scholarly journals Ethnic and Racial Identity in Multiracial Sansei: Intergenerational Effects of the World War II Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans1

Genealogy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Karen Suyemoto
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Racial Identity Development ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Intergenerational Effects

This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). I begin with a brief review of the literature related to the effects of the camps on Nisei, integrating psychological understandings of racial and ethnic identity development, contextual history, and research on the psychological effects; I focus here on effects for Nisei that have been connected to their intergenerational interactions: distancing from Japanese American heritage and identity, silence about the camp experience, and the negotiation of racism and discrimination. I turn then to the primary focus of the paper: Using a combination of autoethnographical reflection, examples from qualitative interviews, and literature review, I engage in reflective exploration of two ways in which intergenerational effects of the camp experience influenced Sansei racial and ethnic identities that vary among monoracial and multiracial Sansei: familial transmission of Japanese American culture by Nisei to Sansei, and the intergenerational effects and transmission of racial discrimination and racial acceptance. I conclude with reflections on intergenerational healing within Japanese American families and communities, and reflections on the relation of these dynamics to current issues of racial justice more generally.

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.

Foundations for a New World Order: Uniting Protestant Worship during the World War II Japanese American Incarceration

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-316
Author(s):  
Anne M. Blankenship
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
New World Order ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church

During the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, visions of a peaceful new world order led mainline Protestants to manipulate the worship practices of incarcerated Japanese Americans ( Nikkei) to strengthen unity of the church and nation. Ecumenical leaders saw possibilities within the chaos of incarceration and war to improve themselves, their church, and the world through these experiments based on ideals of Protestant ecumenism and desires for racial equality and integration. This essay explores why agendas that restricted the autonomy of racial minorities were doomed to fail and how Protestants can learn from this experience to expand their definition of unity to include pluralist representations of Christianity and America as imagined by different sects and ethnic groups.

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.

The 1942 Santa Anita Detainment Center Labor Strike and Japanese American Incarceration during World War II

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-316
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Industrial Production ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
Worker Safety ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Labor Disputes ◽  
Labor Strike

This article studies a brief strike by Nikkei incarcerees at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in 1942. Employed in the industrial production of camouflage nets, the imprisoned Japanese Americans staged a strike over pay, worker safety, and rights. Without previous guidelines, the center’s administrators had to devise a resolution to this halt in the production of war materiel. The Santa Anita netmakers' strike and its resolution provided a foundation for handling labor disputes at the permanent WRA camps later. The author identifies the administration, division of labor, pay, and unsafe work conditions, along with the strike leadership, management’s response, and the outcome of the strike.

The Movement for Japanese American Redress

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Asaka
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Redress Movement

The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.

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.

8. World War II and the demise of the Great Writ

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-91
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
High Courts ◽  
The Us

This chapter explores the role of habeas corpus during World War II in the US and Great Britain. On the American side, the chapter details how suspension ruled in the Hawaiian Territory but the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on the mainland followed in the absence of a suspension under Executive Order 9066. As the chapter details, this happened even though lawyers counselled President Franklin D. Roosevelt that doing so would violate the Suspension Clause. The chapter continues by contrasting the experience in Britain, where Prime Minister Winston Churchill led the push to retreat from its citizen detention program under Regulation 18B and restore a robust habeas privilege. The chapter also compares habeas decisions rendered by the high courts in both countries while asking larger questions about what can be learned from these events.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 122-124
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
World War ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The book concludes by celebrating aspects of the history of the writ of habeas corpus as a great writ of liberty, observing that the writ has served as a vehicle for securing the freedom of political prisoners and slaves and for the declaration of bedrock constitutional rights in criminal cases. But, the conclusion also notes, it is also the case that habeas corpus has sometimes fallen short, as the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans reveals. Habeas, in other words, is sometimes only as effective as the politics of the time permit. Highlighting the challenges that lie ahead for the future of the storied writ, the conclusion suggests that we would do well to recall the period when the writ earned Blackstone’s praise as a “second magna carta,” for that history tells a story of a habeas writ that could bring even the King of England to his knees before the law.

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.

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.

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