
As Japanese Americans were allowed to take only what they could carry when they were
removed, they were not allowed to take their pets. This made for some particularly heartwrenching scenes. The photo of the elderly couple on the truck (fig. 13) documents both the
physical act of evacuation and the emotions involved. In her autobiographical book Desert
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Exile (1982), Yoshiko Ushida evokes a similar incident and describes how they had to give
away the family dog:
Fig. 13: Couple Saying Good-bye to Their Dog, Bainbridge Island.
Two problems that remained unsolved until very near our departure deadline were what to
do with Laddie, our pet collie [...]. Our pedigreed Scotch collie was a gentle friendly dog, but
our friends didn’t want to take him because of his age. In desperation, I sent a letter to our
university’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian. “I am one of the Japanese American
students soon to be evacuated and have a male Scotch collie that can’t come with me. Can
anyone give him a home?” [...] It was a particularly sad day for my sister, who was the avid
animal-lover of our family. It was she who begged, cajoled, and coerced my parents into
getting all of our dogs. But once they became our pets, we all loved them, and Mama used
to cook a separate pot of vegetables to feed our dogs along with their cans of Dr. Ross’s dog
food. Although the new owner of our pet had promised faithfully to write us in camp, we
never heard from him. When, finally, we had a friend investigate for us, we learned that the
boy hadn’t had the heart to write us that Laddie had died only weeks after we left Berkeley.
(61-62)
In her When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), Julie Otsuka traces the life of the four members
of a Japanese American family during the war years and gives the enforced separation of
families and pets a different twist:
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White Dog barked. “Hush,” she said. White Dog grew quiet. [...] “Play dead,” she said.
White Dog turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. His paws went limp. The
woman picked up the shovel that was leaning against the trunk of the tree. She
lifted it high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his
head. White Dog’s body shuddered twice and his hind legs kicked out into the air, as
though he were trying to run. Then he grew still. A trickle of blood seeped out from
the corner of his mouth. She untied him from the tree and let out a deep breath. The
shovel had been the right choice. Better, she thought, than a hammer. [...] When the
children came home from school she reminded them that early the next morning
they would be leaving. Tomorrow they were going on a trip. They could bring with
them only what they could carry. (11-12)
Besides Lange’s images, those of another photographer commissioned by the WRA stand
out for their underlying message of disapproval of the government policy of internment:
the photographs of Clem Albers. Gerald H. Robinson speculates that “Albers’s experience as
a press photographer made him skeptical about politicians and, although not vocal about it,
he viewed the mass evacuation of American Japanese with a disdain that is smuggled into his
two-edged images” (31). In early April 1942, Albers photographed the erection of Manzanar
War Relocation Center under the surveillance of military police units. His images emphasize
the primitive living conditions, the dust and the lack of privacy and space that the internees
were confronted with when they arrived at Manzanar (fig. 14). One particularly telling image
shows evacuee children on a truck, looking through the wooden planks that seem to serve as
bars (fig. 15). The picture shows identity tags stuck to their clothing, and a seemingly detached
hand is resting on the bars. Another photo takes the viewers inside a dark barrack room and
makes them peek out like the young woman who is leaning in the door of the barrack, watching
another girl walking by (fig. 16). The caption shows Albers’s slight sarcasm: “Fugiko Koba trying
a new pair of geta, which are stilt-like sandals especially useful in dust.”
Fig. 14: Clem Albers, An Evacuee Resting on His Cot after Moving His Belongings into
this Bare Barracks Room, 1942.
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Fig. 15: Clem Albers, Trucks, 1942.
Fig. 16: Clem Albers, Yaeko
Yamashita Watches Fugiko Koba
Trying a New Pair of Geta, 1942.
The full potential of many visual narratives is only revealed after the identification and
reconstruction of specific contexts and intertextual—or intermedial—points of reference.
Such visual representations make for even more complicated yet didactically rewarding
objects of interpretation as they call for particularly close analysis and the evocation of
previously covered materials. Thus, Gretchen Van Tassel’s photograph of two women implies
contextual knowledge of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series (1943). The interpretation
of the picture may play out the ambivalence of foreground and background, between explicit
and more implicit visual messages (fig. 17). In the foreground, Tassel portrays a Nisei woman,
Yoshiye Togosaki, with her Caucasian supervisor at the UNRRA Overseas Training Center
at College Park, Maryland. They are about to leave for Italy as medical officers. Captain
Togosaki volunteered out of Manzanar internment camp to participate in the war effort for
world peace and freedom that the background poster, Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear (1943),
tries to support by advertising war bonds.
The visual repertoire of the Japanese American internment experience also includes
paintings. Thus the painter Henry Sugimoto documented the Japanese American experience
from inside the camps.13 Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1900 and immigrated to the United
States in 1919. He attended art schools in California and Paris. While interned at Jerome and
13
The Japanese American National Museum’s digital collection includes 133 paintings by Henry Sugimoto (http:
//www.janm.org/). See also Kim. Most of his paintings may also be downloaded from the Online Archive of
California. The images as well as further information on the scope and content of the collections as well as a
biography can be found at the OAC: http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf258001r8. A teaching project
on Sugimoto could be accompanied by the documentary Harsh Canvas: The Art & Life of Henry Sugimoto (2001).
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Fig. 17: Gretchen Van Tassel, Captain Yoshiye Togosaki
Talking to Major Eva Landaberg, 1945.
Rohwer during World War II, he taught art classes. Several decades later, Sugimoto completed
a series of paintings that documented and interpreted the history of Japanese immigrants
in the United States. His painting Working on Farm (1970) shows the typical experiences
of Japanese men who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century,
working as laborers on the railroads, in coal mines, and on farms. In Stop Picture Bride
(1965) he illustrates the picture bride system as well as the 1924 Exclusion Act that barred
further immigration of Japanese women. Sugimoto uses iconic figures like Uncle Sam and
the Statue of Liberty to refer to historical and political events. Sugimoto also documented
how the bombing of Pearl Harbor radically transformed the lives of Americans and especially
Japanese Americans in Untitled (News of Pearl Harbor) (1942) and Attacked Pearl Harbor
(1947). The confinement of over 1,200 male leaders of the Japanese American community
in Hawaii and the United States is depicted in My Papa (1943). Evacuation (One Dollar
for a Nice Icebox) (1942) symbolically visualizes the losses of Japanese Americans. While
interned at the Fresno Assembly Center, Sugimoto painted a mother with her three children;
the picture (1942) shows the mother nursing her youngest child while in the background a
soldier serves as a reminder of war and removal. Even a supposedly simple still life like Fresno
Assembly Center (1942) tells a complex story by means of implication and allusion: a plate
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of peaches sits beside a copy of the Fresno Grapevine (a newspaper produced by Japanese
Americans in the camp), a ration booklet, and the tag that identified the Sugimotos by their
family number, 24907. The painting When Can We Go Home? (1943) is a cubist montage that
centers around a mother and her daughter (fig. 18). A lightning bolt breaks up the image
into triangles. The left triangle contains architectural symbols of California—a skyscraper, a
train, and the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The upper right triangle is dominated by symbols of
internment—a guard tower, a camp mess hall, a sunflower—representing the ‘new’ life. The
woman and the child at the center are inspired by Sugimoto’s wife and daughter, Madeleine;
the title is a question posed by Madeleine to her parents. In the painting the mother’s arms
embrace the girl who gestures to the left of the painting toward the outside. Equally ripe,
if not overripe, with symbolical power is Sugimoto’s painting Freedom Day Came (1945): a
paper that announces “Exclusion lifted” sits on the table between the man’s crossed arms
and a map of the United States with the word “California” while a bird seemingly prefers to
remain in an open cage. Sugimoto frequently revisited the subjects which he had depicted
during his years of internment and re-envisioned his own vision of history. As he translated
many works onto larger canvases, he also inserted new details and therewith raised issues
of artistic reconstruction and revision.
Fig. 18: Henry Sugimoto, When Can We Go Home? 1943.
In addition to the visual materials mentioned so far, memorials and monuments can also
be read as visual narratives (figs. 19-21). The 1990s saw the commissioning, construction,
and dedication of at least three major memorials to the Japanese American experience.
The Japanese American Internment Memorial in San Jose, CA, was dedicated in 1994 (http:
//www.scu.edu/SCU/Programs/Diversity/memorial.html). The Go For Broke Monument was
unveiled in June 1999 as the first of its kind in the Mainland United States to commemorate
the segregated Nisei military units (http://www.goforbroke.org/). A third memorial with
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Fig. 19: The Japanese American Internment Memorial, San Jose,
photograph by Ingrid Gessner, 5 Sept. 2002.
Fig. 20: The Go For Broke Monument, Los Angeles,
photograph by Ingrid Gessner, 24 Aug. 2003.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Fig. 21: The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II,
Washington, photograph by Ingrid Gessner, 9 Sept. 2003.
a national scope was dedicated as the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During
World War II in Washington, DC, in November 2000 (http://www.njamf.com/). The
history of all three memorials and especially the story of their planning, construction, and
dedication are further examples of the importance of acts and sites of public memory
in American culture. The contestation or the disputes surrounding those memorials and
their respective incorporation and commemoration of American history links up with the
controversiesÑhistorical and contemporaryÑover other national memorials and monuments
in the United States in general and in Washington, DC, in particular.
And, of course, the original historic sites themselves continue to constitute visual narratives.
Michael Kammen counts Manzanar among the “parks with an edge to them” and defines
these parks as those sites the NPS was entrusted with during the 1990s and that “expose
episodes in the American past about which a consensus does not exist” (204). Web sites
such as the National Park Service’s page about “Manzanar National Historic Site” serve as
globally accessible virtual entry points to the specific historic localities. The historic site of
Manzanar also provided the blueprint for a 3-D Interactive Virtual Reality Installation called
“Beyond Manzanar” created by artists Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand. The installation
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has been acquired by the San Jose Museum of Art San Jose, CA, and can be downloaded
from the museum’s web site (http://mission.base.com/manzanar/). The installation, which
uses some of the WRA photographs previously discussed, widens the scope of the Japanese
American internment experience and brings a more universal message. Originally created in
response to attacks on people of Middle Eastern origin after the Oklahoma City bombing
in 1995, it also refers back to the Iranian Hostage crisis 1979-80 that was accompanied by
attacks on Iranian Americans in the US. Both events are put into context with the Japanese
American internment during World War II. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and
the ensuing ‘war on terror,’ accompanied by the curtailing of civil liberties, add yet another
dimension to the installation and its topicality for the classroom.
3 Teaching Japanese American Internment Experiences:
Possible Approaches and Practical Suggestions
During World War II Japanese Americans were interned because they were perceived as
dangerous and because popular patriotic discourse had defined them as the ‘other.’ Teaching
Japanese American internment experiences thus engages universally and didactically
relevant issues of collective stereotypification, political delegitimization, and intercultural
conflict.14 The fact that the internment continues to shape and re-shape the ways that
Japanese Americans individually and collectively understand their place in America may
stir equally broad-ranging discussions of the role and function of identity, ethnicity,
and memory in a multicultural society. Within the context of a cultural studies-oriented
approach to teaching EFL, teaching projects on Japanese American internment experiences
could well be fitted into the more specific frame of teaching American immigration and
its historical and political ramifications. Possible points of access for students are the
introductory chapters on Japanese Americans in Peter Freese’s Growing Up in a Multicultural
Society: Nine American Short Stories and Randolph F. Rau’s Great Immigrant Stories as well
as encyclopedias, history textbooks such as Boyer’s Enduring Vision or respective chapters
from Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Internet sources
allow for more project-oriented approaches and procedures. The “Immigrant Experience”
at Ellisisland.org offers a good general overview, and the web site of the exhibit “A More
Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution” at the Smithsonian Museum
of American History includes textual and visual documents of the Japanese American
immigration experience (http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/). The web sites
of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (http://www.aiisf.org/) and the Angel
Island Association (http://www.angelisland.org/) are recommendable as well.
14
For recent articles on teaching the Japanese American internment see Miksch and Ghere; Daniels,
Incarceration”; Potucek.
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Documents and issues to be considered for student projects along those lines might include:
The Congressional Report on Immigration (1892), the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between
the United States and Japan, racist land laws, the immigration stations Ellis Island and Angel
Island, the “picture bride” and “paper sons” system, and the Immigration Act of 1924 (aka
National Origins Act). Both student preparation and in-class discussions of the materials
presented might be guided by assignments of the following kind and scope:
• Outline the important events in the history of the Japanese in the United States.
• List and discuss the immigration laws enacted between 1892 and 1924. Do you think
these laws were appropriate and necessary? How did Japanese immigrants react to
restrictive and racist policies?
• Why did the Japanese immigrate to the US? On what projects did they primarily
work? Which aspects of Japanese culture helped the Japanese become successful in
America?
• Angel Island has been called the Ellis Island of the West Coast: Research and compare
the situations at the two ports of entry to the United States.
• Describe the role of the Japanese woman immigrant in the early 1900s.
Depending on the scope and magnitude of the individual presentations and the emphasis
specific teaching projects put on preparatory contextualization, more traditional
presentations and discussions can be supplemented by wall newspapers, classroom collages,
and maybe even web sites documenting the progress of the project. Ventures of that kind
make students engage more actively the issues and strictures that governed the personal
and collective lives of Japanese Americans. They increase the active involvement of students
in the process of reconstructing a historical and cultural experience at first unfamiliar and
removed.
Whatever the individual selection of specific materials will be after the contextualization,
the teaching project should keep the goals of visual literacy and media competence in clear
focus. For that reason, the first documents of the internment experience to be interpreted
in more detail should be particularly exemplary in regard to the didactic and methodological
approaches and purposes of the entire project. Possible opening discussions might engage
the following materials which can be used alternatively or in combination:
• Henry Sugimoto’s painting Going to America (1980) (fig. 22), which shows a Japanese
immigrant to America and contains a poem in Japanese by Gessho Shaku: “A man
with ambition leaves his village; / Unless he accomplishes his mission, / He will not
return. / The place where he buries his ashes / Does not have to be his homeland. /
For man, there are green mountains everywhere.”
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
• The official “Instructions to all Persons of Japanese Ancestry” of May 3, 1942, which
marks the beginning of the evacuation and internment.
• Dorothea Lange’s and Ansel Adams’s long-shot photographs of Manzanar (fig. 6, 23).
Fig. 22: Henry Sugimoto, Going to America, 1980.
Fig. 23: Dorothea Lange, Dust Storm, 1942.
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Recovering Japanese American Experiences
In addition to providing the opportunity for close, critical readings, these documents will
help students remember the larger contexts of immigrant expectations and shattered hopes
and, at the same time, turn their attention to the very sites of the internment experience.
In the further course of the teaching venture, the wealth of photographs and paintings
depicting the various facets of Japanese American life after Pearl Harbor—inside and
outside the camps—can be interpreted as documentation and interpretation of the historical
experience along the lines suggested above. The structure and composition of specific
visuals, the repertoire of internment representation, and questions of what is—explicitly or
implicitly—excluded or included will serve to stir in-class discussions. However, in the context
of foreign-language teaching and intercultural learning, special emphasis might be put on
the recovering of the personal perceptions and emotional dispositions of the individual
victims of the political action. Visualizations of the life before and after the evacuation order
should make students reimagine the various aspects of the internment experience and the
dramatic and traumatic changes it brought for Japanese Americans. Thus, Dorothea Lange’s
April 1942 photographs Lunch Hour at the Raphael Weill Public School and Flag of Allegiance
Pledge at Raphael Weill Public School (fig. 11, 12) may trigger reimaginations of the common
experience of everyday school life and friendship among children of native-born and
Japanese ancestry between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the relocation.
For example, students might assume the roles of either the Japanese child or the nativeborn American child in the pictures and, from the perspective of sixty years later, recollect
the experiences of innocent togetherness and forceful separation. Especially evocative
visuals such as Clem Albers’s photographs of a Japanese American couple saying good-bye
to their pet dog and of trucks jammed with suitcases, blankets, household equipments, tools
as well as adult and children evacuees provide further possibilities for students to relate to
the historically distanced yet universally relevant experience of deportation and separation.
Other forms of remembering and imaginatively reconstructing the historical experience may
include the writing and presenting of
• diary entries and autobiographical records of native-born Americans and Japanese
Americans personally affected by the political situation and restrictive measures;
• articles for one of the camp newspapers about life within the limits of internment,
starting from, e.g., Ansel Adams’s 1943 photograph Roy Takeno Reading Paper in
Front of Office (fig. 9);
• speeches or interviews of Japanese American internees, which exemplify individual
and collective conflicts emerging from opposing attitudes and opinions concerning
service in the US military and the implied issues of loyalty divided between
submissiveness and patriotism.
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Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
The interpretation of individual visual documents and the imaginative recollection of the
internment experience in student writings can be continued by the offerings available in a
wider pool of materials, activities, and projects. Particular curricular requirements and the
special didactic and methodological agenda of the respective course will have to provide the
guidelines for the further selection:
• ComparativeÑintermedialÑinterpretations of visual and verbal representations of
similar episodes of evacuation and camp life will make students see and understand
Japanese American experiences from various perspectives and in different media.15
• The interpretation of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “Wilshire Bus” may serve to
include more prominent issues of the literaryÑin that case, fictionalÑrepresentation
of the internment experience and especially its aftermath and long-term emotional,
destabilizing effects.
• The movie adaptation of David Guterson’s novel Snow Falling on Cedars may serve a
number of different purposes. It can be shown in its entirety as part of both the initial
contextualization and a concluding wrap-up. A course may want to stress methods
of film analysis and, in doing so, center the whole teaching project around David
Hicks’s film or focus on individual aspects such as the trial structure, the relationship
between different immigrant groups, the specific representation of nature, war, and
the relocation center, as well as the role of Ishmael Chambers as the character both
involved in the historical action and exploring it from a somewhat detached position.
All of these aspects can also be approached from an intermedial perspective, with
student groups working on comparative analyses of novel and film.
• More research-oriented assignments might ask students to gather and present
information and materials on individual artists and writers and place their works
effectively in the wider contexts of the teaching project. Presentations on Sugimoto
and Yamamoto, for example, remain more within the framework of the Japanese
American history and will help students understand individual life cycles shaped
to a considerable extent by the internment experience. Presentations on Lange and
Adams, for example, allow for critical discussions of questions of outside perspective
and commissioned documentation. Considering a wider American Studies scope,
Lange and Adams could also be presented as representatives of American landscape
photography and the documentary photography of the 1930s and 1940s.
• Advanced student research projects (such as Facharbeiten) might work in an even
more interdisciplinary context and explore, e.g., the politics of commemoration
governing the establishment of historical markers and national parks. In cooperation
with history and political science courses, the analysis of internment memorials could
be extended to a discussion of the politics of commemoration in general. Currently
15
See Hebel and Moreth-Hebel, “Vom Intertext zum Internet.”
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contested American memorials such as the recently finished World War II memorial
and the projected Ground Zero memorial, and Holocaust memorials in both the
United States and Germany—completed or planned—will provide ample opportunity
for didactically and pedagogically relevant discussions of possibly different cultures
of memory.16
The wealth of materials available and the variety of possible approaches and methods to
be employed in their presentations and exploration should keep the focus on the studentcentered recovery of Japanese American experiences in both their specific historicity and
their universally human dimension.
Works Cited
Adams, Ansel. “About this Collection.” Ansel Adams Manzanar Photos. Library of
Congress Collection. 25 Feb. 2002. 22 Oct. 2004 <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/manzhtml/
manzabt.html>.
_____. Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar
Relocation Center Inyo County, California. New York: U.S. Camera, 1944.
Akizuki, Dennis. “Internment Camp Film: From Hobby to Treasure.” The San Jose Mercury
News 18 Jan. 1997, final ed.: lead sec. 1.
Armor, John, and Peter Wright. Manzanar. New York: Random, 1988.
Boyer, Paul, et al. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. 5th ed. Boston:
Houghton, 2004.
Conscience and the Constitution. Dir. Frank Abe. Prod. Independent Television Service. Transit
Media, 2000.
Daniels, Roger. “Incarceration of the Japanese Americans: A Sixty-Year Perspective.” History
Teacher 35.3 (2002): 297-310.
_____. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1988.
_____. Concentration Camps in North America: Japanese in the U.S. and Canada during
World War II. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1993.
Days of Waiting: The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo. Dir. Steven Okazaki. Mouchette Films,
1990.
16
For a similar presentation of the issues surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, see Gessner.
169
Ingrid Gessner and Christine Moreth-Hebel
Dubel, Janice L. “Remembering a Japanese-American Concentration Camp at Manzanar
National Historic Site.” Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Ed. Paul
A. Shackel. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001. 85-102.
Freese, Peter, ed. Growing Up in a Multicultural Society: Nine American Short Stories.
MŸnchen: Langenscheidt-Longman, 1994.
Gessner, Ingrid. “Das Trauma des Vietnamkrieges: Erinnerungspolitik und Gedächtniskultur
im Spiegel des Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Praxis Geschichte 16.6 (2003): 28-34.
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars. Orlando: Harcourt, 1994.
Harsh Canvas: The Art and Life of Henry Sugimoto. Dir. John Esaki. Media Arts Center,
Japanese American National Museum, 2001.
Hebel, Udo, and Christine Moreth-Hebel. “The Pictorial Turn and the Teaching of American
Cultural Studies: Repositioning the Visual Narrative of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from
Want (1943).” Text, Kontext und Fremdsprachenunterricht. Ed. Dagmar Abendroth-Timmer,
Britta Viebrock, and Michael Wendt. Kolloquium Fremdsprachenunterricht 16. Frankfurt:
Lang, 2003. 187-201.
_____. “Vom Intertext zum Internet: Intermediale Literaturinterpretation—Carson McCullers’
The Ballad of the Sad Café und Ambrose Bierce’ ‘Chickamauga.’” Der fremdsprachliche
Unterricht: English 32.34 (1998): 42-47.
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. Dir. Rea Tajiri. Women Make Movies, 1991.
Inada, Lawson Fusao, ed. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment
Experience. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2000.
Kammen, Michael. “Commemoration and Contestation in American Culture: Historical
Perspectives.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 48.2 (2003): 185-205.
Kim, Kristine. Henry Sugimoto: Painting an American Experience. Japanese American National
Museum, Los Angeles. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2000.
Miksch, Karen L., and David Ghere. “Teaching Japanese-American Incarceration.” History
Teacher 37.2 (2004): 211-25.
Muller, Eric L. Free to Die for Their Country. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
Nakamura, Robert A. Something Strong Within. Los Angeles: Japanese American National
Museum, 1994.
Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine. New York: Anchor, 2002.
Partridge, Elizabeth, ed. Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Inst.,
1994.
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Paul, Heike. “Old, New, and ‘Neo’ Immigrant Fictions in American Literature: The Immigrant
Presence in David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars and T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain.”
Amerikastudien / American Studies 46.2 (2001): 249-65.
Potucek, Susan C. “Using Children’s Literature to Make History Come Alive: Discussing
Prejudice and the Japanese Internment.” History Teacher 28.4 (1995): 567-71.
Rabbit in the Moon. Dir. Emiko Omori. Prod. Wabi-Sabi. New Day Films, 2001.
Rau, Rudolph F., ed. Great Immigrant Stories. Stuttgart: Klett, 1999.
Robinson, Gerald H. Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar. Nevada City, CA: Mautz,
2002.
Snow Falling on Cedars. Dir. Scott Hicks. With Ethan Hawke, Youki Kudoh, and Max von
Sydow. Universal, 1999.
Takaki, Ronald. A History of Asian Americans: Strangers from a Different Shore. Boston: Little,
1998.
Tatsuno, Dave. Topaz Camp Original Movie. Delta: New View Video, 1990.
Taylor, Sandra C. Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1993.
Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1982.
Yamamoto, Hisaye. “Wilshire Bus.” Ed. Rudolph F. Rau. Great Immigrant Stories. Stuttgart:
Klett, 1999. 44-50.
Yoo, David. “Captivating Memories: Museology, Concentration Camps, and Japanese
American History.” American Quarterly 48.4 (1996): 680-99.
Web Sites Cited
Abe, Frank, and ITVS. Conscience and the Constitution. PBS. 2000. 12 Aug. 2004 <http:
//www.pbs.org/itvs/conscience/>.
Angel Island Association. 1998-2003. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.angelisland.org/>.
Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. 2003. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.aiisf.org/>.
Exploring the Japanese American Internment through Film & the Internet. National
Asian American Telecommunications Association. 2002. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://
www.jainternment.org/>.
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Fowler, Dave. “Dorothea Lange and the Relocation of the Japanese.” The Virtual Museum
of the City of San Francisco. 10 May 1998. 12. Aug. 2004 <http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/
lange.html>.
The Go For Broke Educational Foundation. 2004. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.goforbroke.org/>.
Japanese American National Museum. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.janm.org/>.
“The Immigrant Experience.” The Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. 2000. 12 Aug.
2004 <http://www.ellisisland.org/>.
Kimura, Erin. “Japanese American Internment Memorial” Asian Americans Santa Clara Valley.
SCU Diversity home page. 27 June 2004 <http://www.scu.edu/SCU/Programs/Diversity/
memorial.html>.
“A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution.” Smithsonian
Institution. National Museum of American History. Behring Center. 1990-2001. 12 Aug. 2004
<http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/>.
Mudrock, Theresa, ed. “Camp Harmony Exhibit.” Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project.
U of Washington. 1999-2004. 25 May 2004. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.lib.washington.edu/
exhibits/harmony/>.
National Japanese American Memorial Foundation. 1 Aug. 2003. 12 Aug. 2004 <http:
//www.njamf.com/>.
Spicer, Edward Holland. “Map of Western United States Showing Relocation and Assembly
Centers.” Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers. Tucson: U of
Arizona P, 1969: 67. War Relocation Authority Camps in Arizona, 1942-1946. Ed. Roger Myers.
U of Arizona Library’s Special Collections. 27 May 2004 <http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/
wracamps/map.html>.
“‘Suffering Under a Great Injustice’: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American
Internment at Manzanar.” Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs Division. 20 Feb. 2002.
12 Aug. 2004 <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aamhtml/aamhome.html>.
“Sugimoto (Henry) Collection 1928-1990.” Japanese American National Museum. ID 92.97.
The Online Archive of California. 2004. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/
ark:/13030/tf258001r8>.
Thiel, Tamiko, and Zara Houshmand. Beyond Manzanar. 1998-2002. 12 Aug. 2004 <http:
//mission.base.com/manzanar/>.
“War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and
Resettlement.” The Bancroft Library. U of California, Berkeley. Online Archive of California.
2004. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf596nb4h0>.
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“Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters during World War
IIÑDorothea Lange.” Library of Congress. 23 June 2004. 12 Aug. 2004 <http://www.loc.gov/
exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html>.
Illustrations
Fig. 1: Film still from Snow Falling on Cedars. Dir. Scott Hicks. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Youki
Kudoh, and Max von Sydow. Universal, 1999.
Fig. 2: Bainbridge Island Evacuees Boarding Ferry under Army Guard. 1942. Seattle PostIntelligencer Collection. Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, Washington,
DC [PI-28053]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/harmony/
Photo/m28053.gif>.
Fig. 3: Lange, Dorothea. Hayward, Calif.—Grandfather and Grandchildren Awaiting
Evacuation Bus. 1942. Online Archive of California. War Relocation Authority
Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement. Vol. 59. Sec.
G [WRA C-160]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2m3nb0sm/>;
National Archives at College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation
Authority, 1941-1947.
Fig. 4: Lange, Dorothea. A Grandfather Awaits Evacuation Bus. 1942. National Archives at
College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation Authority, 19411947 [537566]. 4 July 2004 <http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/digital_detail.jsp?&p
g=13&rn=13&tn=537566&st=b&rp=details&nh=30>.
Fig. 5: Adams, Ansel. Entrance to Manzanar. 1943. Library of Congress. Prints &
Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00286 DLC]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http://
hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00286>.
Fig. 6: Adams, Ansel. Manzanar Relocation Center from Tower. 1943. Library of Congress.
Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00275 DLC]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http:
//hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00275>.
Fig. 7: Adams, Ansel. View South from Manzanar to Alabama Hills. 1943. Library of
Congress. Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00279 DLC]. 5 Sept. 2004
<http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00279>.
Fig. 8: Adams, Ansel. Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi, Mother Frances Yokoyama, Baby Fukomoto.
1943. Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00343
DLC]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00343>.
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Fig. 9: Adams, Ansel. Roy Takeno Reading Paper in Front of Office. 1943. Library of
Congress. Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00407]. 5 Sept. 2004
<http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00407>.
Fig. 10: Adams, Ansel. Baseball Game. 1943. Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs
Division [LC-DIG-ppprs-00369 DLC]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/
ppprs.00369>.
Fig. 11: Lange, Dorothea. Lunch Hour at the Raphael Weill Public School. 1942. National
Archives at College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation
Authority, 1941-1947 [536049]. 4 July 2004 <http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/
digital_detail.jsp?&pg=21&rn=21&tn=536049&st=b&rp=details&nh=100>.
Fig. 12: Lange, Dorothea. Flag of Allegiance Pledge at Raphael Weill Public School. 1942.
National Archives at College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation
Authority, 1941-1947 [536053]. 4 July 2004 <http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/
digital_detail.jsp?&pg=1&rn=1&tn=536053&st=b&rp=details&nh=16>.
Fig. 13: Couple Saying Good-bye to Their Dog, Bainbridge Island. The Japanese American
Archival Collection (JAAC), California State U, Sacramento. 2003. 5 Sept. 2004
<http://library.csus.edu/collections/jaac/>.
Fig. 14: Albers, Clem. An Evacuee Resting on His Cot after Moving His Belongings into this
Bare Barracks Room. 1942. National Archives at College Park. Record Group 210:
Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941-1947 [536861]. 4 July 2004 <http:
//arcweb.archives.gov/arc/digital_detail.jsp?&pg=33&rn=33&tn=536861&st=b
&rp=details&nh=100>.
Fig. 15: Albers, Clem. Trucks. 1942. National Archives at College Park. Record Group 210:
Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941-1947 [536782]. 4 July 2004 <http:
//arcweb.archives.gov/arc/digital_detail.jsp?&pg=94&rn=94&tn=536782&st=b
&rp=details&nh=100>.
Fig. 16: Albers, Clem. Yaeko Yamashita Watches Fugiko Koba Trying a New Pair of Geta. 1942.
National Archives at College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation
Authority, 1941-1947 [536763]. 4 July 2004 <http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/
digital_detail.jsp?&pg=41&rn=41&tn=536763&st=b&rp=details&nh=79>.
Fig. 17: Van Tassel, Gretchen. Captain Yoshiye Togosaki Talking to Major Eva Landaberg.
1945. Online Archive of California. War Relocation Authority Photographs of
Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement. Vol. 40. Sec. E [WRA G-816].
5 Sept. 2004 <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft467nb279/>; National Archives at
College Park. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation Authority, 19411947.
174
Recovering Japanese American Experiences
Fig. 18: Sugimoto, Henry. When Can We Go Home? 1943. Henry Sugimoto Collection
1928-1990. Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Madeleine
Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa. Online Archive of California [92.97.3]. 5 Sept. 2004
<http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf2x0n99bc/>.
Fig. 19: The Japanese American Internment Memorial, San Jose. Photograph by Ingrid
Gessner. 5 Sept. 2002.
Fig. 20: The Go For Broke Monument, Los Angeles. Photograph by Ingrid Gessner. 24 Aug.
2003.
Fig. 21: The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II, Washington.
Photograph by Ingrid Gessner. 9 Sept. 2003.
Fig. 22: Sugimoto, Henry. Going to America. 1980. Henry Sugimoto Collection 1928-1990.
Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto
and Naomi Tagawa. Online Archive of California [92.97.105]. 5 Sept. 2004 <http:
//ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf9j49p075/>.
Fig. 23: Lange, Dorothea. Dust Storm. 1942. National Archives at College Park. Record
Group 210: Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941-1947. 4 July 2004
<http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/digital_detail.jsp?&pg=24&rn=24&tn=539961
&st=b&rp=details&nh=41>.
175