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Miss Breed Letters From Camp Analysis

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“Dear Miss Breed: Letters from Camp”, is a collection of over 200 letters sent to Miss Clara Estelle Breed, also known as ‘Miss Breed’, from Japanese Americans imprisoned in the Japanese Interment Camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Prior to World War II, Miss Breed, was the supervising librarian at the East San Diego Public Library. Through this she was able to become aquatinted with many of the Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) children within her community. When the United States made the decision to join World War II, the young Nisei children that Miss Breed had come to care for were being forced from their homes and relocated to internment camps. Outraged by the situation, Miss Breed decided to help her young friends by becoming their …show more content…

On the day of their departure from San Diego, she had handed out stamped, self addressed postcard at the train-station and urged them to write to her once they reached their destination. Through these postcards, Miss Breed was able to regularly send her Nisei friends’ books, care packages, and immeasurable amounts of support. This letter was written by Louise Ogawa and sent from the Poston Interment Camp, one of the largest of the ten American concentration camps built to host Japanese Americans, and addressed to Miss Clara Breed. The letter was dated on two separate occasions, September 3, 1943 and September 5, 1943, due to Ogawa’s insistence to postpone her letter’s dispatch till the arrival of Miss Breed’s own. Ogawa’s letter to Miss Breed was written in a remarkably appreciative tone, as the purpose of her letter was to thank Miss Breed, “from the bottom of [her] heart” for the iron in which she had previously received and to request the total cost of the item.

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