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Japanese American Internment Essay

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This paper talks about the Japanese American internment during the Second World War. The internment experience has been recorded in many scholarly books by Asian American writers, most of them having race difference and conflict with American hegemony as themes. Yet, even after so many years, the general public has little or no awareness about this bleak period. What is even less known is that there were many creative artists in the camps who managed to produce various kinds of works of art, when left miserably within those government-made ghettos. This paper studies these works of art as visual records of the internment, making the past perceivable, as artefacts of a distant and suppressed historical incident. If the texts that sprouted from …show more content…

It is known throughout the world for its demographic diversity. Asian communities did help to define the United States in terms of history, and the most significant one among them had been the Japanese-Americans. The period of massive immigration from Japan to United States was from 1890 to 1924. The Japanese immigrants, as the historian Ronald Takaki writes in A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, “made bold and dangerous crossings, pushed by political events and economic hardships in their homelands and pulled by America’s demand for labor as well as by their own dreams for a better life” (p. 12). The phase was like a window of entry into the “promised land” for the first, second and third generation Japanese, respectively termed as Issei, Nisei and Sansei. The male Japanese laborers worked in railroads, cotton fields, cane fields, textile mills, and sugar plantations with dreams of making fortunes on the American shores. Work was punishing for the hired immigrant laborers. But somehow they had a strong hope that helping to build up the American economy is a way of finding acceptance into the white society and as well as securing a future for their wives and children in this foreign land. Unfortunately the hopes did not materialize and the shape of the dream changed, the most drastic ordeal being the chaotic uprooting during the World War II

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This book reflects the author’s wish of not only remembering what has happened to the Japanese families living in the United States of America at the time of war but also to show its effects and how families made through that storm of problems and insecurities. The story takes in the first turn when the father of Jeanne gets arrested in the accusation of supplying fuel to Japanese parties and takes it last turn when after the passage of several years, Jeanne (writer) is living a contented life with her family and ponders over her past (Wakatsuki Houston and D. Houston 3-78). As we read along the pages

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Their “Dual” endeavor is to win the war, not only with the enemy abroad but also with the racism at the home front. Takaki’s use of anecdotal narratives does much to illustrate the America in the 1940s, demonstrating the degree to which America was a white man’s country. In addition to this, Takaki shows the wartime responses from a variety of ethnic groups: Koreans, Japanese, Jewish, Filipinos, African Americans, and Italians. Among these groups, Takaki discusses about Japanese Americans in a full chapter, concluding with an examination of Hiroshima as a clear expression of racism.

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