Transfigured Patterns: Contesting Memories at the Manzanar National Historic Site

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT T. HAYASHI
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Legislative Process ◽  
United States Congress ◽  
World War ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
Park Service ◽  
A Site

On February 18, 1992 the United States Congress passed legislation establishing the Man-zanar National Historic Site, an act that would turn the neglected site of a former American concentration camp for Japanese Americans into a site of national remembrance for all Americans. This article discusses the legislative process involving Manzanar's designation as a National Historic Site and how it reveals the ongoing tendency to equate American Nikkei history with only the World War II period. The creation and subsequent interpretation of the site also highlighted the complications of identifying a place with only one layer of its history. The recognition and interpretation of Manzanar threatened the maintenance of local histories and led to contestations between California residents, Japanese Americans, the National Park Service, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

I am Chinese: The Politics of Chinese American Lapel Buttons in Los Angeles during World War II

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Sociological Studies

Abstract This article examines the history of lapel buttons and stickers used by Chinese Americans to identify their ethnicity during World War II. Most of these buttons and stickers were produced by Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs) immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor to differentiate their members from Japanese Americans. In examining this history, this article focuses in particular on Los Angeles, the city with the largest Japanese American population on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, U.S.-born Chinese American and Japanese American youth attended many of the same schools and often formed close friendships with one another. As a result, the questions that the buttons and stickers posed for this generation of Chinese American youth were particularly fraught. Drawing on oral history interviews, sociological studies of the Southern California Chinese American community from the period, and archival newspaper reportage, this article approaches these lapel pins and stickers as items of cultural contestation through which a variety of historical actors—from Chinese consular representatives, to immigrant leaders in the CCBAs, to Chinese American youth—negotiated questions of ethnic and national identity after the U.S. entry into World War II. I argue that rather than reflecting the complex ways that most Chinese American youth understood their own identity, the buttons and stickers represented the official viewpoints of the Chinese consulates in the United States and their allies in the nation’s CCBAs.

Ballad for Incarcerated Americans: Second Generation Japanese American Musicking in World War II Camps

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTA ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
American Popular Music

AbstractDuring World War II, the United States government imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens, half of whom were children. Through ethnographic interviews I explore how fragile youthful memories, trauma, and the soundscape of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Incarceration Camps shaped the artistic trajectories of three such former “enemy alien” youth: two pianists and a koto player. Counterintuitively, Japanese traditional arts flourished in the hostile environment of dislocation through the high number ofnisei(second generation) participants, who later contributed to increasing transculturalism in American music following resettlement out of camp. Synthesizing Japanese and Euro-American classical music, white American popular music, and African American jazz, manyniseiparadoxically asserted their dual cultural commitment to both traditional Japanese and home front patriotic American principles. A performance of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's patriotic cantata,Ballad for Americans(1939), by the high school choir at Manzanar Incarceration Camp demonstrates the hybridity of these Japanese American cultural practices. Marked by Popular Front ideals,Ballad for Americansallowedniseito construct identities through a complicated mixture of ethnic pride, chauvinistic white Americanism allied with Bing Crosby's recordings of theBallad, and affiliation with black racial struggle through Paul Robeson's iconicBalladperformances.

Japanese Commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith L. Camacho
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mariana Islands ◽  
World War ◽  
War Memories ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site

This chapter examines the creation and contestation of Japanese commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands. As an archipelago colonized by Japan and the United States, the Mariana Islands have become a site through which war memories have developed in distinct and shared ways. With respect to Japanese commemorations, the analysis demonstrates why and how they inform and are informed by Chamorro and American remembrances of the war in the Mariana Islands. By analyzing government, media, and tourist accounts of the war from the 1960s to the present, I thus show how we can gain an understanding and appreciation for the complex ways by which Japanese of various generations reckon with a violent past.

Bonds and Barriers

2021 ◽  
pp. 260-294
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Enlisted Personnel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.

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.

Displaced Smiles: Photography and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 519-537
Author(s):  
Jasmine Alinder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Photographic Record ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
Psychological Suffering ◽  
Oral Testimony

Historical texts, oral testimony, and scholarship document vividly the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — the loss of private property and personal belongings, and the emotional and psychological suffering, that the imprisonment caused. Yet there is very little visual evidence in the photographic record of incarceration that would attest overtly to these injustices. A photograph on April 1, 1942, by Clem Albers, a photographer for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), depicts three well-dressed young women who have just boarded a train in Los Angeles, which will take them to a so-called assembly center (Figure l). The photograph would appear at first glance to tell a very different story. The women smile and extend their arms out of a raised train window to wave goodbye, as if they are embarking on a vacation or some other pleasant excursion. The Albers photograph is not an exception to the photographic record of incarceration. In the thousands of photographs made of the incarceration process by government photographers, independent documentarians, and “internees,” it is much more difficult to find photographs that portray suffering than it is to find images of smiling prisoners.Not surprisingly, these photographs of smiling Japanese Americans are unsettling for those scholars, curators, and activists who have worked to expose the injustices of the wartime imprisonment. The smiles are charged for several reasons: They appear to belie the injustice of incarceration and the suffering it caused, they are reminiscent of the ugly stereotype of the grinning Oriental, and they suggest that those portrayed were entirely compliant with the government's racist agenda.

American Buddhism during World War II Imprisonment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michihiro Ama
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
American Buddhism

American Buddhism during World War II imprisonment refers to the Japanese American Buddhist experience between 1942 and 1945 when persons of Japanese ancestry, commonly known as Nikkei Amerikajin, were imprisoned. A discussion of the Nikkei Buddhist experience includes the experiences of Euro-American convert Buddhists who supported them during the imprisonment period. Immediately after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested and interned Japanese Buddhist priests and other leaders of Japanese communities in the United States. In March 1942, the Western Defense Command designated the three West Coast states (Washington, Oregon, and California) and Arizona as Military Area No. 1, from which all persons of Japanese descent, and alien Germans and Italians, were forcefully removed. Following Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US government removed approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans from the aforementioned military zone and incarcerated them in relocation centers built throughout the continental United States. During that time, the Nikkei community consisted primarily of the Issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants, and the Nisei, their American-born children. As Tetsuden Kashima defines, the word “internment” refers to the imprisonment of enemy aliens, such as the Issei Japanese nationals, by the Department of Justice and the US Army, while the term “incarceration” refers to the confinement of the Nikkei, including a great number of the Nisei American citizens, by the War Relocation Authority. The word “imprisonment” designates the entire process consisting of internment and incarceration. The study of American Buddhism during World War II is still in its early stages. Finding records and documents related to this subject from the large collections on Japanese American imprisonment is not an easy task. While the National Archives in Washington, DC, maintains the majority of primary sources dealing with Japanese American relocation and incarceration, other institutions, such as the Japanese American National Museum, the University of California-Los Angeles, and museums built around the sites of internment camps, also preserve records. Some of the primary sources are written in Japanese and are located in Japan, which is another stumbling block for researchers who do not read Japanese. Duncan R. Williams’s forthcoming book, American Sutra: Buddhism and the World War II Japanese American Experience, however, will change the current state of scholarship on Japanese American Buddhism during World War II. The forceful relocation of Japanese American Buddhists served to weaken their long-standing efforts to make their ethno-religious practices accepted by America’s general public. Mass incarceration, however, forced the Japanese American Buddhists to further Americanize their religion, generated a set of new Buddhist practices, and gave them opportunities to reflect on their national identities. Buddhist faith and cultural practices associated with Japanese Buddhism contributed to ethnic solidarity, even though the Japanese American community was divided over the issue of US patriotism. During the postwar period, Japanese American Buddhists initiated a campaign to improve their image in the United States and to honor the Nisei Buddhist soldiers who fought during World War II. The formation of American Buddhism was closely connected to the development of US political ideology.

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.

Rebuilding Japantown

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Oda
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Trade Center

This article follows the transpacific process of race-making and urban redevelopment in the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in San Francisco. Japanese Americans carved out spaces for themselves in the Center’s development by mediating between city representatives and Japanese interests and culture. Their role built on their professional skills as well as contemporary racial thinking about Japanese Americans and U.S. expansionism in the Pacific. As the United States sought out connections with a nation understood as particularly alien, Japanese Americans rearticulated contemporary perceptions of their foreignness toward their inclusion. This story helps us better understand how Japanese Americans moved from “alien citizens” through World War II to “success stories” just decades later, as well as some of the connections of the postwar Pacific world.

scholarly journals History, Rats, Fleas, and Opossums. II. The Decline and Resurgence of Flea-Borne Typhus in the United States, 1945–2019

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Anstead
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
The United States ◽  
Didelphis Virginiana ◽  
World War ◽  
Cat Flea ◽  
Environmental Sanitation

Flea-borne typhus, due to Rickettsia typhi and R. felis, is an infection causing fever, headache, rash, and diverse organ manifestations that can result in critical illness or death. This is the second part of a two-part series describing the rise, decline, and resurgence of flea-borne typhus (FBT) in the United States over the last century. These studies illustrate the influence of historical events, social conditions, technology, and public health interventions on the prevalence of a vector-borne disease. Flea-borne typhus was an emerging disease, primarily in the Southern USA and California, from 1910 to 1945. The primary reservoirs in this period were the rats Rattus norvegicus and Ra. rattus and the main vector was the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis). The period 1930 to 1945 saw a dramatic rise in the number of reported cases. This was due to conditions favorable to the proliferation of rodents and their fleas during the Depression and World War II years, including: dilapidated, overcrowded housing; poor environmental sanitation; and the difficulty of importing insecticides and rodenticides during wartime. About 42,000 cases were reported between 1931–1946, and the actual number of cases may have been three-fold higher. The number of annual cases of FBT peaked in 1944 at 5401 cases. American involvement in World War II, in the short term, further perpetuated the epidemic of FBT by the increased production of food crops in the American South and by promoting crowded and unsanitary conditions in the Southern cities. However, ultimately, World War II proved to be a powerful catalyst in the control of FBT by improving standards of living and providing the tools for typhus control, such as synthetic insecticides and novel rodenticides. A vigorous program for the control of FBT was conducted by the US Public Health Service from 1945 to 1952, using insecticides, rodenticides, and environmental sanitation and remediation. Government programs and relative economic prosperity in the South also resulted in slum clearance and improved housing, which reduced rodent harborage. By 1956, the number of cases of FBT in the United States had dropped dramatically to only 98. Federally funded projects for rat control continued until the mid-1980s. Effective antibiotics for FBT, such as the tetracyclines, came into clinical practice in the late 1940s. The first diagnostic test for FBT, the Weil-Felix test, was found to have inadequate sensitivity and specificity and was replaced by complement fixation in the 1940s and the indirect fluorescent antibody test in the 1980s. A second organism causing FBT, R. felis, was discovered in 1990. Flea-borne typhus persists in the United States, primarily in South and Central Texas, the Los Angeles area, and Hawaii. In the former two areas, the opossum (Didelphis virginiana) and cats have replaced rats as the primary reservoirs, with the cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) now as the most important vector. In Hawaii, 73% of cases occur in Maui County because it has lower rainfall than other areas. Despite great successes against FBT in the post-World War II era, it has proved difficult to eliminate because it is now associated with our companion animals, stray pets, opossums, and the cat flea, an abundant and non-selective vector. In the new millennium, cases of FBT are increasing in Texas and California. In 2018–2019, Los Angeles County experienced a resurgence of FBT, with rats as the reservoir.

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