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15418 results in Military history

Page 216 of 771

  • Introduction

  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 1-8

  • Summary

    This chapter is the first of two that describe the progress of Mainland Nikkei toward economic success and general acceptance in the United States, especially after 1928. With the help of whites, especially lawyers and large scale farmers the Nikkei were able to cultivate large tracts of land despite the anti-Japanese land laws. The American Japanese also gained entry to schools, to college educational institutions, religious groups, American sports culture, and limited, but not insignificant access to integrated housing, the right to fish the waters of the Pacific Ocean, and in general, acceptance in one sphere after another.

  • 18 - Politics

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 245-249

  • Summary

    The WRA, despite charges of racism against it, encouraged Japanese culture. They certainly did want the Nikkei to assimilate, as did the JACL leadership, but they respected both. Language is usually considered the fundamental marker of culture, and the Japanese language thrived in the Spartan centers in everyday conversation, newspapers, theater, religious services, and elementary, high school, and adult language classes. Religious services were conducted in the mother tongue of the Issei, and all centers offered Japanese language courses. One scholar thought that Japanese was the lingua franca of the centers. At the very least, because of the ebb and flow of English speakers, they were bilingual. Despite Caucasian griping, Japanese was spoken openly outside the centers as well. So neither the militant activity of the Tule Lake rejectionists nor any underlying cultural or racial bias by the WRA prevented the transmission of a mother tongue whose mother country was at war with the United States. The German language fared much less well in World War I. Japanese sports, poetry, and theater existed side by side with baseball, swing dancing, and hillbilly orchestras. This plucky unwillingness to suspend their culture was laudable, but so was the tolerance of the WRA.

  • 4 - The Impact of World War II

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 49-54

  • Summary

    For the Nikkei, the most astonishing thing about December 7 was the lagging backlash. Remarkably enough, it remained largely in abeyance for another ten weeks, till January 25, 1942. Morton Grodzins pioneering 1949 study of newspaper opinion established this point definitively. And this lag endured despite many disquieting developments. The roundup of dangerous aliens of all three nationalities, the stupendous Imperial Japanese victories in the Far East, the welcome of these invaders by the Overseas Japanese in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, the sinkings of American merchant vessels off the coast of California, the loss of the famous British capital ships to Japanese air power, and the use of airborne troops to vertically envelope the defenders of the Dutch East Indies islands were not only Japanese victories. They were unprecedented victories, using weapons and tactics that the Western Allies either did not have or could not employ. These events conspired to worsen the position of Japanese Americans. It has often been said that the lack of presidential leadership contributed to relocation, but that is not entirely fair to a president fighting to keep both a skeptical public behind the war effort and businessmen and politicians on his side.

  • 20 - Freedom of Religion

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 257-268

  • Summary

    “Education was Dillon Myer’s passion,” wrote historian Robert Harvey. Critics have charged that Myer was destroying Nikkei culture, but Nisei behavioral assimilation was already well advanced. Many of their own leaders saw assimilation as the best way to avoid another misfortune like relocation. Closing down Little Tokyos was the means to open up the promise of American life to the Japanese Americans. Therefore, the WRA provided an education to 25,000 Japanese American school-age youngsters, including 16,000 secondary students. At a time when pre-primary schools were far from universal, most relocation systems provided kindergarten and many also ran nursery schools. Education for the handicapped was also supplied. The high schools followed the standard curricula of the time, and English was especially stressed. Summer, vocational, and night school were also offered. Books and equipment were inadequate, but the demands of war shortchanged education everywhere. From early on, several thousand youngsters left the centers to attend college. At a time when Nazis and Communists were sending East European children to slavery in concentration camps and shooting their parents, the WRA were sending Japanese American kids to high school and college.

  • 14 - Economics and the Dust of Nikkei Memory

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 212-220

  • Summary

    Historians have emphasized heavily American consumerism, as both a right and a ritual. The Nikkei were not cut off from this right either, mostly through cooperatives patterned after the famous pioneer at Rochdale, England. The cooperatives were just as remarkable as other Nikkei accomplishments. The Manzanar Cooperative was one of the earliest and most successful. Cooperatives developed under Nikkei tutelage as soon as they set foot in the center. Drawing on their already developed business skills and commercial contacts, the Nikkei developed their own organizations. The co-ops proved profitable from the beginning to an entrepreneurial people and membership was well nigh universal. In addition, members had access to shops in the small towns near them and, through catalogues, to the mail order giants Sears and Montgomery Ward. The co-ops also provided a social meeting place and employed as many of 222 residents.

  • 1 - Racism and Anti-Racism1

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 11-23

  • Summary

    Chapter 2 describes the way in which the Nikkei supplemented their general cultural victories with political ones, thus winning acceptance despite the odds, that is, discrimination against them. This progress was largely the work of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). The JACL undertook a very sophisticated campaign to gain acceptance to a wide variety of West Coast activities. These included access to California festivals, cooperation with the American Legion (their supposed enemy), attention from mainstream politicians, the multiplication of JACL chapters, the networking with American and California politicians high and low. These included Los Angeles city councilmen, sheriffs, newspaper editors, prominenti like San Francisco Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and future U. S. senator William Knowland, scion of the influential Oakland Tribune.

  • 19 - Culture

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 250-256

  • Summary

    Relocation did not subvert Nikkei religious freedom. Until recently, historians have hardly noticed, yet religion was central to the Nikkei. The centers were split between Christians and Buddhists. The presence of Buddhism, a subsidized enemy religion, famously illustrates the point. The Protestants fought for the Nikkei from the very beginning. They admitted the overriding necessity of military security, but not mass evacuation. Once relocation occurred, mainline Protestants then worked to help Japanese Americans, and so did Catholics and Episcopalians. This meant a lot to the Nikkei, who initially felt almost completely abandoned.

  • 21 - Education, the Passion of Dillon Myer

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 269-281

  • Summary

    In the American centers, residents had access to myriad sources of accurate information. From the outset, Milton Eisenhower intended that the Nikkei should have their own newspapers, and these were established everywhere. Critics have called them censored, but that is a stretch. Harold Jacoby, who knew the Tule Lake administrators personally, said that he knew of no instance in which a newspaper edition was submitted to the camp authorities before publication, nor an instance when an editorial or article was “planned for publication.” Nobody in the press ever has absolute freedom, but this view was closer to the reality of center papers. Center editors Tomoye Takahashi, Bill Hosokawa, Harumi Kawahara, Paul Tokota, and Barry Saiki discussed a wide variety of controversial issues. In short, the camp newspapers criticized anything that they thought needed it, the U. S. government, their political opponents, each other, the WRA, the San Francisco government, the Dies Committee, supposed California racists, politicians like Earl Warren, and constitutional and political decisions affecting the Nikkei. The only two issues that passed largely unreported were town, state, and national politics and the war itself.

  • 8 - Definitions versus Historical Reality

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 117-129

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the resistance of the inmates to the centers and their cooperation with them. Historians have often crafted a literature of resistance, but cooperation was far and away the usual response of the residents to the WRA. The centers simply could not have been operated without the cooperation of the vast majority of the evacuees. A small minority resisted the WRA, but many of these were physically or emotionally coerced by a militant minority. Most Nikkei accepted their situation in the camps because they could not do anything about it. But they did not deny their ties to either the United States or the Japanese mother country. They embraced the one and tried to explain the other to Americans. But despite their overall cooperation, perhaps as many as 7,000 of the 112,000 Japanese evacuees were hostile to the WRA, and their hostility resulted in riots at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Poston. These upheavals of the pro-Imperial Japanese resulted in the separation of the pro- and anti-American groups. The disorders caused by the militant minorities did not improve Nikkei conditions, they only provided cannon fodder for anti-Nikkei politicians outside the camps and pro-Japanese politicians inside them.

Page 216 of 771