The Internment of Memory: Forgetting and Remembering the Japanese American Experience During World War II (thesis)

Direct quotations will be in italics.

The thesis is about how people have remembered the internment, and how some people have forgotten what happened. He starts out talking about monuments and how they cause people to remember past events. If there is no monument for a major event, then it might be because people there either want to forget about it or just didn't consider it important enough (or have enough money) to build a monument.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, local, state, and national leaders as well as citizens across the country shared an unspoken agreement that the Japanese American story was one to be ignored. Due to a feeling of shame in the Japanese American community and pervasive racism amongst white Americans, there was very little public recognition of the World War II experience for decades after the war.

Many people at the time still felt hatred for all Japanese, including those born in America. Another problem was hypocrisy. The United States was known for having a strong legal foundation, yet the Japanese Americans had been put into the internment camps without any proper legal actions at all. They were not charged with anything, not allowed to defend themselves, not given a trial. They were just gathered up and shipped out. This is a type of hypocrisy that people didn't want to acknowledge, and by ignoring what had happened they could pretend it didn't happen.

When commemoration finally did begin to appear during the latter part of the 20th century, it was due to a variety of factors. First and foremost was the service record of the Japanese American soldiers.

There is no doubt that the Japanese Americans who found in the Second War War fought in a segregated group. They also established an incredible fighting record and that could not be denied. A second thing that the author says helped was the admission of Hawaii as a state. Hawaii had a very large Japanese American population and those people got involved in politics. They gradually got into office and thus brought attention to the Japanese American population.

Then the author gets into a discussion of something very important and that is the definition of words. Words can have powerful meanings and what words are used to describe something can indicate the beliefs that the person using the words has. For example, in the North the Civil War was the Civil War. In some places in the south it was called (and may still be called) The War of Northern Aggression. Same event but two totally different spins depending on the words used.

This is very important in relation to the internment process. The persons of Japanese ancestry were gathered up and put into camps. These were in very inhospitable places. They were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with armed guards. For a while no one was allowed to leave. So, what do we call such a camp?

Several terms have been used. Concentration Camp is one of them. FDR himself used that term to describe the camps. Yet the term concentration camp also almost immediately brings to mind the camps that the Nazis established where they carried out the murder of millions of Jews and other people. The camps in the United States did not murder people, though, and this causes some people to avoid the term.

Another term is internment camp. The people were interned there against their will.

Another term is relocation center, used because one of the goals was to spread the Japanese American population out through the country by relocating them from these camps to other places not on the West Coast. On the other hand, relocation usually does not involve the forced loss of jobs and the loss of much of the people's property that had to be sold off quickly or stored (and then sometimes stolen), all against their will.

Actually, even prison could be used as a term since the people, at least at first, were held there against their will, surrounded by barbed wire (instead of walls) and armed guards.

It seems that "concentration camp" is by definition accurate but by connotation debatable, while "internment camp" is the opposite - a legal and accepted term that is by definition inaccurate when applied to the mass round-up of Japanese immigrants and US citizens in 1942. The heart of the debate over terminology lies in the belief that sugarcoated terms or "euphemisms" are "semantics of suppression [which] shrouded the gross injustice of the incarceration and has effectively and methodically distanced the reality of the concentration camp experience from honest scrutiny."15 The use of less meaning-laden words has even been used by some apologists to forward their own opposing arguments - to downplay the trauma of an event.

Then he talks about how attention started to be given to the internment, the movie Go for Broke being a very important factor in that starting.

He talks more about the camps, and notes that in Canada much the same thing happened to those of Japanese ancestry living there and it was even harsher than what was done here.

The assembly centers were where people were first taken.

The conditions in the assembly centers were often literally fit for animals, as many families found themselves living in retiled horse stalls at racetracks such as Santa Anita and Tanforan, California. There was poor sanitation and insufficient facilities for those housed at the temporary camps, and one of the most common complaints, that would be repeated later within the relocation camps as well, was the lack of privacy. Each barrack building shared one outdoor water faucet, while individual apartments were outfitted with one electric light bulb, army cots, a coal stove, and very little else.

It was estimated that detainees lost a combined $400,000,000 in property and possessions.113 In 1948, Congress attempted to settle claims with the Evacuation Claims Act, but reached a settlement of only 10 cents per dollar lost.

Another factor that contributed to the public silence on the subject of the confinement was the silence of Japanese Americans themselves. For many, the concept of "shikata ga nai," or "it cannot be helped," led to a grudging acceptance of the situation rather than vocal opposition. Others felt that decades of discriminatory laws, naturalization restrictions, and the ultimate punishment of confinement, must mean that the Japanese Americans were somehow at fault.

He discusses the redress movement, Japanese-Americans in politics, academic studies of the internment, and the preservation of camp history, which then leads him into the discussion of museums.

Other ways the event has been remembered have been via factyual books, novels, films, photography, and art. To this I would add that You Tube and personal web sites and professional web sites have helped in people acknowledging and remembering what happened to those of Japanese ancestry in the U.S.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page