Footprints of Freedom Unit



US History – Japanese InternmentPrimary Source CollectionCalifornia History Standard11.7.5Discuss the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home front, including the internment of Japanese Americans (e.g., Fred Korematsu v. United States of America) and the restrictions on German and Italian resident aliens; the response of the administration to Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups; the roles of women in military production; and the roles and growing political demands of African mon Core State StandardKey Ideas and Details1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas.3. Evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain.Craft and Structure4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).5. Analyze in detail how a complex primary source is structured, including how key sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text contribute to the whole.6. Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence.Integration of Knowledge and Ideas7. Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.8. Evaluate an author’s premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.9. Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sourcesGuiding QuestionsArgumentative: Was the internment of the Japanese Americans justified in a time of war?Informative: What does the internment of Japanese Americans demonstrate about American reactions to the attack on Pearl Harbor?Primary Source DocumentsFrom: Lone Heart Mountain Collection at the University of California, the Estelle Ishigo papersFrom: the University of CaliforniaFrom: the University of California From: the University of California , “Are we Americans again?”, by Estelle Ishigo, Estelle, created between 1942 and 1945From the University of CaliforniaFROM "SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC" ?PUBLISHED IN THE STAR-BULLETIN, HONOLULU, T. H. (archived by the University of California)To the Editor:Never before have I taken a pen in hand and written to a newspaper editor but "there comes a time in every man's life," I suppose. I have been watching with growing disgust the efforts of some misguided politicians in California to create an issue out of the Japanese-American problem…I can see what the Japanese-Americans in our armed forces are fighting and dying for. They are not only fighting for America but they are fighting for the right of their families to live side by side with the more fortunate races that have made our nation the great nation it is today. They are fighting for tolerance. They are fighting to prove they and their families had nothing to do with December 7, 1941.They had no axe to grind and a lot of them are giving their lives to prove it. Probably their last thoughts, as they fall mortally wounded, far from their homes in Hawaii, are, "Well, perhaps this will prove we are Americans."…I speak only for myself as I write this letter. I don't know what my fellow soldiers think on the subject, as I have never brought the subject into open discussion, but knowing my fellow soldiers as I do, I think they would certainly be against those hair-brained schemes of radicals who have nothing better to do during this war than to sit around thinking of ways and means of persecuting a minority…Why judge a whole race of people and refuse them the right to return to their homes in the western states after the war just because of what a disloyal, small minority of their race has done? No one in this war is persecuting the German-Americans and Italo-Americans, and there is no reason in the world why they should, so why impose a penalty, after the war, upon the Japanese-Americans?When I meet a Japanese-American on the street in the same uniform as my own, I know he is fighting two wars, our war and his own private war for his people against public opinion and racial discrimination. I am sorely tempted to salute him and say, "Thou art a better man than I am, Gunga Din."…I am not of Japanese blood but I would be proud to have a transfusion from one of those boys on the Italian front.DUDLEY C. RUISH, Pfc. USAExcerpts from a pamphlet that originally appeared in Fortune magazine, April, 1944, under the title "Issei, Nissei, and Kibei.", archived at the University of California.The displaced Japanese-Americans... There are three different types of barbed-wire enclosures for persons of Japanese ancestry. First there are the Department of Justice camps, which hold 3,000 Japanese aliens considered by the F.B.I. potentially dangerous to the U.S. These and these alone are true internment camps.Second, there are ten other barbed-wire enclosed centers in the U.S., into which, in 1942, the government put 110,000 persons of Japanese descent (out of a total population in continental U.S. of 127,000). Two-thirds of them were citizens, born in the U.S.; one-third aliens, forbidden by law to be citizens. No charges were brought against them. When the war broke out, all these 110,000 were resident in the Pacific Coast states—the majority in California. They were put behind fences when the Army decided that for "military necessity" all people of Japanese ancestry, citizen or alien, must be removed from the West Coast military zone.Within the last year the 110,000 people evicted from the West Coast have been subdivided into two separate groups. Those who have professed loyalty to Japan or an unwillingness to defend the U.S. have been placed, with their children, in one of the ten camps called a "segregation center" (the third type of imprisonment). Of the remainder in the nine "loyal camps," 17,000 have moved to eastern states to take jobs. The rest wait behind the fence, an awkward problem for the U.S. if for no other reason than that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were severely stretched if not breached when U.S. citizens were put in prison.Back in December, 1941, there was understandable nervousness over the tight little Japanese communities scattered along the West Coast… authorities were besieged with telephone calls from citizens reporting suspicious behavior of their Oriental neighbors…Every rumor of Japanese air and naval operations…helped to raise to panic proportions California's ancient and deep antagonism toward the Japanese-Americans…The Associated Farmers in California had competitive reasons for wanting to get rid of the Japanese-Americans who grew vegetables at low cost on $70 million worth of California land. California's land laws could not prevent the citizen-son of the Japanese alien from buying or renting the land. In the cities, as the little Tokyos grew, a sizable commercial business came into Japanese-American hands—vegetable commission houses, retail and wholesale enterprises of all kinds. It did not require a war to make the farmers, the Legion, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, and the politicians resent and hate the Japanese-Americans. The records of legislation and press for many years indicate that the antagonism was there and growing. War turned the antagonism into fear, and made possible what California had clearly wanted for decades—to get rid of its minority... The greatest forced migration in U.S. history resulted. ................
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