Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II

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University of Washington Press, 1 d’oct. 2011 - 208 pàgines

During World War II over 5,500 young Japanese Americans left the concentration camps to which they had been confined with their families in order to attend college. Storied Lives describes often in their own words how nisei students found schools to attend outside the West Coast exclusion zone and the efforts of white Americans to help them. The book is concerned with the deeds of white and Japanese Americans in a mutual struggle against racism, and argues that Asian American studies indeed, race relations as a whole will benefit from an understanding not only of racism but also of its opposition, antiracism.

To uncover this little known story, Gary Okihiro surveyed the colleges and universities the nisei attended, collected oral histories from nisei students and student relocation staff members, and examined the records of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council and other materials.

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Pàgines seleccionades

Continguts

An Uneventful Life
3
Toward a Better Society
28
Exemplars
49
Yearbook Portraits
73
A Thousand Cranes
98
Antiracism
118
Nisei Student Relocation Commemorative Fund
140
Notes
152
Bibliography
167
Index
175
Copyright

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Pàgina 19 - One obvious thought occurs to me— that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.
Pàgina 25 - We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over.
Pàgina 152 - Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); and RWB Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
Pàgina xi - Because I believe in America, and I trust she believes in me. and because I have received innumerable benefits from her, I pledge myself to do honor to her at all times and...
Pàgina 12 - If so, send me all the information you can and state at what cost per head they could be landed here; and if their wives and children could be induced to come with them.
Pàgina 58 - Mother and father do not want me to go out. However, I want to go so very much, that sometimes I feel that I'd go even if they disowned me. What shall I do? I realize the hard living conditions outside but I think I can take...
Pàgina 22 - The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country ... is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action. Neither is it a reason to lift an eyebrow at a Japanese, whether American-born or not. . . . There is no excuse to wound the sensibilities of any persons in America by showing suspicion or prejudice. That, if anything, is a help to fifth column spirit. An American-born Nazi would like nothing better than to set the dogs of prejudice on a first-class American...
Pàgina 26 - President empowered the military to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded" and to provide for such persons "transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary . . . until other arrangements are made.
Pàgina 125 - Japanese who were formerly there — nothing sudden and not in too great quantities at any one time. Also, in talking to people from the Middle West, the East and the South, I am sure that there would be no bitterness if they were distributed — one or two families to each county as a start.

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