Ramblings '43

March 20, 2018 12:56 PM

The Student Yearbooks of a Japanese-American Detention Camp: Topaz operated like any other 1940s U.S. high school, except its teenagers were prisoners of the federal government (single link Atlas Obscura link)

The Utah State University library has digitized the original yearbook.

posted by crazy with stars (10 comments total)

This sounds like the plot to a dystopian young adult novel. Sad when what should be dark fiction is history.
posted by vorpal bunny at 1:00 PM on March 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

A film reel digitized by the Internet Archive last year contained, among other things, footage of a high school graduation ceremony at another camp in Arkansas.
posted by XMLicious at 1:18 PM on March 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm also noticing that someone in that thread mentions reading a book titled Journey to Topaz in school.
posted by XMLicious at 1:23 PM on March 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

This post got me to check to see that my neighbor who lived through this is still doing speaking engagements this year at the age of 95. Her calendar had gone dark and I had worried. She was a farm-girl who grew up farming strawberries not far from my house; there are farms like hers was still in the area.

The detainees are all goddamned American Heroes for being as stoic as they were about a unimaginable outrage. Reading about it is horrific. Nobody raised a fuss. It was just what you did; you checked in with the meager belongings you could carry and then bounced around from shitty place to shitty place trying to put a good face on it and live a normal life while demonstrating Upstanding Citizenship. Its heartbreaking. Its heartbreaking to stand on the shitty soil of these places and feel the desert wind and see the scrubby brush and marvel that people grew gardens here, that growing was an act of defying Nature itself that nothing could thrive in this place.

That photo of Ramblings being passed out is it in a nutshell: that's the same fucked-looking process that happens in schools across the US to this day being made done out the windows of a US government flypaper shack in a concentration camp. Capitol-N normal, God bless them.

There are many lessons. Not the least of which: This is what the US will do to you. You will be as Job.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:45 PM on March 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Fascinating- thanks for sharing. So sad, strange, and interesting to look in on the faces of the instructors and students and just wonder what is behind each smile, or lack thereof, in the pictures.
posted by Secretariat at 2:01 PM on March 20, 2018

Nobody raised a fuss.
Fred Korematsu refused to go and when he was eventually arrested, took it to the Supreme Court. Minoru Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi also took their cases to the Supreme Court. There was a group of people who hid in the hills before being taken to the camps. (I'm forgetting where I saw that, so no link to who, sorry.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 6:13 PM on March 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

Nobody raised a fuss. It was just what you did; you checked in with the meager belongings you could carry and then bounced around from shitty place to shitty place trying to put a good face on it and live a normal life while demonstrating Upstanding Citizenship.

So... you've never heard of the no-no boys, I take it. Or the Manzanar riot. Or the work of Miné Okubo, a quiet form of resistance unto itself. Or any of the other people who put up as much resistance as they could, given that they stood the chance to die at the end of a soldier's rifle for their resistance.
posted by palomar at 7:05 PM on March 20, 2018 [12 favorites]

These are amazing, and heartbreaking; thank you for the link. Anybody else out there who first became familiar with the internment camps through Yoshiko Uchida's children's novels?
posted by huimangm at 8:00 PM on March 20, 2018

Anybody else out there who first became familiar with the internment camps through Yoshiko Uchida's children's novels?

Me. I was in middle school, and I remember feeling so outraged and so disappointed. I read so many books on the topic that year; wrote a few essays for class projects, and got really angry. This was also about the time I started loathing a lot of war-related stories and movies that seemed to glorify the cause.
posted by PearlRose at 6:56 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I hope America never forgets about this. I don’t ask my kid’s grandparents about internment any more though. I wanted to show my concern, but it is a painful time for them to think back to. Families lost their farms, families were broken up as brothers got discharged one by one to work in different states, so it had long lasting bad effects and they worked hard in the decades after the war to put it behind them.

I told my daughter though, the principle effect being that she won’t read books by Dr Seuss because “he hates Japanese people”, ie he was a fucking racist who actively campaigned for Japanese internment. Seriously. People say he apologized, but he never did accept Japanese Americans as being Americans, he just decided long after the war to forgive “the Japanese people” including them. He was a German American, but never thought about interning himself to protect America.
posted by w0mbat at 10:01 AM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]