Week 2 Japanese Internment

Introduction

The Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956 bulk 1942-1946 contains 4 boxes and one map folder, detailing the lives of the Japanese Americans who were wrongfully interned without due process of law during WWII. The historical narrative engrained in these boxes and folder includes the life that the Japanese Americans had to endure from multiple perspectives, such as reports from the War Relocation Authority (WRA) who forcefully removed the Japanese American Citizens from their home, and yearbooks of those who endured such hardships and prejudice. The collection mostly focuses on the relocation camp of Manzanar and Minidoka.

The Historical Narrative

Box 1 of the collection includes reports of WRA, which details the life of the interned Japanese Americans from 1942-1945. There are 9 reports total in this box, which are chronologically ordered to understand the changes that happened during the whole internment process. From the finding aid of box 1, one can discover such information of the camp such as the reactions in and out of the camp, and the general politics inside the camp. Box 2 contains press releases by the WRA, many of them advocating the resettlement of the Japanese Americans out of the camps, as well as more in depth look at the life inside the camp, such as statistics on divorce, education, living conditions, and military services. Box 4 contains works written by Japanese American internees. Box 3 contains miscellaneous articles, speeches, theses and more about the internment of the Japanese. The historical that could be ascertained from this collection is the multiple perspective of the internment, from 1942-1946. One could get a pretty accurate detail of what was life like at the internment, in more or less chronological order. We can see what the opinions of those not only living inside the camp, but those outside as well.

The Missing Piece

One of the major problems of the collection is that both box 1 and 2, which is approx. 50% of the collection, are written by the WRA. WRA was the group that relocated the Japanese Americans, so there is inevitably some subjectivity in the reports. Box 1 which contains the report, is the only one in chronological order, so our main source of the historical narrative, with the cause and affect and datas strung together, is biased.  Furthermore, we are only given two main camps, so the data is limited, as life in other camps may not have been the same elsewhere.

The Remedy

To counteract this subjectivity, I think it is important for this collection to add another box, which has the accounts of the life inside the camp from actual Japanese Americans who endured the hardship of the camp. Then, this data should be ordered in chronological order so the researchers could get the sense of the historical narrative from the Japanese Americans Perspective, and compare it with the WRA’s take on the internment to get a more holistic view of the life in and out of the camp.