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Educating Youth in America's Wartime Detention Camps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Roger Daniels
Roger Daniels*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Extract

Pupil for pupil, more has been written about Japanese American students than about those of any other ethnic group in America. They enter into our historical consciousness with the abortive attempt of the San Francisco School Board to segregate Japanese American students in 1906–07 which led to the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–08 between the United States and Japan. As Henry Yu has recently reminded us, scholars were fascinated by the achievements of “oriental” students in American schools in the 1920s. Sociologists and educational psychologists, especially at Stanford University and the University of Chicago and often in conjunction with the Institute of Pacific Relations and/or Robert E. Park's Survey of Race Relations, produced a substantial corpus of work that focused on second-generation Asian Americans and stressed such things as test scores and life course studies. Conceived as studies in Americanization they almost totally ignored the community-run language schools: the lack of sophisticated studies examining these schools remains one of major gaps in the historiography of ethnic education in America.

Type
Essay Review
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 1: A Special Issue on Asian-American Educational History Guest Editor: Eileen H. Tamura , Spring 2003 , pp. 91 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 For accounts of school segregation in California see Charles M. Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) and Irving G. Hendrick, The Education of Non-Whites in California (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1977). For an insightful account of the scholarly literature and Asian American education, see Eileen H. Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education: An Historiographical Essay,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001), 58–71.Google Scholar

2 Yu, Henry Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

3 Three representative titles are: Reginald Bell. Public School and the Second Generation Japanese in California (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1935); Elliot G. Mears. Orientals on the American Pacific Coast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928); and William Carlson Smith. Americans in Process: A Study of Our Citizens of Oriental Ancestry (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1937).Google Scholar

4 For an analysis of the process see Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans. [1977] 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Melbourne, FL: Krieger, 1986).Google Scholar

5 For an account of the controversy, see the volume edited by the late Yuji Ichioka, Views from Within: The JERS Study Revisited. (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1989).Google Scholar

6 James, Thomas Exile Within: The Schooling of Japanese Americans, 1942–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) See also his “The Education of the Japanese Americans at Tule Lake, 1942–1946.” Pacific Historical Review 56 (1987), 25–58. An earlier bureaucratic and somewhat pedestrian account is William Zeller, An Educational Drama; The Educational Program Provided the Japanese-Americans during the Relocation Period, 1942–1945 (New York: American Press, 1969). Other more specialized accounts of WRA schooling include: Rollin Clay Fox, “The Secondary School Program at the Manzanar War Relocation Center” (Ed.D. thesis, UCLA, 1946); Robert Chipman Lee George, “The Granada (Colorado) Relocation Center Secondary School” (MA thesis, University of Colorado, 1944); Yoshito Steven Hirabayashi, “The Educational Experiences of Japanese-American Children in Relocation Camp Schools during World War II” (Ed.D. thesis, University of San Francisco, 1992); Jerome T. Light, “The Development of a Junior-Senior High School Program in a Relocation Center for People of Japanese Ancestry during the War with Japan” (Ed.D. diss., Stanford, 1947); Mildred J. Smith, “Backgrounds, Problems, and Significant Reactions of Relocated Japanese-American Students” (Ph. D. diss. Syracuse University, 1949); Anne Sueko Takemoto, “A Lesson in Democracy: Education in the Poston Japanese American Internment Camp,” (MS thesis, Cornell University, 1986); and Carole K. Yumimba, “An Educational History of the WRA Centers at Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1979). In addition, there are accounts of the educational programs in many of the histories of individual WRA camps, for example, Sandra C. Taylor, Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).Google Scholar

7 James, Exile Within, 170.Google Scholar

8 Sekerak, Eleanor Gerard “A Teacher at Topaz,“ 38–43 in Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress [1986] 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). Sekerak was the teacher of my friend and collaborator, Harry Kitano.Google Scholar

9 Robertson, “Georgia Day“ in Hansen, Arthur A., ed. Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project. Part III: Analysts (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1994), 1–42. Information about unpublished oral histories in e-mail, Hansen-Daniels, October 2, 2002.Google Scholar

10 All California institutions were closed to them but they could attend schools in eastern Washington and Oregon.Google Scholar

11 National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, From Camp to College: Story of Japanese American Student Relocation (Philadelphia: NJASRC, 1943).Google Scholar

12 O'Brien, Roger W., The College Nisei (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1949). Some notion of his Americanizing posture can be grasped from his essay, “Selective Dispersion as a Factor in the Solution of the Nisei Problem.” Social Forces 23 (1944), 140–47.Google Scholar

13 James, Thomas “Life Begins with Freedom: The College Nisei, 1942–1945.“ History of Education Quarterly 25 (Spring-Summer 1985: 155–74.Google Scholar

14 Okihiro, Gary Y. Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). A superior dissertation, Allan W. Austin, “From Concentration Camp to Campus: A History of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, 1942–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2001), focuses on the history of the NJASRC and its struggles with both governmental and educational bureaucracies, should find its way into print soon.Google Scholar

15 The JANM website is to be preferred. The Smithsonian site http://www.si.edu/postal/far/exhibit.html was, unfortunately put together by the postal history folks there and is dominated by paeans of praise for the Post Office for providing postal service to Americans citizens rather than on the injustice of putting children and their parents in concentration camps. The JANM website http://www.janm.org/breed/title.htm is a superb production with extended historical asides and supporting documents, such as a 1943 Library Journal article by Breed. See also Vincent Tajiri, ed. Through Innocent Eyes: Writings and Art from the Japanese American Internment by Poston I School Children (Los Angeles: Keiro Services, 1990).Google Scholar

16 Fiset, See Louis “Redress for Nisei Public Employees in Washington State after World War II.“ Pacific Northwest Quarterly 88 (Winter 1996–7): 21–32. Actually, a Nisei community leader, James Sakamoto, persuaded them to resign for the sake of the community.Google Scholar

17 Several of the essays in Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds. Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America (St. Lucia, Queensland.: Queensland University Press, 2000) illuminate that process, especially John Joel Culley, “Enemy Alien Control in the United States during World War II: A Survey,” pp. 138–51. An early account of the INS camps, still useful, is Paul F. Clark, “Those Other Camps: An Oral History Analysis of Japanese Alien Enemy Internment during World War II” (M.A. thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 1980).Google Scholar

18 The pioneering work on this topic was C. Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. See also his “The Latin-American Japanese and World War II,” pp. 142–45 in Daniels et al. Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress. John K. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread: A Life in the U.S. Foreign Service (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), is a rueful memoir by a diplomat who helped to direct the round-up of Japanese Peruvians. Seiichi Higashide, Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps. 2nd. ed. Foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), is the best memoir by a Latin American internee in English that I know. Max Paul Friedman. Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (forthcoming Cambridge University Press), is a brilliant analysis.Google Scholar

19 Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors, Chapter 5.Google Scholar

20 Books by Fox, Stephen The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston: Twayne, 1990); Timothy J. Holian, The German-Americans and World War II: An Ethnic Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America's German Alien Internees(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Arthur Jacobs, The Prison Called Hohenasperg (Parkland, FL.: Universal Publishers, 1999); and Stephen Fox, America's Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment & Exclusion in World War II (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) are examples of this genre. In response to pressures largely from Italian American legislators and those with large Italian American populations in their districts Congress enacted and President Clinton signed the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act in November, 2000 (P.L. 106–451) which directed the Attorney General to prepare a report detailing injustices suffered by Italian Americans during World War II. The Attorney General's report, a caricature of historical research as Congress had previously ordained the result, seems to have disappeared from the Department of Justice's website—I write on Oct. 8, 2002—but the press release announcing it remains: www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2001/Movember/01_ins_596.htk.Google Scholar