Week 2 – The Finding Aid for “Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment”

For this week’s blog post, I chose to analyze the finding aid for the archive of materials from the American Japanese interment camps during WWII. Located in the Special Collections of UCLA’s Young Research Library, this collection contains four boxes and a map folder of information.

Off the bat, there is something very intriguing to me about naming the archive of Japanese internment materials “Collection of material about Japanese relocation,” which can be found under the label Title, and differs from the title at the top.  This idea of relocation is also seen in the War Relocation Authority, the government organization that headed the Japanese internment camp system and wrote many of the publications and press releases in the archive. In using the term relocation, rather than internment, it can be assumed that there might be governmental bias within the collection’s contents.  This is problematic, given that entirely honest narratives aren’t often given by the government.

The contents of the archive include press releases, newsletters, school yearbooks, speeches, pamphlets, etc. Two boxes, or half, of the archive come directly from the War Relocation Authority, which I assume is due to the controls on communication and message dispersal placed on internees.  Even the yearbooks and newsletters would have likely needed approval by the War Relocation Authority.  Many of the documents mention what the experience of living in the camps was like, which could help build narratives around that. Surprisingly, according to summaries in the finding aid, the documents also contain information regarding resistance against the camps and prejudice experienced by Japanese Americans, which could deepen these narratives in ways I hadn’t expected.

The data in this archive, while detailed, may not give a full picture of the reality of the time.  For example, Box 2, Folder 11 contains articles from multiple newspapers regarding the bravery of Japanese American soldiers during WWII. Because newspapers are focused on readership, this could be a signal of positive attitudes towards Japanese Americans, so perhaps these articles wouldn’t have offended America. However, on the other side, the newspapers felt a need to publish these articles that would boost the image of Japanese Americans and their loyalty, which could also identify negative attitudes toward Japanese Americans, attitudes that newspapers might have wanted to alter. It is clear that this data, while detailed, doesn’t provide all the information necessary for the narrative of Japanese Americans during WWII. It’s important to gather data from multiple sources, especially outside of the government, to get a more complete idea. Though there is a lot of information about the logistics of camp operation, we don’t yet have a full idea of American sentiment towards these relocated individuals and what the Japanese American families were really grappling with.

In order to get a more complete narrative about what life was like in the camps, it’s best to go to those who lived it. Information gathered from interviews or the like could be useful for an unbiased and honest narrative. With each family having its own unique experience, incorporating each of these into the broader narrative of the Japanese internment camps is necessary.