Following the events of Pearl Harbor, Japanese along the Pacific Coast were forced from their homes and relocated to various internment camps. The documentary, A Degree of Justice: Japanese Canadian UBC Students of 1942, focuses on six previous students: Dr. Ray Shinobu, Ruth Fusako Cezar, Mary Shinko Kato, Tom Nishio, Mits Sumiya, and Fred Sasaki. For these six individuals, the internment camps put an end to their time at the University of British Columbia (UBC), robbing them of receiving a proper education and degree. These students saw themselves as Canadian and experienced life as such. Confusion ensued for the students as the Canadian portion of their Canadian-Japanese identities were stripped away. Many who were interned identified as Canadian citizens in a nationalistic sense; meanwhile, the government construed their own nationalistic justification for interning those who were potential threats simply due to their ethnicity. Fred Sasaki recalls how after his father was detained upon false pretenses of reasonable suspicion, a local newspaper reported that the “most dangerous Japanese nationalist had been taken into custody”. In Daniel Mayeda’s Huffington Post article, “Lessons From the World War II Experiences of Japanese Americans for Today’s Muslim Americans”, he recounts a similar experience where his grandfather, Kunitomo Mayeda, was detained and arrested by FBI officials. Mayeda writes that “during this process no charges were ever filed against him… the government viewed the arrested Japanese aliens as essentially ‘prisoners of war’”.
George Takei in his TED talk, Why I love a country that once betrayed me, discusses his experience regarding his placement in an internment camp, and the stripping of his nationalistic identity with America.
“when my mother finally came out… tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never forget that scene. It is burned into my mind”.
Arguably, because Takei was only five years old, his experience wasn’t as alien to the normality that other internment sufferers, such as the students, were ripped from, “what would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps”.
In Duarte Geraldino’s TED Talk on the deportation of American immigrants, he discusses the importance of the social circle, interpreted as the conglomeration of intricate and complicated relationships (such as family and friends) that bind a society. Geraldino explains how many events can lead to the hardly reversible disruption of this perplexingly interlaced social circle focusing on the particular event of deportation. The University of British Columbia was an important facet in the Japanese-Canadian students’ social ring. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, this social ring was disrupted as their identities as students were overlooked. Japanese male students were ordered to turn in their COTC uniforms, indirectly removing their status as a student. As such, when this status was removed, it was a removal of a large part of their identities.
This part of history cannot be forgotten, because if there is one dogmatic expression that can be pulled from the past as a whole, it is that humankind progresses upon learning from their mistakes. “Our family stories contain profound lessons that must be retold to safeguard the constitutional liberties of all Americans” (Mayeda). The stories of the Japanese internment serve as clear lessons that demonstrate the lasting harm and sociological effects of narrow-minded implementations.
Works Cited
Dir. Alejandro Yoshizawa. Prod. Mary Kitagawa, Tosh Kitagawa, Henry Yu, and Shirin Eshghi. UBC Library, n.d. YouTube. 12 Mar. 2012. Web.
Geraldino, Duarte. “What We’re Missing in the Debate about Immigration.” Duarte Geraldino: What We’re Missing in the Debate about Immigration | TED Talk. TED Talk, n.d. Web.
Mayeda, Daniel. “Lessons From the World War II Experiences of Japanese Americans for Today’s Muslim Americans.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Sept. 2017. Web.
“Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me.” Performance by George Takei, TED Talk, TED Talk,