This week I chose to explore the finding aid for the Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956 bulk 1942-1946. There are four boxes of relevant material stored by the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections, and it’s open for public access upon request. (I can’t wait to check out some collections one day!) Shortly after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the government forced the internment of Japanese Americans. Materials in this collection include publications with many different perspectives such as the War Relocation Authority, Japanese American internees, and advocacy groups. Boxes include materials like published reports, pamphlets, yearbooks, speeches, and more.
Narratives
The first two boxes are publications sponsored by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The WRA is the US government agency that handled the internment of Japanese Americans. The materials included published reports and pamphlets that detailed general aspects of life in internment camps such as education, religion, and employment through the eyes of the government. It argued and provided justification for the internment of Japanese Americans.
The next box included materials written and produced by Japanese American internees. It included their own articles depicting life at camp, such as the conditions, the barracks, sports, school, and employment. The emphasis was placed on the Manzanar and Minidoka internment camps.
The last box was described as miscellaneous and included article clippings, publications, speeches, radio broadcasts, and more. There were various sources like the Japanese American Citizens League and the American Council on Public Affairs.
What’s missing? And how can it be remedied?
Out of the four boxes, two were sponsored by the WRA. To me, it is very problematic if the majority of the narratives are told by the government agency responsible for the internment of Japanese Americans. How can the WRA tell the story of Japanese American internment if they were not the ones to endure it themselves? In this collection, the narrator of history is the WRA. But by including more documents that detail the life of Japanese Americans by Japanese Americans, we can reconstruct the history and present different narratives. In Caswell’s article, she expresses how history becomes silenced when omitted from archives. With more records and narratives that we document from the community itself, the gaps in history will close.
Box three included materials produced by Japanese American internees, so their narratives are presented, but they are not at the forefront of this collection. Also, the emphasis was placed on the Manzanar and Minidoka internment camps. This collection could be strengthened if narratives of Japanese American internees were included from other camps because the narratives would might differ.
In addition to more community based points of view, I would also like to see their narratives on life at camp in a greater context and scope. It would be beneficial to see materials and narratives on how they prepared themselves for camp, how they kept their morale and culture during camp, or how they rebuilt life after camp. Overall, this collection could be enhanced if more materials were drawn from the community as opposed to the government agency.
Great, Katherine! I bet there are some archival collections elsewhere that could help fill in some of these gaps. It makes you wonder how this collection was formed, and why it’s at UCLA specifically.