Japanese Internment

Overview

When President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, all Japanese-Americans were ordered to evacuate the West Coast of the United States. Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of Pearl Harbor, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 of these werenisei(literal translation: "second generation"; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and sansei("third generation"; the children of Nisei). The rest wereissei ("first generation", immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for citizenship by U.S. law). Ten internment camps were established in the most remote areas of Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming; facilitating the relocation and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry as little as 1/16^th percent. Sixty-two percent of the internees were in fact, United States citizens.

In 2015, the CSUCI University Archives became a collaborative member of a university-wide (18 CSU campuses) Japanese-American internment archival project initiated by CSU Dominguez Hills, in which approximately 15,000 items will be digitized, including personal writings, photographs, poetry, artwork, organizational records, audiovisual recordings, oral history transcripts, and internment camp publications. CSUCI University Archives contributed three oral histories and accompanying photographs, which focus on the personal experiences of Marilyn Fordney, Santa Anita Racetrack detention facility, Boys Town, Omaha; George Wakiji, Santa Anita Racetrack detention facility, Gila River concentration camp; and Morris and Cherry Abe of Tule Lake and Topaz concentration camps. The combined efforts of the various CSU Archives and Special Collections departments will create an opportunity for researchers to go beyond the boundaries of traditional research by utilizing various and numerous types of information, thereby gaining personal insight into the lives of those affected. Armed with this evidence, researchers will engage in discourse and reflective thought, evaluating and analyzing events and personalities with both an historical perspective and a 21st Century level of understanding and rationale.

Resources

• Japanese Internment Digital Collection - CI
• CSU Japanese American Collection - CSU Dominguez Hills
• Japanese American Stories - Densho
• Japanese Internment Camps - US History.org
• Japanese Relocation - History.com

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