Japanese Internment Monument field trip

Our field trip to the Japanese Internment Memorial in downtown San Jose was a pretty eye opening experiencing. It is an amazing piece of art dedicated to a period of time in America, and specifically on the west coast, that speaks volumes and is put together beautifully. All things considered, this monument is often times passed when walking down the street without a second look. While on our mini trip we learned a lot about the situation with Japanese immigration into the United States and the situation in America post Pearl Harbor travesty.

It was in the 1880's that the first generation wave of Japanese immigrants, the Issei, started arriving on America's west coast. Most who arrived were middle aged males who worked as agricultural laborers, hoping to one day have land of their own. As the Japanese started to have more and more success in society with their own land and businesses, sentiment toward the Japanese as a people grew. Eventually the first real organized racist league against the Japanese started, the Oriental Exclusion League, and it boasted around 78,000 members. They were set to do one thing, hault Japanese Immigration, and in 1908 they succeeded. This was only the beginning of the prejudice and intolerance of the Japanese people in the states.

The severe restriction of Japanese immigration, called The Gentleman's Agreement, made it so that only the Issei already living here could stay and only their immediate family members could enter. This prompted the popularity of picture brides for Japanese men living in the states. They were arranged marriages with women in japan and they would communicate though letters and photos. They were technically married in Japan, and so finally between 1910 and 1913 more than 20,000 picture brides left Japan and made their journey across the sea to join their husbands in the US. This huge influx of Japanese woman gave rise to more Happa (Japanese-American) families in the US and 2nd Japanese generation, the Nissei, were born.

There was much discrimination and prejudice on the families. The second generations parents couldn't legally own land (Alien Land Act) and to add to that, they couldn't become citizens. Shortly after this unequal treatment, in 1924 the Asian Exclusion Act was passed which barred any further immigration. This is where the monument comes into play. Despite all this widespread discrimination toward their race, the Japanese showed little hostility toward the larger community. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942, President Roosevelt authorized the internment and relocation of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans along the Pacific Coast. The order was called Order 9066 and it allowed the military to evacuate Japanese Americans from their homes and towns, including San Jose, and resettle them into designated "exclusion zones."

One of the vignettes on the moral was of some of the Japanese American soldiers getting ready to go to war against Japan. This part of the monument blew my mind because of the circumstances in which they were participating. The circumstances were, that if you were Japanese male and living in America, you were either fighting in the war against Japan, or you were being held basically prisoner in an internment camp with the rest of your family, away from your home. This specific area of the moral paints a picture of Japanese American men fighting the good fight alongside other American men against their own homeland. Despite all the prejudice and mistreatment their race had endured over years and years in America they still fought. As explained by professor McCune, there were many Japanese men who participated because they wanted to show their immense and swelling pride in being Americans. The fact that these young men, who were 2nd generation Japanese immigrants, could feel so much for a country that had treated them so unfairly amazes me.

The amount of injustice to have been endured by one people, and still there was an overwhelming feeling of Americana pride really just blows my mind.