All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien

December 11, 2017 2:14 PM

Earlier this year a film curator at the Internet Archive digitized a 16mm color film reel shot by an unknown cameraperson which captured 17 minutes of footage from a concentration camp for Japanese-American citizens in Jerome, Arkansas in June 1944, showing the daily lives of detainees and camp personnel and their families.

An associated Internet Archive blog post.

Notes on why "concentration camp" is an appropriate term: 1, 2, 3 (Among other reasons, it was used by President Roosevelt at the time.)

During his Senate confirmation hearings in January, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was asked in the context of the World War II detention of Japanese-Americans whether U.S. citizens and permanent residents can be indefinitely detained without charge or trial and his response was not reassuring.

Previously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

posted by XMLicious (16 comments total)

Not a criticism, because there is little information in the film itself, but it seems a stretch to call what we're seeing scenes of "the daily lives" of the detainees. It looks like they were being processed in or processed out in every scene that involved non-whites, except, possibly the graduation scene?

Interesting nonetheless. Wikipedia says ten percent of the camp's population were relocated from Hawaii, which explains the fellow with the lei on his hat.

I have been to the Manzanar site, but did not realize there was one so far east.

A sad chapter in US history (there are, alas, too many)
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:59 PM on December 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

I remember when this was taught to me in school in California (where the rates of interment were really high) they whitewashed and sanitized the hell out of it to make it sound like a voluntary trip to the countryside.

I also had a history teacher one year who dutifully taught the book and then put it aside to call it out rightfully as mostly bullshit, which was nice.

Tangentially - every time I see everyday films from this era I have no idea how everyone's clothes look so damn good. Even the shlubby dudes wearing dirty overalls somehow look sharper than anyone today, like everyone's outfits came out of wardrobe on a well funded movie.
posted by loquacious at 3:08 PM on December 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

They'll be wearing hijabs in the next film...
posted by jim in austin at 3:10 PM on December 11, 2017 [6 favorites]

Some hijabs look amazing, but I wasn't referring to concentration camps. I was just commenting on the everyday clothes of the era.
posted by loquacious at 3:13 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Even the shlubby dudes wearing dirty overalls somehow look sharper than anyone today, like everyone's outfits came out of wardrobe on a well funded movie.

All clothes were made a hell of a lot better back then. For the most part all-natural fibers, more substantial weight cloth, and mostly hand-sewn.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:40 PM on December 11, 2017 [8 favorites]

My late grandfather was a WWII vet (European theater) and he never talked much about the politics of that time. I was relived as I got older because he was conservative & I feared what he'd say.
A documentary on the war came on TV once & as we sat watching it, he didn't say a word until it got to the part about the internment of Japanese Americans.

Finally he said, "what we did to those people, it's shameful." There were tears in his eyes.
posted by pointystick at 3:41 PM on December 11, 2017 [25 favorites]

they whitewashed and sanitized the hell out of it to make it sound like a voluntary trip to the countryside.

People in my schools read "Farewell to Manzanar," but the most surprising thing about all this is that my mom was school-aged in the San Francisco Bay Area during WWII and she says she knew of nobody getting interned, nor anybody giving her shit about her long-ass German maiden name. I find these memories kind of amazing, but perhaps it really was all publicized so much less than what we see today.
posted by rhizome at 3:46 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is a pretty amazing find. The addition of color changes it, somewhat.

This seems as good a place as any to put an observation I've been chewing on for a while. When I hear people who are not Japanese American talk about the camps - and they have been talking about them a lot more since the election, and that matters! - I often hear them talk about them in the context of one person they know who experienced them. As in, my neighbor was in a Japanese American concentration camp. My mother-in-law. A man I met at an event. These are really important encounters, and I appreciate these people for witnessing and passing on these stories and I don't wish to take away from that in any way. But... how can I say it? I think the thing that is hard to wrap your head around, if you haven't spent a lot of your life thinking about the camps, is that this happened to an entire community. With rare exception, if you meet an elderly Japanese American in the mainland United States, they were almost definitely in an internment camp. Folks my age have a slightly greater variety of backgrounds (a few families immigrated after 1965; a few, like mine, moved to the mainland from Hawaii), but any Japanese American you meet, chances are probably at least two to one that their parents or grandparents were in one. My childhood best friend's grandparents were in one. My coworker's dad was born in Jerome. My volunteer buddy's grandfather was in the resistance at Tule Lake (yes, there was a resistance). I don't want people to stop treating their encounters with formerly interned people as something rare and special and worth learning from, because they are, they really are, but I think there's room to do that and also to know that in the Japanese American community, this affected and still affects everyone.

Forgive me for using this thread as a place to dump all my thoughts about internment but I have been thinking about this poem since this thread on radical Asian activists and think it's super relevant right now. I stumbled across it shortly after the election, and even though I thought I'd seen all there was to see on the topic of the internment (super fun times when you want to read about people who look like you but all they ever write about is being sent to prison camps in the desert because that is your community's defining event), it just about knocked me over. It is by Mitsuye Yamada and was written in the 1970s.

To the Lady

The one in San Francisco who asked;
Why did the Japanese Americans let
the government put them in
those camps without protest?

Come to think of it I

should've run off to Canada
should've hijacked a plane to Algeria
should've pulled myself up from my
bra straps
and kicked'm in the groin
should've bombed a bank
should've tried self-immolation
should've holed myself up in a
woodframe house and let you watch me
burn up on the six o'clock news
should've run howling down the street
naked and assaulted you at breakfast
by AP wirephoto
should've screamed bloody murder
like Kitty Genovese

Then

YOU would've

come to my aid in shining armor
laid yourself across the railroad track
marched on Washington
tattooed a Star of David on your arm
written six million enraged
letters to Congress

But we didn't draw the line
anywhere
law and order Executive Order 9066
social order moral order internal order

YOU let'm
I let'm
All are punished
posted by sunset in snow country at 4:01 PM on December 11, 2017 [30 favorites]

Japanese-Americans operated many successful truck farming businesses for vegetables and fruit on the west coast prior to WW2. The concentration camps were accompanied by the confiscation of (often economically successful) Japanese-American owned businesses and farms and their redistribution to 'non-Japanese', i.e. whites.
posted by carter at 4:27 PM on December 11, 2017 [18 favorites]

I remember when this was taught to me in school in California (where the rates of interment were really high) they whitewashed and sanitized the hell out of it to make it sound like a voluntary trip to the countryside.

Sometime when I was in high school, the Baseball Hall of Fame had a touring exhibition that came to the Field Museum in Chicago. I'd seriously wanted to go to Cooperstown since the age of five, but it's kind of a long way and there's not a whole lot else to combine into a trip. Anyway, this exhibition comes and I insist on my dad and brother going. The exhibition wasn't all that great and there was probably no way it could have lived up this idea I'd been building up for most of my life. But then it turns out that Japanese internment was a-okay because people could play baseball. I have no idea what message they thought they were trying to convey, but the failure was astonishing. I'm sure people will assume I'm retconning things to make high school me look super-principled or something, but that was the end of my desire to go to Cooperstown. My mom lives in Vermont now and it's reasonable-ish day trip distance, but what's the point?

I have a vague memory that they made a complete mess of talking about segregation, too, but I don't remember the details.

Improbably, I have been to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
posted by hoyland at 4:41 PM on December 11, 2017

A sad chapter in US history

Not just in the US, either. The same thing happened in Canada - Japanese Canadians were declared "enemy aliens." Their property - beyond what they might be able to carry in a couple of suitcases - was confiscated and they were sent to concentration camps.

When I was a kid, I read David Suzuki's Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life in 1987 (I loved The Nature of Things, so when the book came out I devoured it). He and his family were sent to Slocan in British Columbia, and he talks about it in that book. I would have learned next to nothing about it aside from the crumbs mentioned in a high school history class if not for his book, which in turn made me want to learn more on my own. And media coverage to this day is still all kinds of fucked up - "Not all was bleak" is a literal line in this 2013 Globe and Mail story that was updated as recently in March of this year.

David Suzuki talks about his family's internment in WWII.

Joy Kogawa and her family were sent to Slocan as well, and that became the setting for her novel Obasan.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:18 PM on December 11, 2017 [7 favorites]

every time I see everyday films from this era I have no idea how everyone's clothes look so damn good.

I recently captioned a video on these events, and it was explained that because they could take so little, they often wore their best clothes when being taken away.
on mobile, sorry for brevity
posted by quinndexter at 5:29 PM on December 11, 2017 [7 favorites]

My neighbor growing up was the son of 2 internment camp inmates. His parents owned hundreds of acres of farm land in the future Silicon Valley. They ended up losing all of their land, even though his father served in the army after internment. My neighbor was an employee at Apple from the early 80s on, so he did ok, but by rights his family should have become extremely wealthy oligarchs. He benefitted from some amount of government remuneration but it was like <1% of the money he would have made as the owner of a significant part of Silicon Valley.

He was a cool guy. Took me fishing all the time as a teenager and I babysat his kids. I learned to surf wearing his wetsuit. He never expressed bitterness about what happened and by his description his parents were treated well in the camps, but I can’t help buT think about how the US would be different if there were several extremely wealthy Japanese families who hadn’t lost everything in the war giving money to universities and political organizations and how that would have influenced the political discourse.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:23 PM on December 11, 2017 [9 favorites]

Australia, too, had internment camps for 'enemy aliens' in both world wars.
posted by andraste at 8:37 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Canada absolutely interned Japanese Canadians - but at least books like Obasan are required reading in schools.

I don't know to what extent we interned German or Italian Canadians - there were some, but I don't know if it was as widespread as the internment of Japanese Canadians (which was very driven by racism against them). I do know that we hosted Germans interned by the Brits - with the irony that the majority were German Jews who had fled to the UK to escape Naziism.
posted by jb at 10:11 PM on December 12, 2017

Canada absolutely interned Japanese Canadians - but at least books like Obasan are required reading in schools.

We read Journey To Topaz in school, but I note its subtitle on Amazon is "A Story Of The Japanese-American Evacuation". However, I think Illinois does better than average when it comes to teaching the Second World War, and I was in the gifted class, and I don't know what was taught in the standard curriculum. (I also feel like I read most of the major children's books dealing with the Holocaust in school, which now leads me to worry that the other kids read none of them.)
posted by hoyland at 6:54 PM on December 13, 2017