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AnonymousI have been to JANM several times, including school trips, and this is the first time I had a guide who was actually interned. I am nisei and have always been interested in my culture and enjoy learning about it. I have visited Manzanar and one of my final papers in college years ago was actually on President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. Today, however, was especially impactful because of Mas Yamashita and his experiences/stories in camp and after he had been released. His stories about his time at the internment camp in Utah to his shame at being Japanese after war's end really moved me. However, it was during the special photo exhibit of Susumu Ito that I was really moved as I thought about how the people in the photos, Japanese men, women, children, and whole families seemed like "any other family." Very few of the photos showed any depressed state of mind or any animosity towards those who were responsible for their internment. It really showed me how courageous they were. One particular photo showed some members of Ito's family in front of their barracks with a small garden they seem to have grown-it got me to think how strong this group must have been to carry on their lives with any sense of normality. It was a good week with a god ending.
AnonymousI felt privileged to have had the opportunity to visit the museum today. I had been to MOCA right next to it and walked around little Tokyo, but had never had the opportunity to go into the JAN museum. Walking through museums that deal with the hardships that people have encountered is always tough. There is a sense of beauty, love, and pain in the pictures. While the surrounding were hard, many found ways to maintain and/or bring some joy to their lives. Many pictures captured moments in history that might not have been recorded had they not broken the "no camera allowed" in the camps rule.
edited by malvarenga on 8/7/2015
AnonymousMas Y. was our guide at the Japanese American Museum. There were many things that he told us that I never knew the Japanese went through when they came to this country. He spoke of the different marriage rules and how a Japanese man at the turn of the century could not marry anyone but a Japanese women. A single Japanese woman was not able to enter the United States. Men would ask their parents to set up an arranged marriage, and by proxy a wedding was performed. The woman was then able to enter the United States. He also spoke of the difficulties they had when trying to purchase land.
Mas's family was placed in the Topaz camp in Utah. I grew up two hours away from this site and remember our father taking us there and reflecting on what a sad moment in history this was. Mas spoke of a Christmas there and that he remembers someone made a cardboard fireplace and put it in front of the window. On Christmas Eve someone in the camp came through the "fireplace" dressed as Santa and gave him his first toy. A grey stuffed elephant.
My father-in-law was in the internment camps in the United States, but never talks about his experience. For me hearing Mas was a way to understand the pain that my husbands family went through and why he doesn't want to talk about it. Incredibly enough, my father-in-law and Mas grew up by each other after the war. Mas had no idea that my father-in-law was also in an internment camp until I told him today. Hence, reinforcing the fact that they didn't talk about it. He spoke of his time after the war and wanting to distance himself from the Japanese culture. How sad. I was able to ask Mas a few questions that helped me gain more understanding about my father-in-law. I want to share Mas's story and facts with my students so as not to forget the terrible result of war and racism. Thank you again Clay and Catherine for setting up this tour.
AnonymousI really enjoyed visiting the JANM. There were many parts of the museum that opened my eyes to people's lack of knowledge of the treatment of Japanese during World War II. For example, over hundreds of Japanese were taken from Latin America to be traded for American prisoners in Japan. Japanese also faced years of racial discrimination by the American government and people. Even though, many Japanese living in America had volunteered/drafted into the 442nd regiment. Many had died heroically and yet were not recognized for their contributions. This can also been seen the photographs taken by Dr. Ito.
AnonymousWe had a very informative time with your docent this afternoon. It is disheartening and difficult to believe that our country can have such a checkered past. We look at the flaws of today, and shake our heads and think it's better than anywhere else, but when we really dig into our past, it can be awful. The ray of hope of course is that we learn from those mistakes, and while some things never really change, and flaws will always exist, we can at least have places such as these so that we never forget.
On a trip to Manzanar, I spoke to a man who said he was a teen whose father was a guard during those times. He painted a rosier picture of hat happened there, and I can see that as a guard's son, and not a captive, his perspective would be better. But in that context we can piece together that for himself, as a teen during those times, he didn't have a problem with Japanese, he played ball with them, made friends, and lived through that period making the best of that situation. The docent from the Japanese American Museum confirmed that while not an ideal place, as a teen himself, he made the best of it. None of this is to suggest that we overlook the tragedies, injustice, and indignity of what occurred, but we look at these as examples of human resilience of overcoming a terrible situation.
4th grade social studies touches on Chinese and Japanese immigration and thier difficulties on the west coast. A field trip here could be difficult, but with today's climate on Islam and Muslims it is topical, and easy parallels can be made with recent Latin American immigration issues. This could be a big learning experience for students who never really get to see the deeper issues, or meet living historical figures who lived through those times.
edited by dcolato on 8/8/2015
AnonymousLeaving most of my life in the LA area, I'm embarrassed to say that yesterday's visit was my first to the JANM, but not the last I hope. My group docent Catherine, was so knowledgeble. She mentioned that when she was 7, her nurse cousin from Germany send her family a picture of the NAZI flag, adn she thousht it was so beautiful due to its colors, but she didn't know what it meant. Also, that she didn't learned about the Japanese Americans being sent to camps during WWII, until she was 24 working for the Air Force in Japan. I had some knowledge of the topic in college, but I had no idea that the U.S.'s government sent Japanese from Latin America too. Also, the conditions in which they lived at those camps in either the dessert or cold mountain areas, were terrible, and set up like a military camp. The visit to the museum was such an eye opener, I will definitely ry my best to take my students there one day
AnonymousI have attended many field trips with my students to this museum. I find having the docents be actual internment camp residents very powerful, and I still get moved each time I attend. This trip we were toured by Mary. She was very touching in her stories of her life in the camps. She kept saying, "It was so sad." at the end of each anecdote. I found it heart breaking. I know that this is an extremely moving experience for my students, because often I run into them years later and they tell me that they still think about it. Since we do not have Ellis Island museum, this is a great museum to bring students to understand the immigrant experience, and the bigotry that often is focused on new immigrant groups. The experience of the concentration camps is tragic, and our students should be educated in the happenings of the past and also strategies for standing up to wrongs like this in the future.
AnonymousI never knew we had this valuable resource here in town! It has such a great collection and way of presenting facts about the Japanese Internment. The docent was incredible - it made it so much more personal to have someone that experienced the internment talk about it. This is an opportunity that won't be available for too many more years. Another thing that really helped it all hit home was the picture of the Japanese people being loaded onto the buses, and the picture was of the site where the museum is now. I have briefly touched on this dark spot of American history in the past, but I intend to include so much more after having gone through the museum.
AnonymousMy first year teaching the World History teacher and I organized a field trip to JANM and their National Center for Democracy which is the newer museum they have in the Buddhist temple across the way. That space is truly amazing as well because they have a multicultural narrative interactive space that allows students to contemplate democratic values through the perspective of those who have both fought and been marginalized by the same democratic government: the United States. The people at JANM are wonderfully accommodating. We paid for nothing because of the title 1 grant they offer to pay for our transportation. They can only take a small group of students through the museum at a time so we split our 120 students into two groups of 60 so that half went to JANM while the other half explored the National Center for Democracy. Then we switched, went to lunch, and then the students all convened in the downstairs classroom space at the National Center for Democracy where they crated posters about the historical figure assigned to their group. Then we went into the auditorium space, which is really a nice space, where the students presented their posters.
During this visit we had Mary as out docent. As we all learned, many of the docents there are survivors of the internments camps. There are also WWII veterans not of Japanese ancestry as docents as well. The docent tours are worthwhile because they are so narrative driven from a first person perspective which really brings the exhibits and photographs and artifacts to life. Some people may not like this as much preferring to absorb the information on their own, but for our students I prefer the docent tours at JANM. Also, I've been twice now and both experiences were different because of the docents experiences. Because we read Night during the second semester in my class while the students are learning about WWII in their World History class, I want to figure out a way to include the post war anime representations because I want the students to learn that in addition to the atrocities Nazi Germany committed in Europe and the inhumane revocation of rights we committed against Americans that "looked like the enemy" here, we also need our students to understand the aftereffects of dropping the atom bomb. I know the history teacher covers this, but I want to use first person narrative as a different access point into the historical context. This means I'm trying to think of a way if time permits to end the year with one of the two anime titles suggested: Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies. I might use it for the final somehow. Last year we couldn't go to JANM, but this year we will try again because it is such a meaningful experience. We did have students last year that went on their own though and we called ahead beforehand, and JANM allowed them to enter for free. They were given an audio tour and we asked them to take pictures as part of their service learning project presentation.
Anonymous"I didn't want anything to do with my heritage after the war. I do not speak or write the language after my time in the Topaz Internment Camp"
-Mas Yamashita
I plan on using those account of a Japanese American citizen (also our tour guide) in my WWII unit. This real life connection that humanizes war and those who were victims in the U.S. by their own government provides student with a view point that our traditional textbooks in large part overlooks. It is so imperative as educators that we provide our students with a full scope picture of history that isnt written exclusively by the victors. The U.S. is guilty of deplorable actions on its own citizens, these are part of our history too. If we never teach it, we can never learn from our mistakes.
AnonymousI had the privilege of being a participant for the Teaching American History grant and was able to visit the JANM. It is a gold nugget set in this wonderful city of ours. Then, as now, I was very glad to see that Japanese Americans had their national museum in the heart of their city. I am not sure about a Chinese or Korean national museum, but I was quite impressed with the JANM.
I had read and had been part of a theme unit and one of the books used was Farewell to Manzanar. Living in Long Beach (and Los Angeles) and travelling through Terminal Island, I was able to connect with the “setting” of the book. Having been stationed and conducted combat tours in the desert I was able to connect with the other camp’s “setting”. Written in the form of “Lost Names”, I found this book to be very powerful.
Like then, this tour was a wonderful experience. Mary was wonderful and her first person testimonial very powerful. I really enjoyed the exhibits because the way the timeline was set for the events. I really enjoyed the photo exhibit by Sus Ito. As a veteran I COMPLETELY empathize with his pictures: work hard, play harder!
I am glad we as Americans have been able to atone for our sins. I am also aware that history is not that clean. As was mentioned by the docents, the Jewish community balked at calling the interment/incarceration camps "concentration" camps. Caution needs to be given in order for the word to maintain its oomph. We have a big Armenian population who also had their Holocaust. Some may say that not only the California missions but also all the missions built by the Catholics were mini-concentration camps. The Koreans under Japanese occupation was forced-assimilation, the whole peninsula was a concentration camp; this is analogous to, “Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” With that said, I and we cannot deny our past as Americans, but we need to be VERY careful how we present this subject to our students.
Attached are a few little nuggets…
Tony Judt: “Post War: A History of Europe since 1945” explores the German perspective of losing the war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Surveys and http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/review/postwar-picking-up-the-pieces.html
Japan’s non-apologies: https://news.vice.com/article/south-korean-comfort-women-threaten-to-sue-japan-for-20-million-in-the-us
Comfort women in Glendale: http://www.glendalenewspress.com/tn-gnp-me-second-ruling-favors-comfort-women-statue-20150225,0,3061802.story and http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-former-comfort-woman-visits-bronze-memorial-20150506,0,41277.story
http://janmstore.com/products/common-ground-exhibition-magnet
AnonymousI love Little Tokyo, and although I have been to Chado Tea House, I have never been to JANM. I learned so much from this tour. For one, we were so lucky to have a first hand account of the experience in the Japanese concentration camps thanks to our tour guide, Babe. I felt so lucky to have heard his memories - the most visceral was his retelling of his family first living in horse stables and the stench that could not be escaped, even after cleaning and scrubbing the stables as clean as they could.
As for the museum itself, it was interesting to see the barracks reconstructed and for the public to view. I was particularly affected by the fact that the Japanese in these camps never once resisted, never fought back, and that many remained loyal Americans despite their confinement to the camps. I was impressed that so many tried to build normal lives on the camps, participating in activities and pastimes, such as baseball.
I was fascinated and at the same time disturbed by a publication which had a reference page on how to discern between Japanese and Chinese, apparently due to the fact that a Chinese journalist had been mistaken for Japanese. The page had a Japanese face and a Chinese face and pointed out detailed descriptions of certain aspects of the face so that someone could tell the difference. I find it amazing/shocking that so many were held prisoners simply for the blood/ethnic make-up that made them but who didn't define them completely as people.
I was very sad and shocked to learn the details of the Japanese camp experience. Although I knew about the camps and what happened at that time in history, to see firsthand accounts, pictures, and artifacts really made the history come to life and struck me as so unfair and wrong.
AnonymousOur visit to the Japanese American National Museum was special. My group was fortunate to have a guide who was kind and highly informative. He was a victim of the internment camps so he had a unique perspective that he was generous enough to share. He discussed a great deal of his memories, including feeling like he was a “rejected American”. It was terribly painful listening to his experience and memories, knowing that such a nice person could have been ripped from his home and treated so poorly simply because of his cultural background. Our guide told us about officials storming into his family’s home when he was a boy and sifting through their belongings, not telling them who they were, where they were from, what they were doing or why they were doing it. He also told us that when his family received notice that they must leave, they were forced to live in a horse stall. He recounted how they tried to rid the stall of its horse stench, but to no avail. As he explained his experience, he expressed the shock and horror that his six member family had to live in a tiny, putrid horse stall. Even after cleaning the stall, they could not eliminate the odor.
Our guide talked about playing baseball at the camps, the influence older boys stuck in the camp had on him, his sponsorship by Orson Wells, and the reaction of his fellow students when he went away to school (they couldn’t understand why he was in a camp). Despite our trip to the museum being a day of incredible experiences, hearing this lovely man’s story was the most valuable of that day.
AnonymousI found the parallel between the American government’s treatment of Japanese-American citizens and their actions toward Germany’s treatment of Jewish people hypocritical and incredibly sad. I should note first that there is a significant difference, of course, in that America did not starve, conduct torture experiments—so far that I am aware—or murder millions of the citizens like the Nazi’s. What the Nazi government did to the Jewish population was horrific and thankfully, not mimicked by the Americans toward its Japanese-American citizens. Though these two cultural experiences are, in some ways, not able to be compared, they are both incredibly sad.
I am completely surprised that President Roosevelt somehow thought he had the right to remove citizens from their homes and place them in internment camps. Did he get the idea from the Nazi’s and then, for political reasons, turn around and join the war against Germany? It’s a great topic to cover when creating a unit on the Japanese-American experience during World War II. I would also tie in Americans’ fear of Muslims post-9/11 and if America’s fear of extremists could ever lead it to recreate such terrible actions in history.
AnonymousThe exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum was fascinating! I appreciated learning the history of what occurred through the various images and videos. I was struck by images such as the soldiers from the 522nd battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat team in 1945. They were a group of Japanese soldiers holding up a captured Nazi flag. 1st Lieutenant Sakae Takahashi stated, “We’re fighting two wars. One for American democracy and one against the prejudice towards us in America…” I found this compelling. I found the racist signs and images of the Japanese-Americans disgusting. These remind me a lot of the racist caricatures of Jewish people, African-Americans, and Latinos that have been circulated throughout history. I often have my students complete a project in which they search for these types of racist signs and caricatures and compile them into a magazine that includes their feelings about racism and attitudes of other cultures before/after our project. I am absolutely going to add the Japanese-American experience to this project. I think it would benefit my students tremendously.