In preparation for a writing project coming up, I’ve made it a goal to check out more local museums, exhibits, art installations, and cultural places to see how they communicate. And also, you know, #lifelonglearning #SummerReadingProgramKid.
This month’s visit was to the California Museum’s “Uprooted” exhibit, which shares artifacts, personal accounts, and information about the Japanese internment camps during WWII. The internment of Japanese Americans is a part of our collective history that I didn’t learn about until I was an adult living in San Francisco and I was reading a plaque on Angel Island that commemorated the people who were held there (first the Chinese, then later Japanese). This exhibit gave me more context and texture to how quickly racism amplifies to mass hysteria in America.
The exhibit sets the scene with Japanese immigration to California starting in the 1860s and then tells the story of how the bombing of Pearl Harbor served as the inciting incident to rounding and detaining up 110,000 people. One hundred ten thousand. Majority American citizens. Yes.
Some notices/lessons:
Japanese Americans now in their 80s described being in school the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the discrimination they faced from classmates.
It took only 8 months for the U.S. government to “evacuate” over 100K people to camps.
Families were driven from their homes with no expectation of when (or if) they could return, forced to abandon property and businesses. It was noted that Bob Fletcher, a resident of Florin, CA, maintained the neighboring farms belonging to detained families and returned the profits to them once they came back.
There was a beautiful display of artwork, crafts, and furniture all created within the camps from what sparse materials were available to those detained. Heartbreakingly, birds were a frequent symbol.
Four years into WWII, a questionnaire was issued to each person at the camps, asking them to declare their allegiance to the United States. Questions 27 and 28, in particular, tore families apart because it asked whether an individual was “willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty” and “swear unqualified allegiance to the USA and faithfully defend the U.S. from any foreign government”. People who answered no to both questions are known as “No-No Boys” and were transferred to Tule Lake (essentially a max security prison).
Barracks (recreated in the photos below) were bare bones and lacked any privacy at all. I remember seeing similar barracks at the Manzanar camp outside of Lone Pine, CA before a thru-hike and thinking how brutally cold the winters must have gotten.
In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled the internment unconstitutional and people were given $25 and a train ticket to anywhere…as in, “hey, sorry about that…uh, you can go now.”
Many Japanese Americans reported that the detention made them feel ashamed of their culture, some of whom stopped passing it on, and others for whom the theft of their autonomy galvanized them to their culture and made it all the more important to share with their children.
Through the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, redress was attempted and those who had been interned received $20K and an apology from the U.S. Government. I had no idea about this and had all kinds of conflicting feelings about it. (Will we ever make things right with America’s indigenous communities? …with African-American descendants of those who were enslaved? How does a check and a “sorry” from George W. Bush (below) make things “right”?)
The legislation stated that government actions had been based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" as opposed to legitimate security reason.
“In enacting a law calling for restitution and offering a sincere apology, your fellow Americans have, in a very real sense, renewed their commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice.”
One of the most amazing parts of this exhibit is the virtual reality technology at the end which allows you to interact with survivors of the camps. You can ask a variety of questions and listen to them respond, as though you’re having a real conversation. The same technology has been used to capture oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Here is Marielle Tsukamoto…
Many descendants of internment camp survivors have gone on to promote healing and combat forced removal, detention and xenophobia (and ongoing violence against AAPI communities) wherever it occurs through advocacy and nonviolence. Recently, this activism has shown up in response to the Muslim ban and immigrant family separation.