Literature Review Of Kikokushijo

The U.S. internment of people of Japanese descent during the 1940s was a major event in U.S. history, but it is often overlooked by many. It affected hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent, whether they were citizens or not. The incarceration of those placed in camps was affected mentally and it caused many of the internees to develop PTSD or otherwise commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder (Potts, 1994, p. 1). The camps affected how the Japanese were viewed in society during the time period of the camps and following the liberation of them. It also changed how the Japanese viewed society. This paper will focus on the cultural and social aspects of the Internal Improvements.

There are many things that happened to Japanese-American immigrants during World War 2 that people in this time period aren’t really familiar with. A story from a Japanese woman, Jeanne Wakatsuki-Houston, who was born and lived in this era, with help from her husband, James D. Houston, explains and sheds some light during the times where internment camps still prevailed. The writing piece titled “Arrival at Manzanar", takes place during her childhood and the Second World War. In the beginning, Jeanne and her family were living a calm and peaceful life in a predominantly white neighborhood, until disaster struck the world and they were forced to move due to escalating tensions between Japanese Orientals and white Americans. At the time, Japanese-Americans, like Jeanne, were forced to live in an internment camp, which is a prison of sorts, due to the war with Japan. The text is being told through a first person point-of-view in which Jeanne herself tells the story through her experiences during the war. In that story, which contains only a part of the original text, much of the setting took place either prior to and during the time she was sent to the internment camps and describes her struggle with it. This story clearly states the importance of family and perseverance which is shown through her use of pathos, definition, and chronological storytelling.

The structure of Kesaya E. Noda's essay “Growing Up Asian in America” facilitates the reader’s understanding of her bi-cultural experiences. The author begins by stating her thoughts on the prejudicial assumptions made by Americans ignorant of the author's culture. The author states early in the essay, “People would ask… Sometimes questions came making allusions to history… “Your parents were in California? Were they in those camps during the war?”. Noda reflects on the historical significance of Japanese immigrants and Japanese- American culture, describing the obstacles these Asian immigrants had to face. She also describes how American opinion on immigration changed once Asian newcomers demanded higher wages, and how these weren't

In her novel When the Emperor Was Divine, author Julie Otsuka presents the long-lasting effects that isolation and alienation have on a person’s self- image and identity. During WWII, Japanese-Americans living in the United States were forced to move to isolated and horrific internment camps. The US government ensured they were separated from the rest of the country. This even included their own families. When the Japanese-Americans were allowed to return home after the war, the result of the isolation they experienced created irreversible damage. They continued to experience alienation, often making it impossible for them to recover emotionally, mentally and financially. Otsuka uses characterization to bring to life the traumas of the war and the effects it had on her characters, the girl, her mother and her father.

By simply referring to the four main characters by their appellation—the mother, the son, the daughter, and the father— it is shown that this isn’t the story of only one family; this is the story of numerous families that were uprooted and torn apart during this period of Japanese internment and discrimination. These four nameless characters can be any Japanese person in the United States and their experiences can be be extended to all Japanese Americans at that time. Meanwhile, the namelessness of the characters also conveys the loss of their identities. One Japanese American who was arrested as a spy said, “We were just numbers to them, mere slaves to the Emperor. We didn't even have names. I was 326” (Otsuka 119). The Japanese lost the basic right to their own names, and consequently, they lost their identities. Knowing that their Japanese identities may them trouble, the children even attempt to change their identities. They said, “We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her” (Otsuka 114). In this way, it can be said that identity is encoded in a name. Much like the children, I attempted to

Thesis: Even though the Japanese Americans were able to adapt to their new environment, the

For the Japanese to arrive to America, the journey was a long one. They came to look for a better life, with many open opportunities. There hopes included to have a life with a new civilization where no one has been before. When the Japanese came for a better life they came as farmers, railroad workers, fishermen, etc. Many troubles came and began to realize their social status from other Americans, they were not always welcomed.

The dream however, was short lived, as many of Japanese were the subjects to nativism. The treatment of the Japanese immigrants who lived in the United States was beyond unjust. In “Chester H. Rowell Analyzes the Problem of Japanese Immigration

After the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, life in the U.S. had changed. It was the first time in a long time that America was attacked on its homeland. This national security threat was a big shock to the people. The Japanese had to suffer the consequences of their attack. Just as the Germans developed concentration camps for the Jewish during World War II, the Americans set up "relocation" programs better known as internment camps to keep all the Japanese. The reason the Japanese were moved into these camps was because they were suspected of being spies. They were forced to live there for up to four years and were not able to continue with their own lives as they were before while they were living in these camps.

At the end of the war, Japanese citizens occupied numerous countries in the Western Pacific, while countless Chinese and Koreans resided within Japan as slave labor. At the time Japan had no vessels or other manner in which to conduct the mass movement of these populations. Under U.S. supervision and with hundreds of ships borrowed from the U.S., six million Japanese returned to Japan within three years; and nearly one million Chinese and Koreans returned to their respective countries in the same timeframe.5 In the end the combined U.S. and Japanese social reconstruction efforts successfully resolved the challenges facing the population.

In forming a self in Japanese society she notes that one is more accessible to gaining further understanding about the culture being studied. Thus, she critiques the traditional ethnographic methods because she finds that older text make objective assumptions that are not necessary the reality of a culture. The assumptions than are seen as the true reality and full understanding of a culture. On the contrary, reflexivity “implies that ethnographic knowledge is intrinsically incomplete and relative” (84). Thus she suggest, that the best path to studying cultures is to acknowledge our bias, assumptions and that of our informants to trace the “parameters, the

In his masterly study of Japanese Brazilian return migrants to Japan, for example, Takeyuki Tsuda describes how, from being a relatively high status ethnic group in “Brazil, Japanese Brazilian workers in Japan found themselves denigrated and shunned by local Japanese, a rejection that engendered a growing realization of themselves as “Brazilian” in their modes of interaction, sociality and conviviality, in their egalitarian vision and in their human capacity to have fun and celebrate

A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images written by Dr. Eiji Oguma, a Japanese historical sociologist, in 1995, was the first book to thoroughly break down the assumption that Japanese perceived themselves to be an ethnically homogeneous nation-state during the Meiji period and during World War 2 (WW2). Prior to the publication of this book, there was a generally accepted narrative among liberal scholars that the pre-war Japanese Empire and its people believed in the myth of homogeneity, which was supposedly the source of their colonialism, discrimination against Koreans and Chinese and their military aggression in WW2. According to Oguma’s extensive analysis of government policies, academic debates and news articles from the Meiji to post-WW2 periods, he convincingly argues that the dominant narrative regarding Japanese self-identity during the pre-war era was that Japanese considered themselves to be

There were four acculturation strategies that was proposed for minority migrants, depending on their level of cultural awareness: (a) assimilation occurs when individuals abandon their cultural identity in favour of adopting the new culture, (b) marginality occurs when individuals abandon their cultural identity and yet have little interest in adopting the new culture, (c) integration occurs when individuals maintain their cultural identity as well as adopting some characteristics of the new culture, and (d) separation occurs when individuals maintain their original cultural identity and do not adopt the new culture (Heggins & Jackson,

Identity is created in language. Through language we show other people who we are and what we purport to be. Our sense of self and our sense of otherness are constructed by the language we speak. Each community has its own language, its own vocabulary or its own sounds of speech, which represent the community’s identity. For instance, the major Japanese regional language, Kansai-ben is characterized as a friendly and humorous dialect by speakers of the standard Japanese. An individual speaking Kansai-ben is therefore acknowledged as belonging to that linguistic group. Speaking a common language develops a sense of belonging to the community. Of necessity or voluntarily, we can assimilate into the particular linguistic group, of which we