Ethics of Identity: Japanese-American Internment
Ethics of Identity: Japanese-American Internment
Since 1893, when Fredrick Jackson Turner announced that the American identity was not a byproduct of the first colonists, but that it emerged out of the wilderness and only grew with the surfacing of the frontier, America has placed a great emphasis on the notion of a national identity. However, the paradox of the American identity is that although the United States is a melting pot of many different traditions, motives, and ideals, there are nevertheless, distinctive qualities that define the "American." It usually takes a crisis to cause an individual, or a nation, to renew itself. However, sometimes it takes a fight for survival to induce it. The incarceration of a numerous number of Japanese American's during World War II explicates one such fight that paved the identities for many, both socially and ethnically. Rarely do history classes or stories dissect this ordeal in order to expose the consequences upon the collective and individual identities of the Japanese Americans. While there is a voluminous body of literature that details the Japanese American narrative, there is little popular discussion of a key question: What do the Japanese internment and assimilation experiences tell us about the "national myth" and the identity of "Americans?" David Kennedy, in "Freedom from Fear," describes:
The chronic discomfort of government officials with their own policy bore witness to the singular awkwardness with which American culture tried to come to terms with the internment episode. What happened to the Japanese was especially disquieting in wartime America precisely because it so loudly mocked the nation's best image of itself as a tolerantly inclusive, fair-minded "melting pot" society an image long nurtured in national mythology, and one powerfully reinforced by the conspicuously racialized conflict that was World War II (790).
David Kennedy's "national myth," the American self-image of a tolerant
Since 1893, when Fredrick Jackson Turner announced that the American identity was not a byproduct of the first colonists, but that it emerged out of the wilderness and only grew with the surfacing of the frontier, America has placed a great emphasis on the notion of a national identity. However, the paradox of the American identity is that although the United States is a melting pot of many different traditions, motives, and ideals, there are nevertheless, distinctive qualities that define the "American." It usually takes a crisis to cause an individual, or a nation, to renew itself. However, sometimes it takes a fight for survival to induce it. The incarceration of a numerous number of Japanese American's during World War II explicates one such fight that paved the identities for many, both socially and ethnically. Rarely do history classes or stories dissect this ordeal in order to expose the consequences upon the collective and individual identities of the Japanese Americans. While there is a voluminous body of literature that details the Japanese American narrative, there is little popular discussion of a key question: What do the Japanese internment and assimilation experiences tell us about the "national myth" and the identity of "Americans?" David Kennedy, in "Freedom from Fear," describes:
The chronic discomfort of government officials with their own policy bore witness to the singular awkwardness with which American culture tried to come to terms with the internment episode. What happened to the Japanese was especially disquieting in wartime America precisely because it so loudly mocked the nation's best image of itself as a tolerantly inclusive, fair-minded "melting pot" society an image long nurtured in national mythology, and one powerfully reinforced by the conspicuously racialized conflict that was World War II (790).
David Kennedy's "national myth," the American self-image of a tolerant
Cited: Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. "Densho Digital Archive." Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. . Fukuda, Yoshiaki. My Six Years of Internment: An Issei 's Struggle For Justice. San Francisco: The Konko Church, 1990. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pak, Yoon K. Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Seattle 's Japanese American Schoolchildren During World War II. Great Britain: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998.