scholarly journals Process Drama in the Japanese University Classroom: Phase Three, The Homelessness Project

2016 ◽  
Vol X (1) ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Eucharia Donnery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Role Play ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Process Drama ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Communication Course ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The Social ◽  
Guest Lecturer

The purpose of this paper is to describe the third phase of a process drama project, which focused thematically on the social issue of homelessness. Two classes of the elective English Communication course took part in this project twice weekly for ten weeks, in which the students examined homelessness from the perspectives of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The goal of the project was for students to develop an understanding of homelessness, while simultaneously losing awareness of English as a dreaded examination subject, and using the target language as a viable communicative tool instead. The techniques used in this project were manifold: tableau, family role-play, class role-play, writing-in-role, reaction-writing, research online in both Japanese and English to examine the nature of propaganda, online class discussions, as well as a guest lecturer session with a refugee speaker1. The trajectory of this discussion moves along a traditional Japanese Noh theater three-part narrative arc, called Jo-Ha-Kyu , “Enticement・Crux・Consolidation”.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

Japanese Americans at Dachau: Intercultural Exchange in the US Tour of The Gate of Heaven

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-212
Author(s):  
Emily Colborn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Globe Theatre

The Gate of Heaven, which toured the United States for two years marking the 50th anniversary of the Dachau concentration camp liberation and commemorating the heroism of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II, imagines the friendship between a Japanese-American veteran and the Holocaust survivor he saves at the gates of Dachau in 1945. While the playwright-performers set out simply to celebrate their family histories – Lane Nishikawa is a third-generation Japanese American and Victor Talmadge lost many relatives in the Holocaust – the commemorative politics they encountered at each stop on the tour transformed the meaning of their play. A reconstruction of the social framework the play encountered at four venues, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Old Globe Theatre in southern California, demonstrates the malleable nature of race relations in America and the instability of Holocaust representation.

Blackface Behind Barbed Wire: Gender and Racial Triangulation in the Japanese American Internment Camps

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Roxworthy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Us History ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
Racial Impersonation ◽  
Blackface Performance

In a dark footnote to a dark chapter in US history, Japanese Americans interned by their own government during World War II performed in blackface behind barbed wire. Exploring blackface performance in the camps raises questions regarding the potential resistance of racial impersonation and blackface's potential for triangulating race.

Asian Exclusion and Enforced Leisure

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 144-161
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Children ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Asian People ◽  
Immigration Station

Despite their differences, Chinese and Japanese migrants and their American children occupied a shared location in an American racial framework that placed them outside the possibility of inclusion through cultural and political assimilation, regardless of long residence or native birth. The detention of Chinese Americans at the Pacific border and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were physical manifestations of exclusion. Even as social scientists challenged earlier fears about cultural and biological blending, most Americans consistently held Asian people apart as inherently foreign and often threatening. Detention as a measure of national defense, enacted at Angel Island Immigration Station and in wartime incarceration (or “internment”) camps, separated detainees from the norms of work, family, and sociability. Even as the United States screened working-class immigrants for their risk of becoming “public charges,” the government enforced leisure on those incarcerated. Unchosen leisure thus became a problem to be solved.

scholarly journals Comics in Action: A Reflection of the Dominant Narrative in World War II

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (Spring 2019) ◽  
Author(s):  
Spencer Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Times ◽  
The U.S

In this paper, I argue that the propagandized use of comic books during World War II promoted views among Americans which contributed to antipathy towards Americans of Japanese and German descent. More generally, the goal of the essay is to highlight the importance of comic books as a reflection of the times – they simultaneously influence and are influenced by society’s dominant ideas – and promote the further study of such material. I examine the text and art from three comic book covers dated from 1942-1943. An analysis of these selections suggests that comic books depicted Axis soldiers as savage and animalistic, while Americans are portrayed as trustworthy heroes with whom the reader may easily identify. These conclusions are confirmed by various government sources, which claimed to have been teaching citizens about the war and the enemy, which in reality meant teaching citizens how to hate the enemy. Even more disturbing, comic books were read primarily by children, so these hateful ideas were spread to the most impressionable of all Americans. These very depictions, I argue, reflected and contributed to the general American sentiment towards the war, specifically in relation to the treatment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps and the use of atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Further, the proliferation of comic books and the sole fact that they were used as a propaganda arm by the U.S. Government demonstrates their importance during the period and suggests that they be studied more to further understand their importance to American society.

Power to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacie M Williams ◽  
Jarrett Drake
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Grassroots Organizations ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Community Archives ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Community Archive

Archivists have long recognized the inherent historical and social mandate in preserving stories of those who endured violence at the hands of the state. Examples of this responsibility include archivists who recorded public tribunals in post-apartheid South Africa, documented stories of Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II, and acquired collections of 1960s civil rights activists who experienced military intervention while fighting to end segregation. These endeavors align with the historian Howard Zinn's call for archivists to "compile a whole new world of documentary material" about the lived experiences of marginalized populations and communities. Drawing upon Zinn's charge as well as scholarly literature around community archives, social justice, and human rights, this article describes the joint effort of community organizers and professional archivists who collaborated to establish a community archive for victims of police violence in Cleveland, Ohio. The archive, A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, provides a sustainable, autonomous means for Cleveland residents to share their first-hand accounts of police violence in the region. The authors will narrate the archive's conception and development as well as advance the archive as a post-custodial model for other grassroots organizations protesting various forms of state violence.

scholarly journals Voices that Matter: The Attic Echoes Through the House

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flávia Rodrigues Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The Buddha

Abstract: In The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka explores two main topics: the Picture Bride practice and the internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. An analysis of the development of both topics in the narrative reveals parallels with potential issues faced by women and diasporic subjects in contemporaneity, connecting with theoretical approaches on these topics. It is interesting to note that the narrative is mainly developed in first person plural with occasional expansion to other subjects such as “I”, “she”, “he”, and even “you”. The effect of this game between singular and plural is a narrative that describes a collective experience but avoids essentialisms. Even though it focuses on Women’s voices, the novel also explores different subjectivities involved in the diasporic experience. Thus, Otsuka’s narrative gives voice to disempowered subjects long locked in the attic of history and makes their voices echo through the houses of contemporaneity.

Jim and Jap Crow

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Briones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Military

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

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