This historical event of Japanese internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor turns into histories of todays intercultural communication. This example is specific to political histories and looking further, a cultural-group history for the Japanese. Although this historical event is documented, it is definitely not publicized nor has it ever been, therefore it could almost be referred to as a hidden history. Hidden history is defined as, "histories that are hidden from or forgotten by the mainstream representations of past events" (Martin & Nakayama 2013).
It is evident that the United States is not proud of this historical time period. For those of you who do not know, Japanese Internment Camps were put into place by Executive Order 9066. This required almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were either U.S citizens or legal permanent resident aliens. This move was justified as a "military necessity, but later documented that "our government had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage" (Weglyn, 1976). I feel as if this is the perfect example of stereotyping cultures/ethnicities because there was no proof at all that Japanese Americans had anything to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it was just assumed because of similar looks. After 50 long years Japanese American advocates made great strides and Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. This act not only made mention of America's wrong doing, but each victim of internment was given $20,000.
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| Pictured above: 2nd generation Japanese American children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while in Internment Camp. |
Making the shift from history to histories has such a large impact on intercultural communication. "Health studies has shown a 2 times greater incidence of heart disease and premature death among former internees, compared to non interned Japanese Americans"(Satsuki). With a better understanding of what one historical event can place on one certain cultural group it makes me step back and think about the stereotype I place on some groups of people just because of something in history. For example, I will rightfully admit when I see Muslim persons 9/11 comes to mind. I know that this is not right by any means, but reminds me how easy it is to place people who had nothing to do with a historical event into that same group.
Below is a link to a video about Japanese relocation to the internment camps:
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation/videos/japanese-internment-in-america
References:
Ina, Satsuki. (n.d.). Internment history. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history
Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2013). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill
The history of the Japanese interment camps on American soil also stood out a lot to me as somewhat of a dark time in our history. America is known as the world's melting pot, with various cultures and heritages being mixed together to make up what this country is and stands for today. With these Japanese-American interment camps, and stereotyping the Muslin-American community as a whole after the 9/11 attacks, it brings up the issues that there are still prejudices that exist today. I agree with you that it is unfortunate that these still exist this day in age.
ReplyDeleteI always find it so intriguing that we call what the Germans were doing "concentration" camps, but we use the term "internment" camp. Maybe if it's labeled something different it won't be that bad? I'm a big fan of George Takei and his producing a musical about the time his family spent in an internment camp-http://www.allegiancemusical.com/. His goal is similar to your argument that this historical event still remains absent from our retelling of WWII.
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