Japanese American internment during World War II and its lasting impact

Immigrants have always offered a colorful perspective of the lands they choose to settle. As outsiders they can view customs and traditions that the natural born citizen simply take to be a standard practice, in most if not all places. Yet, immigrants make it clear that the world is not so similar and something even as simple as the way a person holds his or her head can be different in nearly every culture. It is with this special perspective that the voices of immigrants color the world in which they live. Yet, as outsiders their perspective or reality rarely achieved appreciation form those who fear the unknown. It is for this reason that the immigrant is often the victim of oppression and subjugation that further colors their view of their chosen culture and can also starkly affect their worldview for the rest of their lives.

One, among many outstanding examples of just such a cultural victimization is that of the Japanese Internment marking the beginning of the American entry into WWII, with the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Okihiro 225) Within just a few short months of the attach plans and actions were laid in place that "evacuated" more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and incarcerated them in several "internment" camps dotted along the west coast of the country.

The practice of detaining persons considered dangerous during a war is often called internment, even though they may not be enemy nationals. In World War II the United States detained persons of Japanese ancestry and German or Italian citizenship in relocation centers." ("Internment ")

The use of the term, internment, would be seen by some to be a softening of the reality of the situation. Though without the recorded intention of genocide, the internment camps were really more like concentration camps. The conditions were deplorable and resources and services were scarce.

A flimsy structures of two-by-fours covered with tar paper nailed to joists with wood strips. Small windows let light into barren rooms barely ten by twenty feet, but they also let in the cold and heat and the ever present dust and sand. Row upon row of those barracks, spare and drab, extended in straight lines that converged where the earth met the sky.

Okihiro 92)

There was little to do and even less information. Prisoners had no idea when or if they would be allowed to return to a home they were not sure they wanted to return to.

These feelings were so strong and so encompassing with this constant foreign environmental reminder of the destitution they had been forced into that the legacy is still felt today.

The sky turned steel grey," wrote artist Estelle Ishigo of the winter of 1942 in Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. "Icy winds blew long white drifts of clouds over the roofs. Our clothes were becoming far too thin. Shabby, shivering people stood in line for G.I. socks, underwear, coats and wool pants.... We looked beyond the mountain into the cold, threatening sky and gazed with longing at the distant horizon -- this country, our home, our refuge, our sanctuary now seemed far away."

Okihiro 93)

Without committing any crime the sense of injustice these people had must have outweighed their understanding. "As we stood in what seemed a breadline for the destitute, I felt degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed with a longing for home."

Okihiro 93)

There was no remittance given to any Japanese-American, and ethnicity was the only real determinant factor for incarceration within a camp. Even people of significant social importance and wealth, who were second and even third generation Japanese-Americans were evacuated, as can be attested to by the incarceration and internment of the well-known and well respected Stanford professor, Yamato Ichihashi.

Yamato Ichihashi in 1941, when the United States entered the war in the Pacific, was one of the best-known, certainly one of the most eminent, Japanese in the country. At a time when the Japanese-American population was overwhelmingly rural, with a minuscule business and professional class, Ichihashi was a distinguished 64-year-old professor of history at Stanford University who had over 30 years built an international reputation as an authority on Japanese history and United StatesEast Asian relations. He had published respected books and scores of articles and reviews about Japan and East Asian security issues, written both in English and in Japanese.

Hatamiya 25)

Property was certainly not all that was lost as many lost their dignity and self-value. The psychological effects of being victimized by an entity which they had trusted to protect them and serve their interest as productive members of their society.

Besides financial losses, enormous psychological damage was wrought. As families fell apart, individuals lost their self-esteem and pride -- two characteristics important in Japanese culture. But most significantly, Japanese-Americans had suffered the indignity of being falsely imprisoned by their own government. They had been innocent victims in a racist episode that betrayed the very principles on which the United States was founded.

(Hatamiya 25)

One of the most lasting psychological effects of the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in the prison camps is the idea that even in a nation founded on principles of tolerance people can be imprisoned and victimized without cause or reason. This was surely proof to many that this could happen to anyone at any time. Japanese-Americans were particularly confused by the fact that they were interned while other members of the American population, whose nations of origin were also fighting against the allies. This practice and standard made the internment seem even more arbitrary and unfair. The government even went so far as to discharge Japanese-Americans from military service. This situation created extreme strain on the psyches of those who were imprisoned, purely because of what race they were.

One extremely bitter such ex-serviceman stated to me that he told his commanding officer, "I know why I'm discharged. it's because I'm a Jap. Well, why don't you discharge the Germans and Italians, too?..."

These resentful, discharged soldiers in voicing their resentments undoubtedly helped crystallize the belief among a great many of the other camp residents that they would never again be acceptable to our Government or our people.

(Collins 162)

These facts coupled with many others led to an extreme sense of resignation and anger toward the government and a lasting level of distrust for its authority, among nearly all those detained.

Collins 162) This made returning to private life extremely difficult and also left many feeling incapable of making any sort of sense of their experience. Silence seemed to be the order of the day. Even those with ability and desire were left mute by their experiences for many years.

Soon after he returned to his home on the Stanford campus in April 1945, after having been forced to spend three years in federal relocation centers, Yamato Ichihashi informed an old friend who, like himself, was a specialist in international relations, that he hoped "to write a history of the evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast states." He said he planned to draw from his own personal experiences to tell the story. 1 Ichihashi had gathered extensive research materials and recorded what had happened to him in detail from the moment of his ordered "evacuation" 2 from the Stanford area in the spring of 1942 to his return three years later. For some reason, however, Ichihashi never completed his project on relocation, and his accumulated research materials and draft essays languished in his files. Perhaps he was too embittered by his wartime experiences, public and personal, to reopen them through his writing; or perhaps those arduous years had simply worn him down and made him unable to concentrate on sustained scholarly work. (Chang 11-12)

This is not an unusual situation, as many Japanese-Americans were and even still are reluctant to discuss their experiences. This made the legal attempt to gain reparation for those who were imprisoned and lost so much very difficult. The acceptance of a plan for reparation was not achieved until 1988, and the completion of a memorial in honor of those Japanese-Americans who served in the armed forced and those who were interned in the camps during World War II was not completed until late in the year 2000.

Mizejewski 1)

The world of the Japanese in America had inextricably changed and the reality of their lives would never be the same. Having no material or intellectual connection remaining in their nation of origin, some even being not immigrants but second and third generation Japanese-Americans they were still considered a threat to national security and worthy of containment. Public challenges to the plan existed but where not heeded and many majority Americans and even those of German or Italian decent watched quietly as the Japanese-Americans were rounded up with little or no notice and shipped off to places unknown. The legacy of this situation is often shadowed by the desire for Americans to believe the ideology of the nation as tolerant and accepting of racial diversity, regardless of its reality in practice. Reparation and monuments to imprisoned Japanese-Americans are only a beginning in the attempt to realize ideology.