Race, Culture, And Citizenship Among Japanese American Children

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Race, Culture, and Citizenship amongJapanese American Children and

Adolescents during the Internment Era

BENSON TONG

“As we got off the bus, we found ourselves in a large area amidst asea of friendly Japanese faces,” recollected then twelve-year old NiseiFlorence Miho Nakamura in her memoirs. It was a poignant day. Up-rooted from San Francisco in April, 1942, and sent off to the TanforanAssembly Center, Nakamura and her family were victims of racial lump-ing, of anti-Asian sentiments that reached a crescendo during WorldWar II. Their incarceration in the assembly centers and later, at the so-called relocation centers (typically scholars label them concentrationcamps), were turning points in their lives. Japanese American childrenlike Nakamura faced a unique struggle. Nakamura recalled that she“didn’t know where we were,” or why the uprooting occurred. Likemost children and adolescents,1 she had limited knowledge of the ori-gins of the internment, although she knew that a period of disruptionhad set in. The “evacuation,” however, had been carried out on a com-munity-by-community basis, and so she found solace in kinship andpseudo-kinship ties that were replicated at Tanforan. As a dependent ofher parents she “was not frightened because” she was with her family,and “with them, I [she] felt safe.” Like most children, she could con-tinue to rely on the protection of her parents.2 Yet other things didchange. For children and adolescents, being imprisoned in a harsh envi-ronment, questions were raised, issues debated, and relationships strained.Along the way, the children and adolescents were forced to confront inone way or another more abstract notions of race, citizenship, and cul-ture.

Besides a few studies on the education of these children in the con-centration camps, and several published collections of their writings andmemoirs, to-date we know little about the evolving worldview of Japa-nese American girl and boy internees during this wartime era.3 In thedecades after the 1960s, with the rise of the Asian American movementas well as the momentum of the Japanese American redress movement,scholars, writers, and organizations have churned out numerous inter-

4 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2004

pretive monographs, edited collections of oral interviews, novels, mem-oirs, documentary films, feature-length films, and museum exhibits inan effort to “re-vision” history so that the Japanese Americans are deemed“subjects—as men and women with minds, wills, and voices.”4 Yeteven as the collective memory is memorialized and interpreted, childrenremained fairly invisible in Asian American historical writings. Twofactors account for this omission: record keepers of the past primarilyfocused on the “stereotypical” or the Euramerican child, and second, thefailure to understand that “young people have had unprecedented influ-ence on the society around them.”5

This article attempts to reclaim the experiences and worldview ofJapanese American children and adolescents during the World War IIperiod in United States history, as well as their attitudes toward theirinternment. Another critical question is to what degree, if at all, theirforced isolation from the larger society reinforced the racial-ethnic aware-ness of the children. If that awareness was heightened, then what was itsrole in shaping their self-identities as Americans and members of amarginalized community? How did race figure in their understanding ofcitizenship?

The primary sources relied on to analyze this experience include theextensive Japanese (American) Evacuation and Resettlement Studyrecords (particularly essays written by schoolchildren and reports filedby educators), oral interviews (complete transcripts and excerpted ones),published memoirs of children and families, unpublished letters, a diary,camp newspapers, and school newspapers. The sources—with the ex-ception of the oral interviews and published memoirs—were mostlygenerated by Japanese American children or adolescents, as opposed tobeing generated by adults reflecting on the past. Oral interviews andmemoirs, by their very nature, raise the question of reliability. Thehuman memory fades, changes, and is influenced by later experiences;hence, any recollection of past events is unlikely to offer a clear orcomplete reflection. The other sources, however, are sufficiently wide-ranging enough in terms of type of material and age-groups to balanceany inherent flaws in the genres of oral history and autobiography.Furthermore, in spite of the methodological problems of these genres,the fact that the same themes and perspectives are repeated in the tran-scriptions or narratives over and over again suggest some internal coher-ence within the materials, and thus their historical veracity remain in-tact. Brief accounts of primary sources are offered in the notes to ex-plain the nature of all of the materials.

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Scholars have reminded us that “each generation of American chil-dren has come of age in a different world of realities.”6 Japanese Ameri-cans who were born in the late 1920s to the mid–1930s—the genera-tional unit of this study—grew up in the interwar and war years. Theirexperiences stood in marked contrast to those of a previous generationor even the generational unit born in the early 1920s or earlier whoencountered a different set of historical circumstances. The followingbrief narrative illustrates the changing historical forces up until the out-break of the Pacific War that took place in various “settings” (such as inthis case the ethnic community, school, family, and race) that shaped thedifferent generational units in various ways.

At the turn of the last century Japanese American children who werethe first-born of the immigrant generation fell under the influence of thedekasegi ideal. Historian Yuji Ichioka defines dekasegi as the practiceof Japanese workers leaving their country of birth temporarily to workelsewhere, and this practice includes the desire of eventually returningto Japan.7 That ideal motivated Japanese immigrants in the United Statesto establish Japanese language schools as early as 1902 in Seattle, fol-lowed by others in San Francisco, Sacramento, and elsewhere. The goalof these schools was to educate the children so that they could later joinpublic schooling in Japan.8

By the early 1920s the curriculum of those schools underwent a trans-formation. Post-World War I anti-Japanese exclusionists claimed thatsuch schools were indoctrinating children to be loyal to the emperor ofJapan. A movement was afoot to pass laws to weaken the “influence” ofthese schools by regulating the schools, controlling the parameters ofthe curriculum, and monitoring the teachers’ qualifications. In response,Japanese American educators “Americanized” their schools to some de-gree—schoolchildren now received instruction in American citizenship,and acceptance of the larger society was the ultimate goal.9 By the nextdecade, gakuen or institutes, as the schools came to be known, hadfallen into some disfavor with a younger generational unit of the Nisei(second-generation Japanese Americans).

From the late 1920s onwards some adult Nisei preached that theirgeneration should serve as “cultural ambassadors,” helping to fosteramity between the United States and Japan against the backdrop ofrising international tensions. To that end, Nisei study tours of Japan orkengakudan were organized to prepare them for this role.10 Yet, othervoices prevailed. Historian Lon Kurashige, in his study of the NiseiFestival in Los Angeles, argues that in the 1930s the festival became an


occasion to demonstrate the Americanization of a community that hadachieved economic success. Japanese American elites or communityleaders no longer wished the Nisei generation to play the role of the“bridge” across the Pacific. Following the outbreak of the Sino-JapaneseWar in 1937 mainstream suspicions cast on Japanese Americans pushedelites to project—through beauty pageants, parades, fashion and talentshows—the community as undividedly loyal to the United States.11

Besides community, school, and race, other settings that can deter-mine the youngsters’ encounters with change include the family. Thevaried experiences of the parents—level of poverty, occupational changes,previous exposure to racism, and migration—and the order of thoseexperiences in the family’s history often mediated the children’s re-sponses to transitions in their lives. These family disruptions also canleave more serious repercussions during a stressful time, as it was thecase when they were “embedded in a wartime rather than in a peacetimecontext.”12

Historian William M. Tuttle, Jr., echoing the argument of scholarswho studied children using the life-course perspective, explains that“age or stage of development . . . is a crucial factor mediating the effectsof one’s psychosocial environment.”13 While settings can shape change,age complicates that process. Children, who on the whole are dependenton their families, are deemed to be more vulnerable to family stressesthan adolescents. The fact that Nakamura relied on her family to findorder and the familiar suggests an inner turmoil that she had to resolve.On the other hand, Stanley Hayami of San Gabriel, California, wassixteen years old when he entered the Heart Mountain camp in Wyo-ming. His diary reveals a boy’s mind filled with ruminations on race,citizenship, and his own educational future, and little on the fortunes ofhis family or his relationship to parents and other siblings.14

Compared to adolescents like Hayami, children, who were still devel-oping their intellectual schema, were typically less able to name thesituation or articulate abstract concerns. In the Clara Breed Collection—which are letters written by Japanese American youngsters from Postoncamp to librarian Clara Breed in San Diego—children in the early monthsof their incarceration reported of the new surroundings, expressed aweof and also complained about the harsh climatological and topographicalconditions, and pined for the life they left behind, though rarely ana-lyzed their fortunes within the context of racism, wartime hysteria, orgovernment control. For example, ten-year old Katherine Tasaki at theoutset of her stay in Poston wrote: “School is so dull I don’t enjoy it as I

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did back home . . . I sure do wish I could have seen Santa again. If onlyI didn’t have to come into the camp maybe I could be borrowing fivebooks too.” Her later letters to Breed also echoed this theme of nostalgiafor the past, even as she became increasingly reconciled to the circum-scribed present. Like other youngsters who wrote to Breed, Tasaki of-fered few thoughts on the racialized origins of their incarceration. Yet inthe same collection we read of letters from older adolescents such asLouise Ogawa, who in 1942 was seventeen years old and later wouldleave for Chicago to work in a wartime industry, that reveal a nuancedunderstanding of their fate; wrote Ogawa soon after her arrival at Poston:“This camp is so far away from civilization that it makes me feel as if Iwas an[sic] convict who is not allowed to see anyone.”15

Historian Sucheng Chan, deliberating on second-generation ChineseAmerican youth in the interwar years, however, argues that individualpsychology was less important than imagined or real physical and bio-logical differences in determining the responses of the children to his-torical change.16 The identity formation of Japanese American childrenpossibly played out in the same way; racially marked as “Orientals,”they, like Chinese Americans, found race distorted their sense of iden-tity. Echoing that argument is historian Chris Friday, who postulates inhis comparative essay of American-born Japanese and Chinese that the“‘white’-dominated host society that ‘naturalized’ a racial hierarchy con-tributed to a cacophony of directives on what second-generation identi-ties should be.”17 Other “directives,” Friday contends, include their gen-erational position, international events, transnational ties, and familyand peers.18 Both context and time, in sum, determined how JapaneseAmerican children and adolescents reacted to their incarceration.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, an existingnetwork of familial and extra-familial ties along with ideological andstructural forces shaped the youngsters’ response to the wartime eventsthat soon unfolded, even as those ties and forces as well as the young-sters’ reaction to them changed as time passed on. Age also problematizedthat response. At home, these mostly Nisei youngsters received a type ofsocialization that negated individualism. Instead, they were taught to puttheir family ahead of personal needs or ambitions. From an early agechildren learned that the loss of honor for the family was abhorrent.Parents conscientiously instilled in children a deep appreciation of con-formity. A set of values passed down to the next generation shaped aworldview that supported such a cohesive, collective identity. On, forexample, was the attitude of obligation and respect toward one’s elders,


school, and country. Gaman meant perseverance or maintaining one’sstoicism. Ninjo, to offer another example, is humane sensibility; empa-thy, and benevolence toward others that controlled any latent aggres-sion.19

The children who were born in the 1920s and 1930s had parents whohailed from a homogeneous culture and society. Unlike Chinese immi-grants who were divided along the lines of dialect, place of origin, andregional variation in food and material culture, Japanese immigrants inthe United States hailed from a society that had a strong sense of na-tional identity. This shared sense of the past, a collective memory noless, shaped the group orientation.20 Social organizations that knittedboth blood-related and non-blood-related kin such as rotating credit as-sociations (tanomoshi), area clubs, Buddhist temples, and Christianchurches also reinforced collectivism, mutual obligations, and also some-times, Japan-oriented nationalism.21 These patterns of mutual aid andsupport coupled with a strong sense of peoplehood and a cultural em-phasis on collective order converged to foster a strong sense of ethnicidentity in these Japanese American children and adolescents. Ethnicitywas public, “performed,” and palpable.22

Yet structural and ideological forces, besides the ethnic culture, alsomolded the lives of these young Americans before the war years. Likeother children of racial-ethnic backgrounds, Japanese American young-sters underwent a form of public schooling that was shot with contradic-tions. As David K. Yoo explains, schooling in the post-World I eraunderwent reform. Policy makers and educational professionals envi-sioned schools as vanguards of assimilation, but the politics of raceundermined that aspiration. Racial discrimination blocked the youth’sentry into the mainstream labor market, raising questions in their mindsabout the market value of their education. Unable to find jobs in theUnited States that were commensurate with their qualifications, a fewcontemplated employment prospects in Japan, while many gravitated tothe ethnic enclave economy. These second-generation Japanese Ameri-can youth on the cusp of adulthood were resentful of their dependencyon community resources. Equally heavy on their minds was the unfair-ness of their exclusion; though “American” in every other way, theirputative or real physical difference—their “otherness”—kept them in asubordinated position in society.23

Mainstream American schooling did little to facilitate full integrationinto society. Yet it socialized Japanese American youngsters in a waythat unsettled the known and the familiar. Through their interaction with

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teachers and peers, Japanese American girls and boys learned that beingAmerican was to enjoy certain freedoms denied to them at home. Likeother Asian peers, Japanese American youngsters developed the impres-sion that American social relations were egalitarian, nurturing, and af-fectionate whereas Japanese ones seemed hierarchical, distant, and im-personal.

In the era before the Pacific War Nisei youngsters, particularly ado-lescents, were also exposed to mainstream consumption-oriented popu-lar culture. Newspapers, magazines, radios, and films disseminated in-formation about heterosexual romantic ideals, popular icons, and thelatest trends in clothing, cosmetics, and food. Girls were particularlyconflicted; though attracted to mainstream notions of modernity, theyalso felt the pull of traditional Japanese womanhood.24 The question ofpersonal freedom was more critical for girls than for boys, since theformer were already expected by their parents to abide by gender-de-fined boundaries in dating, standards of beauty, and female indepen-dence.25 Parents, for example, prevented their daughters from “goingout,” except for club or group activities.26

On the surface children and adolescents before World War II werejust like any other middle-class, native-born American youngsters. Inrural areas where many of the Japanese American youngsters lived be-fore World War II, limited access to mass-produced toys forced them toinvent their own diversions that mimicked those of non-Japanese young-sters. Nisei youth in rural Cortez, California, played mumblety-peg andkick-the-can. Those in the farming community of Hood River Valley,Oregon, constructed cardboard villages out of empty boxes or playedtag and catch in vacant lots in small towns.27 Dressed in western garb,both those in rural and urban areas attended schools with racially di-verse student bodies, joined a variety of extracurricular activities rang-ing from Boy Scouts to baseball games, and enjoyed their interactionswith coethnic and non-coethnic peers. “I mingled with Caucasians,” saidGeorge Nakagawa, who grew up on a farm outside of Kent, Washing-ton, a locale with few Japanese American children. Eventually internedat Tule Lake, California, Nakagawa recalled that he “had lots of friendsand enjoyed it.”28

Still, an undercurrent of social isolation governed these social rela-tions; an unspoken rule of separatism prevailed. And such a rule becamemore rigid as they grew into adolescence. Hiroshi Mayeda, the son offarmers, attended school in San Pedro, California in the 1930s, and laterwas interned at the Jerome camp in Arkansas. Commenting on peer-


oriented social activities outside of school he recalled that “when you’reyounger, you’re always invited and then later on, as you get older, thatkind of falls off.” In high school the color line was obvious—he knewhe was unwelcome by some school clubs.29 Ruth Uemko Voorhies, whogrew up in downtown San Diego, and was interned in Poston, Arizona,echoed that assessment; though she was a member of several raciallymixed school clubs, “socially, anyway, we were mostly all Japanese.”30

Even Nakagawa echoed that sentiment: “socially, my life was centeredin the Japanese American community,” he admitted.31 A few young-sters, particularly those in farming families or of working class back-grounds, also attributed their limited socialization with non-Japanese tothe demand for their labor in the family economy; Voorhies explainedthat she did not participate in team sports in school in spite of herpassion for such activities because she “had to come home and help”with her father’s fruit stand, and later her widowed mother’s pool hall.32

Nisei youngsters who lived in tiny, rural Japanese American communi-ties were caught in a unique situation; they complained of the lack ofco-ethnic peers, and at the same time could not form close relationshipswith non-Japanese Americans; Buddy Fujii in the prewar era lived in thecountryside near Reno, Nevada which had only seven Japanese Ameri-can families. He bemoaned that “it wasn’t always easy to get adate . . . there were no Japanese girls my age here.”33 In a time whenmiscegenation was taboo, Fujii like most Japanese American boys andgirls, could not date across the color line. By the time they reachedadolescence, Nisei youngsters like Fujii became to some degree raciallyconscious. Rejected by the larger society, Japanese youngsters created aseparate social world. They clearly did not enjoy structural integra-tion.34

For Japanese American children and adolescents the flames of racialanimosity—which had smoldered for decades before—that caught fireafter the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor threw into greater relief theirracially subordinated position in the mainstream society. The initial re-action, however, was one of either indifference shaped by naiveté, or inother cases, disbelief coupled with an assertion of their Americanism.Nakagawa, when queried about his reaction to that attack, recalled hisolder brother telling his mother about it, but as a nine-year old boy hehad no personal reaction to it. Masayo Arii lived in the isolated ruralcommunity of Winters, California, and was fifteen when the war brokeout; with little knowledge of current affairs, her reaction was “it’s justsomething that happened.”35 Eleven-year-old Masako Nakae, who was

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raised in a farming family in Auburn, California, “knew that somethingbad had happened,” but her only point of reference was the quarrel herparents had about returning to Japan.36

Kasuko Endo, who then resided in rural Milwaukee, Oregon, in anessay for schoolwork in camp wrote that “we all became very shocked,since we were of Japanese descent. We wondered how Japan could dosuch a thing to this peaceful land of ours.”37 Kay Uno grew up in LosAngeles and was nine years old when the bad news broke out: “‘Oh,those Japs, what are they doing that for?’ We didn’t think of ourselvesas Japs.”38 Pat Aiko Amino, was ten years old when she heard the badnews, and was convinced that “it doesn’t have anything to do with usbecause I’m an American, you know. I was completely American.”39

That sense of disbelief, as suggested in Endo’s, Uno’s, and Amino’srecollections, embodied also an initial denial of possible racial lumping.They refused to see themselves as associated with the enemy. HistoriansElliott West and Paula Petrik draw our attention to the unique nature ofa child’s mind: “a child is still developing intellectual schema—theability to remember, to discriminate between detail and generality, toperceive cause and effect, and to draw conclusions from evidence.”40

As such, Japanese American children neither could immediately analyzethe implications of the attack for their futures nor understand that theirmaligned identity was wedded to international politics.

But in a few days after the attack the hard reality of how transnationalconnections impinged on their ethnicity came home. Some children,however, did report of receiving obvious reassurances of emotional sup-port from teachers and peers or at least no blatant negative reaction fromthe school community. Arii, the daughter of tenant farming parents,recalled that in her racially mixed school she did not receive “static” or“any reaction from the rest of the students” and that her principal duringa special assembly to memorialize the Pearl Harbor losses did not singleout Japanese Americans in his remarks.41 Kiyoko Kasai Fujiu of Red-wood City, California, a place lightly populated with Japanese Ameri-cans, was in high school. An ardent reader of American history books,she was well aware of her birthright, yet knew it was a tenuous one. Inspite of her initial fears, her white peers treated her “like they alwaystreated” her.42

Other children and adolescents—even those who had never sufferedracial discrimination before—recalled being at least self-conscious, andin some instances shunned by whites, even suffering overt hostility. Theday after the attack was a Monday and riding the bus on the way to


school, Mary Hara, then in eighth grade and residing in small townGresham, Oregon, “felt a change as a few of the little boys began tosnicker and whisper” behind her back. Older peers were “much nicerand acted friendly.” At school “friends passed false rumors,” and soonshe felt self-conscious of an undefined guilt. All this was in dramaticcontrast to the day before when she “refused to believe” that she was inany way implicated in the Pearl Harbor attack.43 Endo recalled thatsome of his friends “were more kinder and some the opposite,” and likeHara, was “very self-concious [sic]” as white friends listened to thenews broadcast and talked about the bombing.44 Just days after theattack, teenager Sato Hashizume, raised in Portland, Oregon, and whoearlier had given little thought to the incident, was confronted by twoteenagers as she was walking home from school: “Are you a Jap?,” theyasked. And she replied: “N-no . . . no, I-I’m not a Jap, I’m Japanese.”To avoid future similar confrontations, Hashizume took the extrememeasure of wearing the button, “I am A Loyal Chinese,” though such ameasure did not protect her from the internment and concomitantly theforced abandonment of her dog.45 Before the war “their lives betweencultures were a matter of fact and not a matter of dissonance;” they livedin two worlds that they moved between seemingly at will, but now theyknew this bicultural existence involved heavy costs.46

In the weeks following the attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI), suspecting that Issei (immigrant generation) with cultural or po-litical ties to Japan, regardless of how superficial they were, were poten-tial traitors, picked up consular officials, leaders of Japanese businessand social organizations, Buddhist priests, teachers, journalists, and oth-ers for questioning. Later some suspects would be singled out for incar-ceration in specific detention centers. Separated from their fathers and ina few cases, mothers too—those that they were dependent on—JapaneseAmerican children also endured the trauma of confusion, of not know-ing why this had occurred. Writer Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston of Termi-nal Island, California, was seven years old when the FBI arrested herfather; when her mother broke down, Houston clung “to her legs, won-dering why everyone was crying.” Being dependents of their parents,they feared “being left behind,” to quote a Nisei who was then twelveyears old. Houston’s father was held in custody and eventually trans-ported to a hinterland internment camp established for other similarlysuspected traitors. Meanwhile her mother struggled to maintain the com-posure of her bewildered children. Picked by the FBI because of his roleas president of the junior division of the local Japanese Chamber of

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Commerce in Seattle, Yoshito Fujii recalled that his “children, beingsmall [ranging from age one to seven years old], couldn’t understandwhy” he “was kept there.”47 Amino of Los Angeles discovered that herAmerican citizenship did not protect her from suffering the emotionalfallout from the FBI’s interrogation of her mother, a Japanese languageteacher.48

After the initial shock of encountering wartime politics that turnedpersonal and intimate, the weeks of preparation—sometimes just days—and journey to the so-called assembly centers, and later to the morepermanent “relocation centers” or concentration camps evoked for mostof the children a sense of excitement over what promised to be anunknown adventure. Twelve-year-old Rosie Nakamura, formerly of Se-attle, in an essay she wrote in late 1942 at the Minidoka concentrationcamp in Idaho, characterized the relocation as “the most exciting thing Idid since I was 5 years old.”49 Such feelings, however, were temperedby the impending losses of friends, pets, and toys. For children thedeeper, racialized significance of the uprooting and incarceration es-caped them; said Hisako Inamura Koike, then a twelve-year-old in SanDiego who ended up at the Santa Anita assembly center and then later atthe Poston camp, “I don’t think it really touched me as to what washappening.” She did find it difficult to leave behind the family dog.50

Fourth-grader Nakagawa gave the evacuation little thought except hedisliked being separated from his friends.51 Any such sadness was some-times cushioned by the emotional support they received from teachersand peers; Bob (full name unavailable), born in Sacramento, resided inthe Loomis farming area of California in 1942 and had fond memoriesof schooling days, and in particular of his elementary school teachersand peers throwing his coethnic peers a farewell party just before theywere evacuated. Bob and his family ended up at Tule Lake, where heclaimed in contrast the relatively large size of his new school alienatedhim.52 The journey itself piqued the interest of youngsters; Jim Akagi, ayoung teenager from Seattle wrote in Minidoka that “we were going onthe train and I never rode a train before. I thought it was going to befun.”53 However, for most children, the journey turned into a monoto-nous routine of sitting, eating, and little play in a confined area ofstifling air.54

Adolescents revealed a different range of emotions from their youngerpeers. To borrow the words of one writer, they “felt the moment morekeenly and understood its larger meaning.”55 They had a tentative un-derstanding of the reach of unequal treatment into their lives; writing


years after the incarceration, Florence Ohmura Dobashi, then fourteenyears old and interned at the Poston camp, recalled that she knew thenshe had been “treated differently by the government and could not pre-vent our being sent away . . . I was confused, a jumble of mixed feel-ings.”56 Fujiu, who had won a Daughters of the American Revolutionprize for an annual history contest, contrasted her understanding of Ameri-can citizenship with the reality that it “might not be something that wasupheld for” Japanese Americans.57 Yet like the children, most of theirimmediate sentiments centered around the sense of confusion and lossthat arose from having to leave a familiar environment. But for adoles-cents on the cusp of adulthood, what they left behind also embodiedtheir shattered, yet always ambivalent, future. Shusho Kumata, a highschool freshman in Seattle who along with his family ended up in theMinidoka camp, Idaho, lost his concentration in his studies in the weeksleading up to the uprooting. He forced himself to accept the inevitableseparation from teachers and friends as well as his belief that his futurewas a “complete wreck.” During the three months at the Pullayup as-sembly center, he claimed he led an aimless life.58 Before the intern-ment freshman Yoshito Wayne Osaki, born in the countryside nearCourtland, California, was the tackling dummy of his high school’spredominately white football team. He resented being singled out forthis role—no white student ever was placed in this position—but even-tually worked his way into the team, which won an inter-school champi-onship just before the Pearl Harbor attack. The evacuation pained him;he was leaving behind memories of personal triumph and unknownfuture successes.59

The makeshift nature of the assembly centers—being hastily con-verted stockyards, county fairgrounds, and horse-racing tracks—and later,the conditions of the barbed-wire concentration camps in remote barrendesert or wind-swept mountainous or swampy areas—all of which con-trasted dramatically with the environments they had left behind—rein-forced the frustration and homesickness of adolescents and children.Unlike adults who tried to repress their emotions, preferring to be sullenor grim faced or countenanced gaman, young children sometimes wereuninhibited, openly demonstrating their dislike of the degrading envi-ronment.60 Both children and adolescents complained the most aboutthe quality of the bland, sometimes unsanitary, food, followed by, in thecase of the isolated concentration camps, the extreme weather anduninspiring landscape. While the food gave vulnerable children stomachcramps and diarrhea, the weather and barren environment made them

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long for the lives they were forced to leave behind.61 Tasaki wrote tolibrarian Clara Breed the following succinct comments about her newenvironment in Poston: “The food is awful the heats terrific wirlwind[sic]—dust home sick.”62 Itsuko Taniguchi penned, whilst in her earlyteens, a poem of the contrast between the past and the present: “Leavingour friends/And my tree that bends/Away to the land/With lots of sand.”63

The children and adolescents, like their elders, however, learned toaccept the immediate circumstances—a response shaped in part by theircultural values and in part by their undeveloped intellectual schema. Inhis diary Hayami had expressed anger at some elements within the Isseigeneration for opposing the internment, which he feared would augmentEuroamericans’ suspicions of the Nisei. He also lashed out at the UnitedStates government for the unjust incarceration. Yet in his New Yearresolutions for 1943 he promised himself to exercise more tolerancetoward others and “resolve[d] not to abandon any high ambition.”64

Many of the adolescents tried to embrace the new circumstances, some-times relying on humor to facilitate the adjustment; wrote Ogawa toBreed once: “I am still one of those Indians residing at BEd. 328–11-A.”65 Sixth-grader Tasaki, who at the start of her stay at Poston hadgrumbled about the conditions, wrote about a year and half after herarrival that they had “had a swell sand storm day before yesterday. Yessir! Arizona is the place for a sand company.”66 Most of the adolescentsand children adapted to the new environment; unlike their elders wholost livelihoods, properties, and status in the community, their losseswere few. Possessing of a worldview that was more centered on thepresent than on the past, they, with the exception of those on the cusp ofentering adulthood (and work life), worried little about the future.67

Youthful naiveté fueled their optimism and they quickly took advan-tage of their new environment. Freed from the confines of suburbanneighborhoods or the responsibilities of the family economy, childrenfound new and/or more opportunities to socialize with their coethnicpeers. Lila Sasaki was only eleven when she went to camp, but alreadyon her family farm in Auburn, California, she was plowing with horsesand hauling fruit to the shed. Sunday school was the only time she andher siblings played with other Japanese children. Internment changedher life; without chores, she found “lots of friends to play with,” eventhough social segregation continued. “Internment wasn’t all bad,” shequipped.68 Hara confessed in her essay that in spite of her earlier am-bivalence about camp life she relished it because she could be closer toher friends.69 When Bob Takemoto first heard about internment he


“didn’t think nothing of it,” but after spending some weeks at the TuleLake camp he said in retrospect, “I was young enough, that I kind ofenjoyed it.” No longer, ever since the age of eight, the tractor driver onthe family farm near the rural town of Lincoln, California, Takemotomade “lots of friends there and went to school and . . . played sports andeverything.”70 Young children enthusiastically joined their peers in ex-ploring the new environment; ten-year-old David (formerly of ruralLoomis, California; full name unavailable) and his friends at the desert-like Tule Lake camp caught scorpions and rattlesnakes, collected arrow-heads, and hiked and climbed the camp area. For David, such play madeup for the competitive school environment in the camp.71 Paul S.Sakamoto, the son of a sharecropper turned farmer in rural Alviso,California, and then incarcerated in the Rohwer camp, Arkansas wherehe attended junior high school, fondly remembered how he and hispeers chased fireflies even beyond the barbed wire fence and caughtcrawdads in the surrounding creeks. For Sakamoto, as it was the casewith most Nisei, the wartime socialization continued the pattern of theearlier years: his social circle remained Japanese American, though nowit was far more intensive.72

These opportunities for socialization—which also took the form ofdances, talent shows, sporting events, civic participation, to name afew—were more than “lifeboats in the daily boredom of exile.”73 Playwas redefined, and the bonds of ethnicity reinforced, even as youngsterspartook of organized activities of mainstream leisure that promoted as-similation. The Nisei social life continued to reflect American patterns,but now it involved more coethnic youngsters. The War RelocationAuthority (WRA) encouraged children to engage in favorite Americanpastimes—football, basketball, and baseball—and to join organizationssuch as the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Older adolescents enjoyedregular dance socials and young Nisei organized bands. To borrow thewords of Robert Cooperman who studied Nisei internment theater, theseextracurricular activities, like the dramas they staged, “offered theparticipants . . . a temporary escape from the indignity of internment”and vignettes of the “Anglo-American teenage way of life.”74

Japanese American youngsters also struck new racial-ethnic friend-ships that cut across the rural-urban divide in the Japanese Americancommunity that in turn contributed to their growing recognition of theirracial marker; Seattle resident Harumi Serata was uprooted to Minidokawhich held internees from both cities and countryside, and recalled hergrade-school years in camp as her “great joy,” because “friendships

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were developed that made life bearable. We were all equals in the samesituation.”75 Kiyoko Kasai Fujiu’s experience typified that of those wholived in prewar small towns or the countryside devoid of a visible Japa-nese American community. Uprooted from the rural area of RedwoodCity, California to the Tanforan assembly center and then to Utah’sTopaz camp, she considered the experience of interacting with a largenumber of coethnic peers from both urban and rural areas in both set-tings “really . . . different,” citing it as a contributing factor to their iden-tity formation as Japanese Americans.76 Similarly, for Charles (full nameunavailable), the most vivid memory of the contrast between his gram-mar school in San Diego and the one he ended up in Poston, Arizona,which brought him in contact with rural Japanese youngsters of CentralCalifornia, was the racial homogeneity of the latter. In the absence ofracial tension as was the case in San Diego, he thrived in school andmade numerous new friends, both those from rural and urban areas.77

In the assembly centers and camps, that modeling of mainstreamnorms and the knitting of ties of peer-oriented friendships were fur-thered along by the relative disintegration of family life. In turn, such adisintegration fostered a shift in the power relations across the genera-tional line. The breakdown of the family unit within the camps wasprompted in part by the overcrowded barracks and communal diningand bathroom facilities. Japanese American organizations disbanded inthe wake of the incarceration. With pseudo-kinship ties weakened, thecollective mentality that also undergirded the family was further loos-ened. Young Nisei spent more time with their generational peers thanwith their elders. Children were now less dependent on their parents,since the government provided all of their needs.78 Charles Kikuchi,already in his youth during the war years, noted in his diary that hisadolescent sisters in the Tanforan assembly center (California) increas-ingly diverged from their parents’ expectations of modesty, domesticity,and chastity. They insisted on wearing trendy dress, dating male peers,and ignoring their chores.79

The decline in conformity to social norms and self-discipline amongsome youngsters played out in the form of vandalism, stealing, smoking,gambling, truancy, and general insubordination.80 Thwarted ambitions,lack of meaningful work, the shortage of recreational activities, and alax enforcement of the law also encouraged the upsurge of juveniledelinquency for a few of the youngsters.81 Any discussion of juveniledelinquency of Japanese American youngsters must consider change asrelative. Before the war years, delinquency was at a very low rate, and


scholars have attributed this to two factors: cultural and structural. Cul-tural factors refer to the social norms of conformity and collectivismthat controlled antisocial impulses. Structural ones refer to community-wide policing of behavior by Japanese consuls, Japanese associations,and newspapers.82 Any increase in non-conformist behavior during thewar years by comparison to that of before seemed dramatic. Isami ArifukuWaugh also reminds us that the incarceration—which clustered the eth-nic community together as well as provided law enforcement authoritiesaccess to it—enabled better documentation of such delinquency thanever before. Furthermore, the general wartime alarm that sounded off inthe larger society about promiscuity and delinquency among Americanyouth meant that social scientists, government officials, and others inpositions of authority could have exaggerated the level of anti-socialbehavior. In the Poston camp in Arizona, teachers reported in late No-vember, 1942 of school boys playing truancy and gambling with olderinternees. Young thieves broke into cooperative stores. Managers re-ported of boys shoplifting goods from the stores. In the following monthsthe situation became more alarming.83 In late 1942 in Manzanar andPoston camps juvenile gangs participated in a few strikes that broke outas a form of resistance against the imprisonment. Throughout the firstyear of incarceration, sporadic reporting of delinquency also appearedon other camps. In the Tule Lake camp, youngsters cut classes, smoked,and gambled, while in the Heart Mountain camp twelve—to fourteen-year-old youngsters attended parties that were off-limits to them. In theGranada camp (Amache, Colorado) youngsters destroyed laundry roomsand recreational halls. The problem of gangs of high school age andolder boys engaging in non-conformist behaviors reportedly persisteduntil the end of the war but only for a few of the camps.84

Rebellious adolescents often rationalized their actions as the outcomeof an aimless life. Ernest Uno, who entered the Amache camp in Colo-rado at the age of sixteen, said he was simply a teenager having “ahelluva good time horsing around” and justified his behavior as a reac-tion to the tentativeness of camp life.85 Such rebellious behavior wasthe product of “nothing to do,” to quote one such high-strung teenager.That teenager also defended her peers: “They weren’t bad or naughty.”86

Former Japantown, San Francisco resident, Kiku Hori Funabiki, recall-ing her participation in a raucous party in camp, downplayed her elders’objections, calling it “normal” and “amusing.”87 The evidence suggeststhat none of these mentioned youngsters grew up to be social misfits.

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Insubordination to parents and rebellious anti-social behaviors were alsoacts that resisted unequal power relations that under normal circum-stances youngsters had to abide by.

During the war years some of that quality of tentativeness also ap-plied to education. Even though the WRA, the agency responsible forthe running of the camps, charged schools with the responsibility ofmolding Japanese youngsters to be participating citizens in a democ-racy, the reality departed from the ideal. The contradictions of the edu-cational system continued from the prewar years into this critical erasince it also sent the mixed message that Japanese American studentswere second-class citizens. The outcome of this facet of life in thecamps was predictable: more questions were raised about their tenuouscitizenship.

At the beginning of the assembly centers, the government (specifi-cally the United States Army which ran them) discounted the need forpublic schooling or even recreational activities because of an erroneouscalculation that the time spent there would be very short before themove to the more permanent camps.88 Eventually, with the help ofeducated internees, at some centers school was organized but it wasrather makeshift—the children carried their home-made chairs from class-room to classroom that lacked partitions, and qualified teachers as wellas supplies were woefully in short supply.89 Schooling in the assemblycenters was also non-compulsory. Many young internees recalled thattime as much play and little else; Lilian Yuriko, a grade school girluprooted from San Diego, in a letter to a white acquaintance reportedthat she was happy at the Santa Anita assembly center since she “hasnothing to do except color, read, go to a friend’s house and play out-side.”90

At the relocation centers or concentration camps the WRA madeplans to establish schools for the estimated 30,000 school-age children.The conditions, however, initially demoralized students and teachersalike. For example, in the Topaz camp, construction of the barrackswhere the schools were housed was incomplete due to the lack of sup-plies, an outcome of wartime shortages.91 At other sites, scattered emptybarracks within a wide radius were converted into schools, which meantthat students expended time and effort to get to classes. Teachers andstudents also complained of unheated classrooms (or in the late springand early summers, overly warm rooms), noisy surroundings, and insuf-ficient equipment.92 While the physical infrastructure of most camp


schools did over time dramatically improve, general shortages preventedlaboratories, home economics rooms, and other vocational training roomsfrom operating at maximum efficiency. Students also found themselvesdistracted by the extremities of the weather and the harsh landscape.High school student Tasaki of Poston complained that “school is fine,but my grade is dropping. It is hard to work in this warm weather.”93

In most instances, students in the elementary and junior high schoolsadapted more readily than their peers in high school to school life in thenew environments. Pre-adolescent and young adolescent students showedlittle evidence of overt dislike of their new facilities or an inquiringmind about the quality of schooling. “We were in our teens,” said KatsumiHirooka Kunitsugu, who grew up in the predominately Japanese Ameri-cans’ Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles before being internedin the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, “and we didn’t worry toomuch about the future.”94

Unlike pre-adolescent students, the older ones possessed a keenersense of the physical and mental dislocations and had more at stakesince they were on the threshold of entering college and paid labor.95

Older students questioned the quality of the education offered in thecamps. Fusa Tsumagari, an ex-resident of San Diego, was a senior in thePoston high school and reported to a white friend that her peers believedthat their diplomas from Poston will “not be valid if they try to go tocollege.” Although Tsumagari assured her friend that she did not sharethose sentiments, five months later in a letter to the same friend sheexpressed doubts about her schooling experiences: “We face the situa-tion of being unable to get the much needed education. . . . We all try,but the atmosphere (should I say surroundings) are so disheartening it’sextremely difficult to keep it up.” Her fears eventually delayed herdecision to resettle outside of the camp when the opportunity presenteditself.96

Those doubts were not just prompted by the poor quality of the infra-structure or the lack of supplies and equipment but also by the inad-equate number of, and sometimes under-qualified teachers—a problemreflecting general wartime shortage of such professionals that persisteduntil the camps closed.97 Some of the educators were also uncomfort-able with their complicity in the bankrupt rhetoric of schools as agentsof democracy. The outcome was predictable: teacher turnover remainedhigh, students became disillusioned, and their educational progress inthe early months of incarceration was to some degree held back.98

Adolescent students, possessing an almost developed intellectual

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schema, understood the fallacy of an educational system that purportedto espouse democratic principles; after all, the United States governmenthad imprisoned them and mandated that they enroll in racially segre-gated schools. One teacher observed that the mere mention of the words,“evacuation” and “democracy,” “was sufficient to set off an explosionof critical, bitter comment.”99 In a paper turned in for school work, ShigSakamoto, a tenth-grade student in the Minidoka camp, bemoaned: “Mywant for education is still wanting, but my powers of study have de-clined to an alarming extent.” Sakamoto ascribed his low morale to hisrealization that the relocation was nothing less than an outcome of preju-dice that had landed him in a “place with dust, sagebrush, and uncom-fortable living.”100

The registration crisis (a period beginning in February 1943 whensome Japanese American men and families resisted the call up for mili-tary duty by the United States government) further deepened the de-spair, but only for older adolescents. Most young children experiencedthe community-wide tensions associated with that crisis, but were notdirectly affected by the process. Adolescents, on the other hand, thoughtoo young to be included in the targeted group of eighteen and above,understood a process that questioned the loyalty of all internees, regard-less of their birthright. The director of education of the Poston campwrote in a report that the “youths were bewildered by the fact that theyhad been treated as enemy aliens even though they were Americancitizens.”101 Older students did develop some doubts about the relevancyof their education in a context of a maligned citizenship.

But the schooling experience in the camps was not entirely negative.In fact, a positive outcome was that it provided creative youngsters theopportunity to hone their skills as well as develop self-confidence andassertiveness. Recalled Mayeda about his high school years in camp: “Iwent to camp high school and that was even more fun because discrimi-nation was no longer there.”102 In the absence of racial hostility, whichmeant that the Japanese American pupils were no longer ostracizedfrom extra-curricular events, they could now run for elected offices orbe involved in various clubs. Many Nisei recalled with fond memoriesof the variety of activities—ranging from class picnics to publishing theschool’s annual—that they participated in and how much they enjoyedthem.103 One narrator quipped, “it was fun to be in school.”104 Kunitsugurecalled that in Heart Mountain she and her peers actively took part inschool dances, intramural sports, and the running of the school paper.Kunitsugu herself found her job as managing editor of the school paper


rewarding, and later parlayed those skills into a career of journalismafter the war years.105 In the camps youngsters were most heavily in-volved in athletics; according to historian Samuel O. Regalado, thatinvolvement helped to build character, leadership, and sportsmanship,and as such also cushioned the trauma of internment.106 As explainedby historian Sandra C. Taylor in her study of the Topaz camp, thesituation “was quite acceptable” for some Japanese American students.Some students learned, even excelled, in spite of all of the inadequaciesof the schools as suggested also in the memoirs of teachers EleanorGerard Sekerak, Yoshiko Uchida, and Catherine Embree Harris. Stu-dents cited sympathetic, skilled teachers as the ones who made the criti-cal difference, Bright students seemingly got more out of their educationbecause their highly competitive Japanese American peers challengedthem to try harder than ever before, even though some complained ofthe pressure. Those who had little interest in education welcomed campschools since sometimes they were not as rigorous as elsewhere, andtheir parents could not maintain discipline in the camps.107 And as timepassed on, and as conditions improved, even older students gained moreconfidence and hopeful of the future as reflected in this student’s Junecommencement address in 1943: “All of us can take the same pride inthis graduation we would in any other kind. We have finished our highschool education under heavy odds, but we have had the courage andpersistent [sic] to carry on.”108 When the new school year of 1943/44opened in the fall in the Poston camp, one WRA report duly noted thatthe students, particularly those in the high school, were showing a “no-ticeable improvement” and “more seriousness of purpose.”109 By thestart of that academic year, most camp schools had moved out of theirtemporary structures and into better facilities tailored to the needs of thestudent bodies.110

Wage labor in the camps and in the nearby countryside was anothersignificant positive facet of the youngsters’ wartime experiences. Stu-dents found another opportunity to develop skills and expand their knowl-edge. Students age fourteen or older were allowed to hold part-timejobs, most of which were related to the operation of the camps. Olderadolescents typically were waitresses, kitchen hands, janitors, messen-gers, typists, clerks, drivers, to name some of the low-skilled or un-skilled jobs that enabled various departments to operate on the camps.111

Students also—due to the wartime labor shortage—were allowed towork for farms outside the camps—a phenomenon that unfolded inOregon, Idaho, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. During the summer and

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early fall—sometimes stretching well into the first few weeks of thenew academic year—a good number of high school students were hiredas farm hands.112 Paid labor, regardless of whether it was carried out onor off the camp, and which typically paid $12, $16, or $19 per monthdepending on the classification of the job, was a much welcomed dis-traction given the tedium of camp life. Their jobs also earned thempocket money that enabled them to be less dependent on their parents.Takemoto was fourteen years old when he started driving a truck thatdelivered coal in the Tule Lake camp, and he recalled how excited hewas with the payoff: “We got a whole $16 a month—it was interesting.”That was a marked contrast to the non-waged labor he did earlier on hisfamily’s farm.113 Hayami’s experience also suggests how adolescentsengaged in paid labor gained self-confidence and new skills; he wasenthusiastic about his work as a printer at the print shop and wrote thathe was “learning a lot.”114

The wartime incarceration of the Japanese American children andadolescents introduced them to new socialization, interrupted schooling,and the liberating nature of paid labor. In the case of adolescents, theyalso experienced heightened racial consciousness. The heightening ofsuch a consciousness was unavoidable. The weakening of familial cohe-siveness in a regimented setting along with the questionable nature ofeducation were conditions that shaped an inquiring mind among adoles-cents. Paid labor served to nurture a sense of independence. Overall,these conditions loosened the grip of old social hierarchies on them.Historian William M. Tuttle, Jr., after studying findings of contempo-rary social scientists, concluded that grade-school years are formativeones for political socialization and such was all the more true during thewar years when children received heavy doses of morally laden mes-sages of patriotism and democratic ideology.115

Imprisoned with other coethnics, adolescents over time became awareof how their fortunes echoed that of a multitude of others who sharedthe same disparaged racial marker. Young Nisei may not have been ableto discern complex causal relationships, but some awareness of whatracism represents was hinted in the writings of these youngsters. LikeNakamura in the first paragraph, teenager Mitzi Nagasaka, born in thewhite-dominated Yakima Valley of Oregon, wrote that the first vividimpression she had of the Pullayup center was that “so many persons ofone nationality assembled to gather” in the mess hall. She then con-cluded that “seeing so many familiar faces” made her “realize that [they]would never be able to get out until we would be relocated to our


permanent home.”116 The swift, forced imprisonment in a racially ho-mogeneous environment isolated from American mainstream societyfollowed by repeated attempts to question their birthright (and evenUnited States congressional attempts to divest them of their citizenship)led to self-questioning and the germination of ideas of race and differ-ence as a conscious reality.

Adolescents reflected on the origins of their internment; initially theyplaced the blame on the demands of the war. Ninth-grader TomikoMasuda, formerly of a rural area outside of Portland, Oregon, reflectingon the recent modest 1942 Thanksgiving celebration in the camp, con-soled herself with the thought that they were not starving as it was thecase in Europe’s war-torn zones. She implied that things could havebeen worse given the corrosive nature of war.117 Commemorating thefirst anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the editorial of one AmacheHigh School newspaper’s issue asserted “we have suffered heart breakand humiliation by the cowardice of our ancestral country.”118 Japan’saggression, according to this rationale, set in motion their incarceration.Wartime hysteria, not any deep-seated racism, provoked their evacua-tion and subsequent imprisonment. Commenting on the incarcerationand resistance of some internees to the draft, another editorial of aMinidoka school newspaper counseled responding positively to thegovernment’s order since “in times of war, racial prejudice is bound tobe high.” What happened to them was an aberration, not a pattern.119

Nagasaka, in her school essay, after she considered how both JapaneseAmericans and Euroamericans were expected to ration supplies, con-cluded that though she and fellow internees felt they “have sufferedmuch” yet they “really are as bad off as the Caucasians [in the UnitedStates].”120 High school student Ogawa bemoaned in a letter that herlife was far too removed from civilized existence. Yet she assured her-self that “if American soldiers can endure hardships so can us.”121 Be-sides asserting her fortitude, Ogawa also implied that the physical andsocial exclusion was a necessary part of the war effort. Clearly theseadolescents encountered some difficulty connecting their current incar-ceration to a long history of anti-Asian sentiments in the United States.Unlike their Issei parents who had endured much bitterness in the longinterwar years, their racial exclusion came swiftly and the color line wasdrawn so sharply in spite of their United States citizenship.122 To them,only the chaotic circumstances of waging a war could explain the rapidchange of fortunes. An implied understanding on their part was that this

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was a temporary situation, one that could be reversed once the world-wide conflagration ended.

As time passed some youngsters, particularly the older ones, gradu-ally did develop a more nuanced understanding of the repercussions ofracism, and became more guarded of their actions. This process emergedas youngsters interacted more with their surroundings. Tenth-grader ShigSakamoto, interned in the Minidoka camp in Idaho, bitterly asserted thatas he spent more time in the camp he came to “realize what such thingsas prejudice can do” to change a person’s life course, and also decipherthe “good intentions of some people which are in reality cover-ups fortheir real thoughts, which are to do us no good”.123 Ogawa in a letterrelated how several Japanese American boys out harvesting crops in thecountryside were refused service in restaurants, and asserted “that thereare people all over the world who hate certain races and they just can’thelp it.”124 Racial discrimination, in her mind, was part of human na-ture. Similarly teacher Catherine E. Harris recalled that her high schoolstudents as farm hands were so dismayed with the hostility they encoun-tered in Parker, Arizona, the town near the Poston camp, that theyavoided patronizing the stores. Some students hired in the beet fields ofIdaho in late 1942 alleged that their employers were guilty of laborexploitation that stemmed from racism, and left without completing theircontracts.125 When officials at the Amache camp, Colorado, invitedpredominately white-populated schools to compete against JapaneseAmericans in athletics, only a few responded, and of those few, severalcanceled the event “because of prejudice,” a WRA report duly noted.Officials met the same rebuff in their attempts to organize exchangeassembly programs. In the few instances where Japanese American stu-dents did get to participate in such inter-racial contact, they were, as aresult of all the tensions that developed, highly self-conscious, presum-ably of their racial marker.126 However, in several other camps such asthe Rohwer, Amache, and Heart Mountain ones, no untoward incidentsdeveloped during similar efforts to encourage such intramural sports andother activities.127

During the war years the racial experiences of these adolescent Japa-nese Americans enabled them to sense, albeit tentatively, that race wasone organizing principle of citizenship. Part of this growing awarenessinvolved a tentative process of racial re-articulation as Japanese Ameri-cans tried to reinterpret the racist discourse so that it could become anempowering racial identity. Such “turning the dominant language of


race against itself” problematized their movement between “subject po-sitions” and the formation of their self-identify as “Americans.”128

The adolescents did not always have a way of naming or articulatingthe discourse in precise terms, but certainly realized that their rights hadbeen violated as a result of their racial marker. Ninth-grader Endo in anessay for school work in the Minidoka camp explained that though sheand her family accepted the order of evacuation as a way “to show ourpatriotism to our country,” they also “thought it was unfair deal to uswho are American citizens.” Though she did become reconciled to lifein the camp, she resolved to play a more active role in building a betterAmerican democracy.129 A few older youngsters knew that the intern-ment was unconstitutional; high schooler Esther Nishio, raised in Venice,California, and incarcerated at the Granada Relocation Center in Amache,Colorado, remembered having taken “civics and studied about the Con-stitution, and the Bill of Rights . . . [she] was really shocked and hurt.”Her father already imprisoned by the FBI, she now became aware of herown tenuous status in America, an awareness that motivated her todefend her rights through her involvement in one dramatic camp laborstrike.130 Similarly, Hayami in his diary duly noted that the evacuation“did not go thru the due processes of law. They didn’t have any evi-dence.” He blamed racial prejudice for their internment, particularlysince in contrast German and Italian aliens were not targeted.131 Echo-ing those sentiments were the essays published in the Fourth of July,1943 edition of the Poston Chronicle; one unidentified ninth-graderpenned: “This day we solemnly celebrate without those things that arethe event of this day.” Another student in the same issue struck a morereconciliatory note: “We all look forward to the time when there will bepeace among all men, and America is once again a country where thefreedoms are kept, and there is no racial prejudice.”132

Even though ideology, not race, defined the American peoplehood,racial boundaries forced Nisei youngsters to admit that they had to carrythe burden of proving that they deserved to be admitted into the bodypolitic, and that the effort was hard and challenging. One editor of theAmache junior high school paper in a commentary on the lifting of theexclusion of Japanese Americans from the west coast at the end of 1944echoed that consensus: “I do know that it takes patience and earnestendeavor when one is a member of the minority group.”133 Most schol-ars argue that the internment damaged the self-esteem of the Nisei. Toexplain their misfortune, they blamed themselves so as to avoid seeingthe world as threatening. Some repressed or denied their true feelings.

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They developed a variety of cognitive-emotional strategies to reducetheir dissonance, and one such was identification with the aggressor.134

What they did was no different from what a previous generation andgenerational unit had done in the prewar era: they were trying to “rewireracism to serve their own collective needs and interests.”135 Their racialre-articulation—even though they did not name the process as such orunderstood it in those precise terms—was designed to “gain broad-based acceptance, legitimacy, and class status.”136

To reduce the distance between themselves and non-Japanese Ameri-cans, many Nisei youngsters in their wartime writings took pains todistinguish themselves from the Japanese in Japan, and from the Issei,so as to assert their American identity. When a riot broke out in Manzanarin early December, 1942, Hayami wrote that he could not “see why usinocent [sic] and good guys haf [sic] to pay for stuff that the Japanesedo.” Hayami struggled to position those of his generation in this mael-strom: “Darn it anyhow us loyal Japanese American’s [sic] have nochance. When we’re outside people look at us suspiciously and thinkwe’re spies.” He then continues: “Now that we’re in camp the Japs lookat us and say we’re bad cause we still love America.” Hayami consid-ered himself an American, and could not imagine living in Japan if heever did lose his birthright.137 In her commencement speech deliveredin 1944, Suzanne Nakano emphatically stated “there is no place inAmerica for the Nisei as Nisei”; her cultural roots she asserted wouldonly hinder their acceptance by other Americans. Hers was an unequivocalcall for outright assimilation so as to avoid from suffering the samemisfortune.138 In an essay appended to his diary, Hayami rationalizedthat the recent evacuation was “good” since it “broke up” the “cliques”and “forced them to spread out over the whole US without lookingconspicuous.” Hayami hinted that assimilation, and not ethnic pluralism,was the way to avoid prejudices from forming again against JapaneseAmericans.139

Other youngsters urged their peers to take an active role in safeguard-ing their rights. Some youngsters extolled the centrality of practicingracial tolerance, and in so doing, guarantee equality for all citizens. Thestudent of the winning essay for a 1945 seventh-grade contest in Amacheon a solution to weed out Nazism from a fictional boy character plannedto ask the boy “to go to church to teach him that his parents were loyalto America and that any one race is not any different from any otherrace.”140 An unidentified senior in an Amache high school, writing inan essay for schoolwork, reminded himself and his peers “to try to make


a country that is as nearly perfect as it can be made” by defeating“prejudice and discrimination.” The ultimate outcome of such efforts, heimplied, was entry into mainstream society.141 One 1944 high schoolnewspaper’s editorial urged its readers to do their part to uphold theideals of the United States Constitution so as to promote democracy, asdid the Nisei soldiers who were “clear[ing] away the rough-strewn andunbalanced places” worldwide. It was the constitution, the editorial fur-ther implied, that prevented them from suffering undue harm during thewar years.142

During the war years, Japanese children, like their non-Japanese peers,demonstrated their patriotism: they sold stamps for the war loan drives,served as Victory Farm volunteers, rationed food and supplies, and col-lected used materials.143 One ninth-grader, writing in the Amache juniorhigh school newspaper, called upon all pupils to respond to the foodshortage by helping out in the school’s Victory Garden, and implied thatthrough such labor, they would secure their rights and “make theseUnited States a better place for the Japanese to live in.”144 Ogawaexplained to Clara Breed, in a letter that rationalized the necessity forrationing, that by “sacrificing the things we love will certainly help winthis war to our favor.”145 A much younger girl, Fumiye Ando, who wasin elementary school in the Amache camp, and writing in her schoolnewspaper, urged her coethnic peers to buy war bonds because thatwould make them “responsible part in our country’s progress.”146 Theseefforts were more than just contributions to the fight against the enemysince the youngsters believed they also went a long way toward solidify-ing their tenuous citizenship. Cognizant of the unequal treatment metedout to them, Nisei adolescents agreed with their elders on one score:they had to prove their Americanism beyond any question. To that end,they had to assert their faith in the fairness of the American government,and in doing so, they submerged any critical appraisal of state authority.

Fearful that they might fail in measuring up to the standard of loyalty,older Nisei youngsters, though eager to leave the tedium of camp life,often were apprehensive about resettlement, which the WRA encour-aged less than a year after the internment process had begun.147 The factthat editorials in high school newspapers addressed the concerns of theadolescents was telling; to convince adolescents to embrace the idea ofresettlement, most newspapers characterized it as an opportunity to dem-onstrate their American identity, and in so doing, find acceptance.148

Under this program, the WRA allowed people to leave the camp andrelocate in the Midwest or the East for education or a job, provided they

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sign a loyalty oath, had no evidence in their files that indicated theywere a risk to national security, and could show proof of sponsorship.149

Some of the youngsters encountered racial hostility toward them upontheir arrival and resettling in the new city or area such as was the casewith fifteen-year-old Lilian Sugita. Such incidents reminded them of thepersistency of the color line, reinforcing already expressed uncertaintyabout resettlement. Resettled in a small town in Montana, Sugita and herfamily endured epithets hurled at them, forcing them to labor in acoethnic’s restaurant, “too traumatized to go outside to work.”150 Inanother instance that made headlines, young Toshio Sano was deniedentry into a grade school in Kansas City but on appeal, did secureadmission—an incident that forced one WRA official to issue a reassur-ance to that city that the “government had no intention to relocate Ameri-can-Japanese families in the area in any large numbers.”151 Similarly,Sakamoto recalled being harassed, even beaten, in an all-white school inUtah until his classmates became acquainted with him. Even then hisinteractions with them were limited, and only when he and his familyfinally moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where there were moreJapanese Americans, did Sakamoto finally find acceptance in school.152

Such racialized rejection paralleled the plight of some college students;fear of interracial hostility breaking out led some, though not all, institu-tions of higher learning to establish quotas for Japanese Americans whilea few simply turned them away.153

Many youngsters, however, met little or no overt hostility. In Minne-apolis-St. Paul, one local WRA official reported that some college stu-dents had received so many social invitations on campus and acceptedthem that they ran the danger of exhausting their finances.154 Similarly,Kim Nagatoni reassured internees that her relocation to Pennsylvaniadid not lead to “unpleasantness of difficulties on the trip East and havebeen very happy here at Swarthmore [College].” Revealing her restoredfaith in humanity, she reminded the readers of her old high schoolnewspaper that “Japanese are different only in that they themselvesthink they are different.” Japanese American youth internees have noth-ing to fear about life on the outside, she implied.155 Likewise, FumioNaka, writing from Columbia College, Columbia, Missouri, reportedthat “the people are fine and make us feel at home.” She gushed: “Allthe students are a ‘swell’ bunch.”156 Historian Gary Y. Okihiro suggeststhat the resettlement of college students was a process that benefitedthem: they gained friends, job skills, and contacts.157

Yet most of the older adolescents understood the need to exercise


caution in their interpersonal relations with the larger society given theirrecent racial exclusion. They were highly self-conscious of their ma-ligned, racial difference—a situation reinforced by the reminders of re-settlement agencies that the behavior of a few would reflect upon thewhole group.158 Some became ill at ease with whites; one student whomoved to Lincoln, Nebraska to attend college wrote: “A Nisei puts upthe barrier because he does not know how the Caucasian feels abouthim.”159 High school student Amino also discovered that she had toproceed with caution. She and her family left the Poston camp in 1945and resettled in Chicago, thus reuniting with her older sisters who hadleft earlier for wartime work. On the first day of school Amino ran intoa number of Japanese American students. When she suggested settingup a Japanese club—one that before the war typically organized socialevents for members—she met resistance from coethnics, who impliedthat any expression of cultural difference was an anathema in light ofthe push for assimilation.160 Youngsters were urged by their resettledpeers, to quote college student Joe Yamamoto of St. Paul, Minnesota, to“show that they are truly Americans” by expressing their commitmentto mainstream American ideals and laboring hard “to be assimilated inthe ‘melting pot.’”161

In her letter to the school newspaper, Nagatoni admitted that eachperson’s adjustment to the new community will differ from anotherperson’s: the nature of the community will make the difference. Herpoint complemented the advice of the WRA authority: to relocate toareas with very few Japanese Americans, and better yet, to settle insmall towns so that they will have a good chance of being acquaintedwith the community. The WRA’s assumption here was that the racialconflagration of the past sprung from the ethnic identification and cul-tural retention of Japanese Americans.162 Youngsters agreed with theWRA; Hayami wrote: “If too many Japanese go to one town, peoplewill begin to dislike us.”163 Clearly these older adolescents understoodthe “price” of ethnic pluralism of the past, knew of the unabated hostil-ity toward them, and accepted the need to integrate into the Americanmainstream even at the risk of submerging their ethnicity.

Children, compared to adolescents, were oblivious to the continuingwartime hostilities. Like adolescents, they too welcomed the resettle-ment as an opportunity to escape the monotonous camp life and returnto familiar surroundings, even embark on new adventures. But theirenthusiasm was much stronger than that of their older peers. Minidokaelementary school students complained of the uninspiring landscape;

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they longed for tall buildings, yearned to forsake the rations, and lookedforward to having non-Japanese friends again.164 Sixth-grader TakakoAoki wrote in his elementary school newspaper that he was “tired look-ing at the same things over and over.”165 A third-grader in the Manzanarcamp Kazuo Kamachi, wrote that he looked forward to relocating sothat he “can go to a pretty school, have a good home, and go to showsand stores.”166 The children had grown weary of the overcrowded, com-munal living arrangements and of the sense of isolation. Those who hadresettled with their families often reported that they relished their newway of life in the eastern or mid-western cities and had established newfriendships among non-Japanese peers. Eugene Hayashi, a third-grader,whose family relocated to Minneapolis, reported to friends in theMinidoka camp that he “like it so much better here than in camp.” Hemade new friends, and boasted that he “can go shopping when we wantto, ride street cars, go to a big church, go to shows and all.”167 HiroshiKanno, a first-grader, moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was ecstaticthat her “teacher” was “very nice” to her, that she had “plenty of friendsnow,” and she was not “lonesome at all” even though her family was theonly one that relocated from Minidoka to this city.168

The years that Japanese American children and adolescents spent inthe camps undoubtedly left an indelible imprint on their consciousnessand self-identity. Hisako Koika believed that the “evacuation made youmore conscious of being Japanese.” After the war, she noticed that ather high school in San Diego, Japanese American students “stuck to-gether as sort of a protection-type, security-type thing.”169 Becomingmore aware of their racial marker was only one outcome. Having hadtheir family life, education, and socialization altered, older adolescentssometimes grew bitter or at least confused and then often resolved toend their racial subordination through hard work, education, and inte-gration into the larger society. For children, the internment experience,at least according to the evidence, was far less emotionally traumaticthan it had been for their older peers, though some change in self-awareness did take place. The uprooting from familiar places to newenvironments did not necessarily traumatize them; typically unable tograsp fully the racial implications of that incarceration, and shorn ofadult burdens such as labor, family responsibility, and career choices,these children adjusted to those environments. Like adolescents, chil-dren established a coethnic peer network in the camps that heightenedtheir racial-ethnic identity, even as that network facilitated their adjust-ment to the new settings. And like the adolescents, they were politicized


by wartime messages. Americanization as exerted through the schools,government propaganda, and coethnic peers ironically encouraged themto confront the cleavage between their racialized image and birthright.Regardless of their age group during those years the experience raisedquestions about their place in society, expanded their worldview, andforced them to confront, albeit sometimes in a tentative manner, thedefinition of citizenship.

NOTES

1. Since childhood involves various “stages” of development, I define childrenas those of thirteen or younger in age, and adolescents as those from about fourteento twenty one years old. See N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, “Introduction,” inGrowing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective, eds. N. Ray Hiner andJoseph M. Hawes (Urbana, IL.,1985), xxii.

2. Brian Komei Dempster, ed., From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up inAmerica’s Concentration Camps (San Francisco, 2001), 40-42. This anthology is acollection of first-person reminiscences of adults reflecting on their childhood expe-riences in the camps.

3. See Thomas James, Exile Within: The Schooling of Japanese Americans,1942-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.,1987); Gary Okihiro, Storied Lives: Japanese Ameri-can Students and World War II (Seattle,1999); Yoon K. Pak, Whenever I Go, I WillAlways Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle’s Japanese Americans during WorldWar II (New York,2002); Vincent Tajiri, ed., Through Innocent Eyes: Writings andArt from the Japanese American Internment by Poston I Schoolchildren (Los Ange-les, 1990); Brian Komei Dempster, ed., From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Upin America’s Concentration Camps (San Francisco,2001), and certain parts in EricaHarth, ed., Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of JapaneseAmericans (New York, 2001). The last source includes excerpted accounts of theinternment experience written during that era by children. David K. Yoo’s GrowingUp Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California,1924-49 (Urbana, IL.,2000) covers mostly adolescent and adult Nisei born in an erathat precedes the birth of the generational unit of this study.

4. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Ameri-cans (Boston, 1989), 7.

5. First quote in Yong Chen, “Invisible Historical Players: Uncovering the Mean-ings and Experiences of ‘Children’ in Early Asian American History,” unpublishedpaper, copy in author’s possession; second quote in Elliott West, Growing Up inTwentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.,1996),xiii.

6. Glen H. Elder, Jr., John Modell, and Ross D. Parke, “Studying Children in aChanging World,” in Children in Time and Place: Developmental and HistoricalInsights, ed. Glen H. Elder, Jr., John Modell, Ross D. Parke (Cambridge,1993), 3.

7. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immi-grants, 1885-1924 (New York, 1988), 3, 196.

8. Ibid., 196-97.9. Ibid., 198-210.10. See Yuji Ichioka, “Kengakudan: The Origin of Nisei Study Tours of Japan,”

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California History 73 (Spring 1994): 31-43, 87-88; Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei:Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia, 1997), 49.

11. See Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A Historyof Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley, 2002).

12. Elder, Jr., Modell, and Parke, “Studying Children in a Changing World,” 14,20, quote in 23.

13. William M. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in theLives of American’s Children (New York, 1993), 15.

14. See Stanley Hayami, diary, Manabi and Sumi Hirasaki National ResourceCenter, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. Hayami first kept this154-page diary when he was sixteen years old in 1942. The diary includes a four-page essay on the Nisei’s claim on American citizenship. Hayami would later bekilled in action while serving in the U.S. Army.

15. Katherine Tasaki to Clara Breed, January 28, 1943, Louise Ogawa to ClaraBreed, August 27, 1943, Clara Breed Collection, Manabi and Sumi Hirasaki Na-tional Resource Center, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. ClaraEstelle Breed (1906-1994) was a librarian at the San Diego Central Public Librarywho corresponded extensively with Japanese American children at the Poston campfrom 1942 to 1945. The vast majority of the 250 letters, Christmas cards, andpostcards were written by Japanese American children; only a few of the itemswere written by librarian colleagues. The letters used for this article have neverbeen edited and are available in their original form.

16. Sucheng Chan, “Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender in the Construction ofIdentities among Second-Generation Chinese Americans, 1880s to 1930s,” in Claim-ing America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era,ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia, 1998), 131.

17. Chris Friday, “Recasting Identities: American-born Chinese and Nisei in theEra of the Pacific War,” in Power and Place in the North American West, ed.Richard White and John M. Findlay (Seattle, 1999), 145.

18. Ibid.19. Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations

of an Ethnic Group (New York, 1996), 70, 72-73.20David J. O’Brien and Stephen S. Fugita, The Japanese American Experience

(Bloomington, IN., 1991), 6.21. Stephen S. Fugita and David J. O’Brien, Japanese American Ethnicity: The

Persistence of Community (Seattle, 1991), 42-44; Brian Masaru Hayashi, ‘For theSake of Our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and ProtestantismAmong the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford, CA., 1995), 108-126.

22. Fugita and O’Brien, Japanese American Ethnicity, 93.23. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei, 19-21, 26-27; John Modell, The Economics and

Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900-1942 (Ur-bana, IL.,1977), 113-16; Hayashi, ‘For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren’, 120-121.

24. Valerie J. Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation ofUrban Nisei Culture in the 1930s,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the AmericanWest, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley, 1999), 295-96.

25. Benson Tong, “Asian American Girls,” in Girlhood in America: An Encyclo-pedia, 2 vols., ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell (Santa Barbara, CA., 2001), 1:51.

26. Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese AmericanCommunity in California, 1919-1982 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 76-77.

27. Ibid., 77; Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of A


Japanese American Family (New York, 1993), 131-132. Kessler’s work is a biogra-phy that offers the story of a Hood River family in Oregon.

28Arthur A. Hansen, Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral HistoryProject, Part III: Analysts, 5 vols. (Munich, 1994), 3:50. Hansen’s multi-volumework offers complete transcriptions of interviews conducted with Nisei adults whowere youngsters during that period.

29. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations Oral History Project:Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in theResettlement Era, 4 vols. (Los Angeles,2000), 1:443. This multi-volume collectionoffers complete transcriptions of interviews conducted with adult Issei and Nisei inSan Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Chicago, but who were youngstersduring the war years.

30. Ibid., 3:198; see also ibid., 3:15 for another similar account.31. Hansen, Japanese American World War II Evacuation, 3:50.32. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 3:199; see also

Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place, 76-77.33. Kathleen Coles and Susan Imswiler, eds., Japanese Americans: Generations

in Nevada (Reno, Oral History Program, 2000), 56. This collection of uneditedinterviews focuses on Japanese Americans who lived in Nevada during that era.

34. Mei T. Nakano, Japanese American Women: Three Generations, 1890-1990(Berkeley,1990), 111; Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei, 43.

35. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 4:17.36. Standing Guard Publication Group, Standing Guard: Telling Our Stories

(Placer County,CA.,2002), 60; for another similar account, see also Jill H. Kunishige,“Nisei Journey: How Five Japanese American Siblings Responded to InternmentYears of World War II” (M.A. thesis, Pacific Oak College, Pasadena, California,2002), 67. The first source offers extensive edited interviews with Japanese Ameri-can ex-internees who were children during that era. The second source offers ex-tended excerpts of interviews conducted with adults who were children during thatera.

37. Kazuko Endo, “My Experiences of the Past Year,” December 30, 1942,Japanese [American] Evacuation and Resettlement Study JERS (henceforth JERS),Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, no. 67/14C, reel 322, folderP2.741. The JERS collection—which covered all existing camps—was generatedby social scientists during that period who often made participant observation stud-ies and at other times collected documents of the camp administrations. Amongthese documents were essays schoolchildren wrote for schoolwork, camp newspa-pers that featured columns on children’s activities, and camp school newspapersthat children and adolescents published.

38. Ellen Levine, A Fence Away from Freedom: Japanese Americans and WorldWar II (New York, 1995), 14. This anthology provides excerpts of interviews of arepresentative sampling of adult Japanese Americans who were children in all ofthe different camps.

39. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:9.40. Elliott West and Paula Petrik, “Introduction,” in Small Worlds: Children and

Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, ed. Elliott West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence,KS.,1992), 4.

41. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 4:18. See also severalsimilar accounts of schoolchildren in the farming White River Valley of Washing-ton in Stan Flewelling, Shirakawa: Stories from a Pacific Northwest JapaneseAmerican Community (Auburn, Wash., 2002), 178; also see Dempster, From OurSide of the Fence, 3-4.

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42. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:150.43. Mary Hara, “Reviewing the Past Year,” undated, most likely 1942, JERS,

reel 322, folder P2.741. For other similar accounts, see also Japanese AmericanNational Museum, Regenerations, 2: 210-211, 214.

44. Endo, “My Experiences of the Past Year.” For other similar accounts, seeLevine, Fence Away from Freedom, 15-27.

45. Dempster, From Our Side of the Fence, 21.46. Quote in Pak, Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American, 119.47. First quote in Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to

Manzanar (Boston, 1973), 8; second quote in John Tateishi, ed., And Justice ForAll: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York,1984), 33; third quote in Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, ed., The Issei: Portrait of aPioneer: An Oral History (Palo Alto,CA.,1983), 158; see also Iatsuye Imanishi,“Me,” JERS, reel 322, folder P2.741 for a teenager’s reaction to her father’s detain-ment. Tateishi’s and Sarashon’s works collect long excerpts of interviews withadult Japanese Americans who were children during that era, while the Houstons’book is an autobiography.

48. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1: 10.49. Rosie Nakamura, untitled paper, undated, JERS, reel 322, folder P2.741; see

also Masako Nakae’s recollections in Standing Guard Publication Group, StandingGuard, 60.

50. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 3:175.51. Hansen, Japanese American World War II Evacuation, 58.52. Yoshito Steven Hirabayashi, “The Educational Experiences of Japanese Ameri-

can Children in Relocation Camp Schools During World War II” (Ph.D. diss.,University of San Francisco, California, 1993), 31. This dissertation provides longexcerpts of interviews that the author conducted with adult Japanese Americanswho were children during that period.

53. Jim Akagi, “My First Experience in a War,” December 28, 1942, JERS, reel322, folder P2.741; see also George Takei, To the Stars: The Autobiography ofGeorge Takei (New York, 1994), 12.

54. Akagi, “My First Experience in a War”; Tomiko Masuda, “The Happeningsfrom December 7 and on (41-42),” JERS, reel 322, folder P2.741; Mits Kawachi,“My Experiences during the First Year of War,” December 28, 1942, JERS, reel322, folder P2.741.

55. Kessler, Stubborn Twig, 209.56. Dempster, From Our Side of the Fence, 5.57. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:149.58. Shusho Kumata, “How Our Life Has Changed in A Year,” January 3, 1943,

JERS, reel 322, folder P2.741.59. Dempster, From Our Side of the Fence, 51-53. See also Akagi, “My First

Experience in a War” and Endo, “My Experiences of the Past Year.”60. Linda Tamura, The Hood River Issei: An Oral History of Japanese Settlers

in Oregon’s Hood River Valley (Urbana, IL.,1993), 176. Tamura’s work providesexcerpts of interviews of adult Japanese Americans reflecting on their children’sexperiences.

61. See Levine, Fence Away from Freedom, 50-54 for examples of children’sreminiscences of those conditions. See also Fusa Tsumagari to Breed, April 25,1942; Margaret Ishiro to Breed, September 8, 1942; Ogawa to Breed, September16, 1942; William Bill Watanabe to Breed, January 23, 1943; Ogawa to Breed,January 27, 1943, all Clara Breed Collection. See also Hansen, Japanese AmericanWorld War II Evacuation, 3:59.

62. Katherine Tasaki to Breed, July 24, 1942, Breed Collection.


63. Itsuko Taniguchi, poem, quoted in Gary Y. Okihiro and Joan Myers, Whis-pered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II (Seattle, 1996), 197.

64. Hayami, January 1, 1943, diary. See also Yuko Hirasaki to Breed, Septem-ber 16, 1942, Tsumagari to Breed, May 8, 1942, Breed Collection.

65. Ogawa to Breed, August 5, 1943, Breed Collection.66. Tasaki to Breed, March 16, 1944, Breed Collection.67. For examples of such sentiments, see Japanese American National Museum,

Regenerations, 4:250, 316.68. Standing Guard Publication Group, Standing Guard, 87, 89.69. Hara, “Reviewing the Past Year.”70. Standing Guard Publication Group, Standing Guard, 72; see also William

Akiyoshi, ‘Experience in a Camp,” undated, most likely 1942, JERS, reel 322,folder P2.741.

71. Hirabayashi, “Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,” 39.72. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 4:296. See also

Kunishige, “Nisei Journey,” 55, 71; Hansen, Japanese American World War IIEvacuation, 3:59-60.

73. James, Exile Within, 65.74. Robert Cooperman, “The Americanization of Americans: The Phenomenon

of Nisei Internment Camp Theater,” in Re-Collecting Early Asian America: Essaysin Cultural History, ed. Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa(Philadelphia, 2002), 327, 329.

75. Dempster, From Our Side of the Fence, 82.76. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:158.77. Hirabayashi, “Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,” 37.78. Valerie Matsumoto, “Nisei Women and Resettlement During World War II,”

in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women,ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston, 1989), 116; see also Tamura, HoodRiver Issei, 204, 206-207.

79. Charles Kikuchi, The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concen-tration Camp, ed. John Modell (Urbana, IL.,1973), 53, 62, 89-90. Kikuchi kept thisdiary while residing in the camp; he made numerous observations of his own familylife, including those related to his female siblings and their relationship to hisparents.

80. On how delinquency was tied to breakdown of family life, as understood bywartime social scientists, see Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping ofAdolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 121-122. For reportingof juvenile delinquency, see Rohwer Outpost, February 6, 1943; Topaz Times,March 1, 1943; Poston Chronicle, March 11, 1943; Poston Chronicle, May 9,1943; Poston Chronicle, August 1, 1943. These publications as well as others citedbelow (Heart Mountain Sentinel, Minidoka Irrigator, Press Bulletin, and GranadaPioneer) are camp newspapers generated by the incarcerated communities.

81. Richard S. Nishimoto, Inside an American Concentration Camp: JapaneseAmerican Resistance at Poston, Arizona, ed. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (Tucson,AZ.,1995), 88, 90. Nishimoto’s observations were made during the camp years aspart of his job as a field worker or assistant to social scientists who documented thenature of the camp life.

82. Spickard, Japanese Americans, 56-57; see also Isami Arifuku Waugh, “Hid-den Crime and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community, 1920-1946” (Ph.D.diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 12-15, 156-159, 241.

83. Nishimoto, Inside an American Concentration Camp, 139; Waugh, “HiddenCrime and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community,” 169-71, 178, 199.

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84. Waugh, “Hidden Crime and Deviance in the Japanese-American Commu-nity,” 180-196; “Editorial: Juvenile Delinquency,” Rohwer Outpost, February 6,1943; “It Must Be Stopped,” Granada Pioneer, March 20, 1943; “Group Seek toCoordinate All Activities,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, January 9, 1943; “JuvenileDelinquency No Longer Center Problem,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, November 13,1943. These newspapers were published by schoolchildren and adolescents whilethey were still incarcerated in the camps.

85. Levine, Fence Away from Freedom, 60.86. Ibid.87. Dempster, From Our Side of the Fence, 12.88. U.S. Department of War, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West

Coast, 1942 (New York, 1978), 207. This as well as other government reportsdocumented the origins, implementation, and closure of the camps.

89. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Per-sonal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Intern-ment of Civilians (Washington, D.C., 1982), 144-45.

90. Lilian Yuriko to Breed, April 20, 1942, Clara Breed Collection.91. Sandra C. Taylor, Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at

Topaz (Berkeley, 1993), 120.92. See for examples Arthur L. Harris to Miles E. Cary, memorandum, February

3, 1943, JERS, reel 203, folder J2. 112; see also Thomas, Exile Within, 46-47;Topaz Times, November 17, 1942; Press Bulletin (Poston), September 27, 1942.

93. Tasaki to Breed, May 18, 1943, Clara Breed Collection.94. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 2:250.95. James, Exile Within, 61.96. Tsumagari to Breed, February 2, 1943, Clara Breed Collection.97. William D. Zeller, An Educational Drama: The Educational Program Pro-

vided the Japanese-Americans During the Relocation Period, 1942-1945 (NewYork, 1969), 79-80; James, Exile Within, 47-52.

98. James, Exile Within, 55-56; Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, “The Impact of Incar-ceration on the Education of Nisei Schoolchildren,” in Japanese Americans: FromRelocation to Redress, ed. Roger Daniel, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano(Salt Lake City, 1986), 44, 48.

99. "Summary of Progress Toward Objectives, Core IX,” JERS, reel 203, folderJ2. 112.

100. Shig Sakamoto, “How the War Affected Me,” undated, JERS, reel 322,folder P2. 741.

101. Hansen, Japanese American World War II Evacuation, 3:60, 64-65; quotein Miles E. Cary, “The Educational Program at Poston, Arizona, January 1943,”JERS, reel 203, folder J2. 112.

102. Charles Wollenberg, “Schools Behind Barbed Wire,” California HistoricalQuarterly 55 (no. 3, 1976): 214; quote in Japanese American National Museum,Regenerations, 1:443.

103. For examples, see Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations,1:14, 158, 440, 446, 2:66..

104. Hirabayashi, “Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,”42; see also Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:13-14, 440.

105. Ibid., 2:250. See also ibid., 2:66.106. Samuel O. Regalado, “Incarcerated Sport: Nisei Women’s Softball and

Athletics During the Japanese American Internment,” Journal of Sports History 27(Fall 2000): 439.

107. Taylor, Jewel of the Desert, 125. Taylor’s argument is echoed in various


ways in Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:250; Hirabayashi,“Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,” 39, 42, 52; John Armorand Peter Wright, Manzanar (New York, 1988), 111; Eleanor Gerard Sekerak, “ATeacher in Topaz,” in Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, eds. RogerDaniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H.L. Kitano (Salt Lake City, 1986), 41;Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family(Seattle, 1982), 124-125; Catherine Embree Harris, Dusty Exile: Looking Back atJapanese Relocation During World War II (Honolulu, 1999), 51, 61. The last threesources—essentially autobiographies—document the lives of two school teacherswho taught in the camp schools during the internment era.

108. Zeller, An Educational Drama, 93. See also Masako Okada, “Enter toLearn; Go Forth to Serve,” salutatorian address, June 1943, JERS, reel 322, folderP2.741.

109. "Narrative Report for School Month October 1943, Poston II Schools,”1943, JERS, reel 203, folder J 2.21.

110. See “High School Students to Aid School Completion,” Poston Chronicle,June 3, 1943; “Improvement in School Plans,” Rohwer Outpost, July 23, 1943;“1226 Prep Students Await Opening of New High School,” Heart Mountain Senti-nel, September 4, 1943; “Two Elementary Schools Set for Opening Monday,”Topaz Times, December 28, 1943; Armor and Wright, Manzanar, 108.

111. Lloyd A. Garrison, “Education Section: Final Report,” 1945, JERS, reel309, folder L 7.00.

112. "280 Participate in Camp Harvest,” Hunt Hi-Lites, November 23, 1943,JERS, reel 322, folder P2.761; for coverage of such involvement, see GeneralInformation Bulletin (Heart Mountain), September 25, 1942; Heart Mountain Senti-nel, April 24, 1942; Press Bulletin (Poston), November 6, 1942; Granada Pioneer,November 14, 1942, August 25, 1943.

113. Standing Guard Publication Group, Standing Guard, 72.114. Hayami, June 22, 1943, diary; see also Japanese American National Mu-

seum, Regenerations, 4:195-196 for another similar experience.115. Tuttle, Jr., ‘Daddy’s Gone to War’, 113-115.116. Mitzi Nagasaka, “Memories That Will Subsist in My Mind,” undated, most

likely 1942, JERS, reel 322, folder P 2.741. For other similar accounts, see Japa-nese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:158, 2:311; “School in Poston,”Press Bulletin (Poston), October 23, 1942.

117. Tomiko Masuda, “The Happenings from December 7 and on (1941-42),”undated, most likely 1942, JERS, reel 322, folder P2. 741.

118. "Editorial,” It, December 11, 1944, JERS, reel 296, folder L3.49.119. "Editorial,” Hunt Hi-Lites, March 3, 1944, JERS, reel 322, folder P2.761.120. Nagasaka, “Memories That Will Subsist in My Mind.”121. Ogawa to Breed, August 27, 1942, Breed Collection.122. Edward H. Spicer, et al., Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the

Relocation Center (Tucson, AZ.,1969), 87-88.123. Sakamoto, “How the War Affected Me.”124. Ogawa to Breed, March 20, 1943, Clara Breed Collection.125. Harris, Dusty Exile, 52; “Eight Boys Blast Charges Made By Miller as

Groundless, Unfair,” Minidoka Irrigator, November 7, 1942.126. Lloyd A. Garrison, “Education Section: Final Report,” 1945, JERS, reel

309, folder L 7.00.127. Jiro Sumita, “Friendly Gesture,” Granada Pioneer, December 5, 1942; Jiro

Sumita, “Distance Means Little,” Granada Pioneer, December 12, 1942; “RohwerHigh Plays Host to McGehee,” Rohwer Outpost, April 21, 1943; “Rohwer High

Tong 39

Students Visit McGehee High,” Rohwer Outpost, May 22, 1943; “Invite Cody,Powell Girls to Play Day,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, May 7, 1943.

128. For the concept “racial re-articulation,” see Michael Omi and HowardWinant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (NewYork, 1986); quote on 5; for the phrase “subject positions,” see Lisa Lowe, “Het-erogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora1, no.1 (1991): 24-44.

129. Endo, “My Experiences of the Past Year.”130. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 2:308.131. Hayami, “My Viewpoint of the Evacuation,” undated, diary.132. "What Fourth of July Means to Me By High School Students,” Poston

Chronicle, July 4, 1943. See also “Girl Scouts Give Touching Speeches,” HeartMountain Sentinel, June 19, 1943.

133. "Editorial”, The Spotlight, January 1945, JERS, reel 295, folder L3.43.134. Donna K. Nagata, Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-Generational

Impact of the Japanese American Internment (New York, 1993), 31-32.135. Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 6.136. Ibid.137. Hayami, December 14, 1942, diary.138. Suzanne Nakano, commencement speech, June 1944, JERS, reel 322, folder

P2.741.139. Hayami, “My Viewpoint of the Evacuation,” undated, in Hayami, diary.140. The Spotlight, June, 1945, JERS, reel 295, folder L 3.43.141. Unnamed author, “It All Depends on Me,” JERS, reel 297, folder L4.10.

See also “We Face Future with Faith in U.S.,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, June 12,1943; “Girl Scouts Give Touching Speeches,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, June 19,1943.

142. "Editorial,” Hunt Hi-lites, January 7, 1944, reel 322, folder P2.761.143. Tuttle, Jr., ‘Daddy’s Gone to War’, 112-133; Heart Mountain Sentinel,

May 8, 1943, June 19, 1943, November 6, 1943; Granada Pioneer, February 11,1943, June 9, 1943; Rohwer Outpost, January 1, 1943, February 3, 1943, October23, 1943.

144. Mac Sakaguchi, “Gardens,” Mystic, JERS, June 15, 1943, reel 295, folderL3.40.

145. Ogawa to Breed, June 24, 1942, Breed Collection.146. Fumiye Ando, “The War Stamps or Bond That You Bought Today,” Junior

Pioneer, February 1944, reel 295, folder L3.26.147. "Why Are You Here,” It, October 30, 1944, JERS, reel 296, folder L3.55;

see also Tasaki to Breed, May 18, 1943, Tsumagari to Breed, May 3, 1943, HisakoWatanabe to Breed, October 6, 1943, Clara Breed Collection; Ann Koto Hayashi,Face of the Enemy Heart of the Patriot: Japanese-American Internment Narratives(New York, 1995), 61.

148. "Editorial,” The Condenser, August 30, 1943, JERS, reel 139, folder N1.148; “Editorial,” It, May 19, 1944, JERS, reel 209, folder L 3.55; “Editorial,”Campus Pepper, May 21, 1943, JERS, reel 151, folder 02.156.

149. For impact of resettlement on women, see Matsumoto, “Nisei Women andResettlement”; for impact of resettlement on male and female college students, seeOkihiro, Storied Lives.

150. Levine, Fence Away from Freedom, 175.151. "Kansas Elementary School Admits Nisei After Dispute,” Granada Pio-

neer, November 31, 1943. See also “On Relocation,” Rohwer Outpost, November24, 1943; Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 4:285.


152. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 4:300; for other nega-tive treatments, see also Daniel I. Okimoto, American In Disguise (N.Y., 1971), 49;Hirabayashi, “Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,” 37, 48-49.

153. Okihiro, Storied Lives, 76, 80-81.154. "Public Evacuees Need To Be Educated on Resettlement Program,” Heart

Mountain Sentinel, February 20, 1943; for other similar accounts of successfuladjustment, see Thomas James, “Life Begins with Freedom: The College Nisei,1942-1945,” History of Education Quarterly 25 (1987): 155-174; Robert W. O’Brien,The College Nisei (Palo Alto, CA., 1949).

155. Kimi Nagotani to Sue, letter, undated, reprinted in Campus Pepper, June 4,1943, JERS, reel 151, folder O 2.156. Other positive accounts of resettlement canbe found in Topaz Times, October 27, 1942, May 29, 1943; Rohwer Outpost, May19, 1943, July 3, 1943, September 28, 1945; Heart Mountain Sentinel, February 20,1942.

156. Fumio Naka, letter to Sue, Campus Pepper, May 21, 1943, JERS, reel 151,folder O 2.156.

157. Okihiro, Storied Lives, 135.158. Charlotte Brooks, “In the Twilight Zone Between Black and White: Japa-

nese American Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945,” Journal ofAmerican History 87 (March 2000): 1679; Okihiro, Storied Lives, 37-38, 71-72.

159. Cromwell Mukai, excerpt of letter, undated, reprinted in Topaz Times,October 27, 1942; for other similar accounts, see also Japanese American NationalMuseum, Regenerations, 3:178; Hansen, Japanese American World War II Evacua-tion, 3:70; Hirabayashi, “Educational Experiences of Japanese American Children,”46.

160. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 1:21.161. "Letters to Editor,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, November 6, 1943. See also

“Former Resident Gives Advice to Potential College Students,” Heart MountainSentinel, August 7, 1943.

162. "Minutes of the Coordinating Council Meeting,” November 28, 1944,Manzanar, JERS, reel 150, folder O1.190.

163. Hayami, diary, January 4, 1943; see also Nakano, commencement speech;Chizuko Sakuma, “Our Next Step—Relocation,” JERS, reel 322, folder P2.741.

164. For examples see Stafford Press, May 1944, JERS, reel 322, folder P2.762;see also Erica Harth, Last Witnesses, 198-199.

165. Takako Aoki, “On Relocating,” Manzanar Whirlwind, March 1945, JERS,reel 150, folder O2.061.

166. Kazuo Kamachi, “Why Would I Like to Relocate,” Manzanar Whirlwind,March 1945, JERS, reel 150, folder O2.061.

167. Stafford Press, May 1944,/ˇ˚æóã›–—%¯q22, folder P2.762.168. Ibid.169. Japanese American National Museum, Regenerations, 3:178.

Race, Culture, And Citizenship Among Japanese American Children

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