Bridge of Understanding, Bridge of Straw

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-231
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Fishing Boat ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Relocation Centers ◽  
The U.S

Joseph Kurihara was a son of immigrants, a Japanese American who did everything he could to become a bridge of understanding. Ultimately, however, he came to believe that the bridge that he had built was made of straw.How did he come to this conclusion? When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Kurihara immediately volunteered his services for the war effort. He volunteered a number of times but to no avail. Instead, he was rejected and—like other Japanese Americans and their parents—he was forced to leave his home and job, and move to what the U.S. government first called “concentration camps” and later, euphemistically, “relocation centers.” What Kurihara learned later, he said, was that his “Japanese features” and his job as a fishing-boat navigator made him suspect in the eyes of the U. S. government, and as a result FBI agents had been tailing him since the Pearl Harbor attack. He could accept these actions as government mistakes.

“Frank Knox’s Fifth Column in Hawai’i: The U.S. Navy, the Japanese, and the Pearl Harbor Attack”

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-168
Author(s):  
Brian Masaru Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Advocate General ◽  
Military Installations ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Intelligence Officer

Secretary of Navy Frank Knox declared a week after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that fifth columnist activities were partly responsible for the success of Imperial Japanese forces. Who and what he meant when he used the phrase “fifth columnist activities” is subject to debate. Most assume he was referring to all Japanese Americans or Japanese nationals residing in Hawai’i. But this essay, based on Knox’s personal correspondence, supplemented with the Pearl Harbor Attack hearings’ published reports, Judge Advocate General records, and the 14th Naval District Intelligence Officer reports, finds that Knox was referring to the Japanese Consul-General Office and a small handful of Japanese American assistants who voluntarily carried out the task of keeping the U.S. Fleet and military installations under surveillance, thereby contributing to the success of the Imperial Japanese attack.

Psychology, Context, and the Risk of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Psychological Conditions ◽  
Predisposing Conditions

Chapter 11 compares the attitudes of some Americans toward Japanese and Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor with German attitudes toward Jews. Theories of genocide generally posit predisposing psychological conditions and then examine instances of genocide to confirm whether or not those predisposing conditions were present. The case of the Japanese American confinements offers an opportunity to examine a case in which at least some of the suspected predisposing conditions were present but genocide did not follow. This suggests that there were significant differences between America and Germany in the intensity and penetration of anti-Japanese and anti-Semitic attitudes, respectively, and also that important legal and political safeguards against minority mistreatment that were compromised in Germany remained at least partially intact in the United States.

In Defense of Justice

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

“The Injustice of Internment”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, liberal Protestants leveraged their influence among officials in the War Relocation Authority to launch their most powerful attack to date on anti-Japanese racial discrimination. Through the Committee on National Security and Fair Play, they challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 and strategized methods to ensure the quick release of Japanese Americans held without trial. With the help of allies such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Council on Race Relations, and the Council on Civic Unity, liberal Protestants developed plans to ensure the long-term protection of Japanese American civil liberties in the decades following the war.

The National Park Service: Groveling Sycophant or Social Conscience: Telling the Story of Mountains, Valley, and Barbed Wire at Manzanar National Historic Site

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANK HAYS
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Park ◽  
National Park Service ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
Social Conscience ◽  
Park Service ◽  
Relocation Centers ◽  
The Many

Manzanar National Historic Site was established to protect and interpret the resources associated with the internment of Japanese Americans at one often War Relocation Centers during World War II. One of the many challenges facing the National Park Service (NPS) at Manzanar is determining how to tell the story of the internment. Opinions about the role of the NPS in managing and interpreting the site range from suggestions that the NPS needs to serve as the social conscience of the nation to cautions that the NPS not become a ““groveling sycophant”” to the Japanese American community. To address this issue, the park sought diverse forums to engage the public in the management of the site. This paper details how public engagement has affected a number of management decisions.

Removal and Displacement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resource ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Economic Losses ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
High Demand ◽  
Farm Security Administration ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Intimate Knowledge

This chapter examines how Japanese Americans’ involvement in natural resource industries (farming and fisheries) shaped the campaign for their removal from the Pacific Coast in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Their intimate knowledge of these lands and waters grounded arguments to both expel and keep them. This chapter also explores Farm Security Administration (FSA) efforts to keep Japanese American land in production. Fearing a decline in crop output at a time when certain foodstuffs were in high demand, FSA officials sought substitute operators to cultivate farms in Japanese Americans’ absence. These negotiations often led to significant economic losses for detainees.

Japanese Americans in Academia and Political Discourse in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Okiyoshi Takeda
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The U.S

I am a political scientist specializing in Asian American politics. Although I earned my PhD in the United States, my initial interest was in the U.S. Congress and not in Japanese American studies or Asian American studies. What shifted my interest toward Asian American studies was that I had witnessed firsthand a campus sit-in at the Princeton University president’s office, where students were fighting for the establishment of an Asian American studies program. Witnessing such an incident, I realized that Asian Americans were an understudied topic in the field of political science. There is also a tendency for scholars from Japan to focus exclusively on Japanese Americans and to disregard other Asian American ethnic groups. Since I did not start out my study on Asian Americans in a graduate school in Japan with an interest in Japanese Americans, I have been able to avoid taking that kind of path....

Refugees from Abroad and at Home

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Issue ◽  
Internal Migrants ◽  
Refugee Problem

This chapter examines the work of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the wake of World War II. Even before the United States officially entered the war, waves of refugees from the European conflict pushed the AFSC to act, and it established hostels to help the newcomers adjust to their new lives in America. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, AFSC activists found themselves faced with a second refugee problem—this time internal migrants as Japanese Americans incarcerated in American concentration camps looked to resettle in the Midwest and East. Again reflecting the AFSC's understanding of race as a multifaceted, global issue, its efforts to create hostels to help both European and Japanese American refugees reveal the continued evolution of Friendly ideas about race, ethnicity, and assimilation in the United States as Quakers increasingly responded to these wartime crises with less direct solutions aimed at overcoming job and housing discrimination.

scholarly journals The Scientists and the Shrub

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan van Harmelen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
World War ◽  
Private Industry ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Government Bureaucracy ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Military

During World War II, Japanese American scientists and engineers imprisoned at the Manzanar War Relocation camp were engaged in an experimental project to grow guayule and process it into latex, a needed war materiel. In this way, they contributed to the American war effort, despite their race-based incarceration. The guayule research project undermines the rationale for the wartime confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans. The laboratory at Manzanar partnered with universities, private industry, and government bureaucracy as an early instance of the military-industrial complex.

Sounds, Images, Politics and Place

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 57-62
Author(s):  
Richard Lerman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Water Use ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The U.S

The author discusses the concepts he has developed while gathering sound(s) and images for projects engaging politics and place, often at sites where human rights abuses have taken place. These works include recordings made at several Japanese-American and Aleut internment sites and at Nazi concentration camps, as well as borderlands works, environmental works on water use in the U.S. Southwest, and works addressing climate change in the Arctic.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document