Looking for help and perspectives

[hakujin]

Greeting 44s. I'm a student at a small college in Arkansas(yeah, I know what you're thinking) and next semester I will be doing a research paper on Japanese internment camps n the United States and Canada. I will be spending the entire semester working on this paper and plan to use it for grad school applications and it is possibe that I may turn this paper into a doctoral dissertation. However, that is far in the future and I must write the actual paper.
My research will focus on the two internment camps in Arkansas and the communities in which they were located. What I'm asking from all of you is contacts that might have first hand experience. Maybe your parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents were relocated and they'd be willing to do a telephone interview or maybe you know someone who wrote a memoir of their experience. Also, if you know professors or academics who have researched this topic that would be good. Other perspectives I'd like to hear are what other Asian-Americans thought of the internment and if Japanese (in Japan) were aware of the internment and if that was used as wartime propaganda. It would be best if you know anyone who was held in one of the camps in Arkansas, but I am willing to listen to anyone's story who is willing to talk.
If you have any other ideas or perspectives for the paper, I'd be more than willing to listen to them. By the way, if you'd like to know more about me personally just send me a private message or an email. I'm not really a message board type of guy.

[Dialectic]

Whassup Hakujin, welcome to the 44s, glad you're aboard.

Hopefully you're enough of a message board guy to read a few responses. Have you tried to contact authors? Joy Kogawa, who wrote a book called Obasan (dealing with the Japanese-Canadian internment) may be willing to discuss it with you. Let me know if you're interested, and we can put you in contact with an author who knows her and see what happens.

If you haven't already, please check out our Declarations of Intent (http://www.thefighting44s.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=1) to learn about our vision and stance (http://www.thefighting44s.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=536). Little Red Book (http://www.thefighting44s.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=29)offers guidance for the type of posting we want to see here, and Integral Slanted (http://www.thefighting44s.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=39) discusses the more complex aspects of Integral Theory and Practice, the principles of which we use to develop this site, and on which I conduct my life.

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Thanks for joining, and have some fun!

[KeJia Sista]

Are you familiar with Yuri Kochiyama? I can ask if she would like to be interviewed. I believe her family was in a camp in Arkansas.

http://www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/kochiyama/kochiyama-bio.html

KeJia Sista

[hakujin]

Thanks for the help, guys. I've heard of Joy Kogawa, but have not read "Obasan" (yet). I've also heard of Yuri Kochiyama, but am not too familiar with her. I think interviewing her would be fascinating. Do you know where she lives now? Most likely, I would have to do a phone interview since I'm in Arkansas and I doubt she's anywhere near this hole. Next week is finals week, so I have to get that out of the way first. The same goes with interviewing Joy Kogawa.

Honestly, this is only the beginning of the paper and I'm still trying to come up with a thesis. We are encouraged to do local topics for our paper, as firsthand documents are more readily available. For this reason, I'd like to focus on the camps in Arkansas. I believe that the University of Arkansas - Little Rock has recently published some information on Japanese internment and a documentary on the subject recently premiered there. I'll be heading over to their library in a couple weeks to collect info.

I am more or less looking for different perspectives or angles on the subject. This is a pretty well documented subject, so I'd like to do some original research on it. I'll be emailing a couple of professors I had in Japan and see if they have any suggestions. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions and keep them coming. It looks like I've come to the right place for help.

By the way, I'm sure I'll be posting in reply to this topic, but I don't know how much I'll get involved in the rest of the board.

[BeTheReds]

None of my Asian relatives were even in the USA at the time, but, from the AA studies courses I took, many sources showed that some Chinese and Korean Americans were actually glad that the Japanese-Americans were being interned. They even circluated aritcles with ethnographies so that someone might be able to distinguish a chinese from a japanese, so as not to be racist (or as racist) to the wrong person. Among Korean-Americans, buttons with the message "I'm Korean. I hate the Japs more than you do!" were circulated.

Most of this was because at the time, Asian-Americans didn't exist at any level as a political entity, because often they didn't even consider themselves Americans yet, and because they didn't differentiate between Japanese and Japanese-American.

[Dialectic]

"I'm Chinese" badges were definitely distributed in Canada, though I'm not certain whether "I hate Japs" was included on any of them (I haven't heard of it, anyway, but it wouldn't be surprising). It got to the point where Japanese were wearing them too to avoid harrassment.

[hakujin]

Thanks to all of you who gave help and information on this topic. Unfortunatelely, it seems as if I will have to change topics for my paper. Apparently, this is a very popular topic and they don't want anyone else writing about it. I've been trying to come up with another idea, and I'm gonna try to do something about the Civil Rights Movement in my hometown in the '50s and '60s. I'll probably get the same response for this proposal, but it's worth a shot. If I am able to do that, an interview with Yuri Kochiyama may still be something I want to do, though the nature of my questions would be different.

[kalbi]

http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/posterlifetext.html


Also from LIFE magazine 1941:

http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/posterchinesetype.html
http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/posterjapanesetype.html



Intersting, eh? Hope that helps some.

[Subwaybrum]

hahahaha jesus christ. Reminds me of when i saw on tv here in australia an old clip of a news/current affairs show. The story was about an aboriginal boy who had been killed by a shark, and then the reporter turns to some sort of expert sitting next to him and asks "are black people more likely to be eaten by sharks than white people?". The audience of the show displaying that footage made a awwww sound the moment he asked. :lol: