Holt Library: Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II: People stories

Life in a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp

Our Story: American History Stories and Activities
"Baseball Saved Us" is a story about a young American boy of Japanese descent named Shorty who is forced to leave his home and move to an army prison camp for the duration of the war. You can learn more about the Japanese American experience during World War II by reading "Baseball Saved Us", exploring "A More Perfect Union" online, and by trying out the activities at this link.
Camp Life
Surrounded by barbed-wire fences—and under the constant gaze of armed guards—inmates endured the discomforts, forced regimens, and indignities of confinement. Even so, they strove to maintain some semblance of a normal life, starting schools, churches, and sports teams. But they were never able to escape from the reality that fear and racial prejudice had caused the U.S. government to strip them of their Constitutional rights.
Daily Life
Daily life in the camps was artificial and difficult. Inmates started schools, sports teams, theater groups, and other civic organizations to try to fill their days with a sense of normalcy.

Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow by John Howard
Call Number: E-book
ISBN: 9780226354774
Publication Date: 2009-05-15
Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression.
Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember Their World War Ii Incarceration by Stephen S. Fugita; Marilyn Fernandez
Call Number: E-book
ISBN: 9780295800141
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Examines the long-term effects on Japanese Americans of their World War II experiences: forced removal from their Pacific Coast homes, incarceration in desolate government camps, and ultimate resettlement.

Ethnic and Racial Identity in Multiracial Sansei: Intergenerational Effects of the World War II Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans
This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). [Journal article]

So many children

More than half of the over 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese incarcerated during World War II were children.

Photo courtesy of Bill Manbo Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

Propaganda

Many Americans feared an attack on the West Coast, one they believed would not come from across the Pacific, but from Inside the United States. They made the argument that anyone of Japanese ancestry could be part of an embedded "fifth column," an internal group of enemy sympathizers who stood ready to engage in sabotage.

Japanese first immigrated to Hawai`i in 1861 to work in the sugarcane fields. Many moved to the US mainland and settled in California where they worked as farmers, fishermen, and small business owners.

Photos courtesy of National Museum of American History

Uprooted

The Mochida family, wearing identification tags, awaits a bus. They were forced to leave their two-acre nursery and greenhouse operation in Eden, California, May 1942.

Housed in livestock pavilions

Families were transported to hastily-prepared "assembly centers" within the restricted military zones. These were fairgrounds and racetracks where inmates were housed in livestock pavilions and horse stalls until they could be transported to camps.

Photo courtesy of National Archives

Featured title for checkout

Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference by Joanne F. Oppenheim; Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada (Foreword by); Snowden Becker (Afterword by)
Call Number: 940.53 O
ISBN: 9780439569927
Publication Date: 2006-02-01
In the early 1940's, Clara Breed was the children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library. But she was also friend to dozens of Japanese American children and teens when war broke out in December of 1941. The story of what happened to these American citizens is movingly told through letters that her young friends wrote to Miss Breed during their internment. This remarkable librarian and humanitarian served as a lifeline to these imprisoned young people, and was brave enough to speak out against a shameful chapter in American history.