Yale exhibit commemorates plight of Japanese-Americans interned during World War II
There are many dates on the calendar that commemorate historic events, but the Japanese-American internment “Day of Remembrance,” this Friday, Feb. 19, is not among the most well known. And what occurred in those camps during World War II continues to be shrouded in controversy.
“Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese-American Internment” on view at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library attempts to give both an overview and an intimate view of life in the 10 camps that were scattered in remote areas throughout the western U.S.
More than 100,000 men, women and children were sent to these locations during the spring and summer of 1942 — two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born citizens — because of their Japanese heritage. For the most part, they had no idea why they’d been interned or for how long they would remain at the camps.
Among the highlights of the show are several hauntingly beautiful photographs by Ansel Adams that document the isolation of the camps and portray the dignity and resilience of the interned Japanese-American people, in spite of their situation.
Courtney Sato, a doctoral student in American studies at Yale, curated the exhibit, drawing on the university’s extensive collection of photographs, correspondence, artwork and literature related to the subject.
Sato calls herself a “4.5 generation” Japanese-American because she’s fourth-generation Japanese on one side of her family and fifth-generation on the other.
Although she didn’t have family members interned in the camps, Sato grew up in Hawaii where her grandfather served in the military intelligence service, helping the U.S. government to translate information.
“I always heard about the wartime period and I have family friends who were interned, and my own research is on Asian-American history,” she says, “so when I found out there was such a robust collection of internment materials here, I was very interested in looking into it more deeply.”
One of the greatest discoveries Sato made as she sifted through the materials was the number of personal items like yearbooks, scrapbooks and diaries.
“I did some research and discovered the Stanford University librarian (Nathan Van Paten) had been collecting things on the West Coast for Stanford’s own collection,” Sato explains, “but because he was friends with James T. Bath, the Yale librarian, he was shipping materials related to internment across the country to him pretty much weekly, and that’s how Yale actually acquired a lot of these materials.”
An important aspect of the exhibition for Sato was to show the resiliency of the Japanese-Americans who were sent to the camps.
“They had to share very small barracks with multiple people. There were no partitions. The bathrooms were communal,” describes Sato. “People who were used to privacy were very traumatized by that.
“A lot of camps were located in harsh, desert conditions where there were sandstorms and negative degree temperatures and no insulation in the wooden barracks,” she continues. “When they arrived, they saw barbed wire, armed guards, watch towers (even though) they were told it was for their own protection. And also, they had the uncertainty of not knowing when they could leave.
“There was fear but also intense boredom being confined to this desert space,” she notes.
Despite such terrible conditions, Sato says she was surprised by all the materials in Yale’s archives that reflected people’s creative resilience.
“For example, there’s this 11-year-old who created a cartoon strip and he didn’t have any formal art training,” Sato says. “There are lots of sketches and the yearbooks have a lot of student writing and artwork. So I was interested in creative resilience — how they coped with everyday life, particularly from the youth perspective.”
Another issue Sato addressed in her research for the exhibit is why the camps were actually called concentration camps in California, but are more commonly referred to as internment camps on the East Coast.
“A lot of academic scholars argued that we should refer to this history as concentration or incarceration because internment is actually a legal category referring to the illegal withholding of aliens,” she explains, “while actually two-thirds of people interned were citizens — so it’s an incorrect term.”
Rethinking the history and terminology, Sato notes that “a lot of the critique is about the U.S. government creating euphemisms for what actually happened.”
She says, for example, “The government called them relocation centers, but the people didn’t have a choice and they weren’t centers at all, they were essentially like prisons. People weren’t sure how long they’d be there because there wasn’t any communication and things just kind of unfolded. And so, even when the government said, ‘OK, you can relocate to a non-exclusion zone,’ a lot of people, especially the elderly or those who were sick and couldn’t work, just stayed in the camps until they were forced to leave. Some of the people were scared of the hostile situation outside and worried about finding jobs.”
Besides the creative production in the camps, there are two other important things Sato would like people to learn from this exhibit.
The first is related to wartime, specifically at Yale and what was happening in this area.
“For example, a lot of people who grew up here didn’t know Yale was transformed into an officer’s training program and that professors were writing about the (injustices). So, it’s showing how this is very much a history that wasn’t removed geographically but was very much a part of this space, too.”
The second is looking at internment in terms of the politics of memorializing and remembering it, Sato says.
“The final section documents how in the 1970s and ’80s, descendants of people who were interned wanted to find out more about the history and hear stories about it because a lot of the older generations didn’t want to talk about this chapter of their lives for obvious reasons. Many of these third-generation Americans are now thinking about and commemorating this history that their relatives underwent and translating it in different ways — through plays and political activist’s work.
“As I was putting together this exhibit, I was thinking about who has the right to tell this story? How is it narrated? Sato asks. “The fact is that this is still very much a charged history, a living history that people are still very passionate and sensitive about.”
Exhibit details and programming
“Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese-American Internment” will be on view at Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St. at Yale University in New Haven through Feb. 26. The exhibition is free and open to the public, weekdays and Saturdays between 8:30 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. For more information, call (203) 432-1810.
Week of Remembrance Events
Monday, Feb. 15: “Loyal Citizens, Prisoners of War”; talk by Violette Takahashi; Sterling Memorial Library lecture hall; 3 to 4 p.m. Free and open to the public
Takahashi was a teenager in Seattle when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Her father was arrested and imprisoned in Ft Missoula, Montana.
Wednesday, Feb. 17: “U.S. Security Concerns: From Japanese American Internment to 9/11 and ISIL”; lecture by Norman Y. Mineta; Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall St., New Haven; 4:30 p.m. (door open 4:10 p.m.)
Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was imprisoned as a child with his family at Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming.
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