Japanese American Experience in WWII

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Link to my HathiTrust collection: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=758227452

Title Page of “Nisei in Uniform”
Title Page of “The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II”
These two book titles represent the focus of my HathiTrust collection. My collection looks at the Japanese American experience during WWII including (but not limited to) Japanese American incarceration and Japanese Americans in the U.S. military.

Introduction

As a Japanese American, I have always been interested in the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. That is why I decided to focus my collection on this topic. My collection looks at the treatment of Japanese Americans on the home front (mainly at Japanese Incarceration) and their service in the military. Before I started curating this collection, my knowledge on Japanese Americans service in the military was mainly on the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, since those were the units that my family members had fought in. Therefore the first text that really caught my eye was “Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during WWII”. It was interesting to read about how essential Japanese Americans were during WWII in Military Intelligence units.

Connections

A Page from “Nisei in Uniform”

I chose this image from the “Nisei in Uniform” book for a couple of reasons. First, the top half of the page is an attention grabbing photo showing the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The bottom half of the page features photos of three soldiers, all Americans, who volunteered for military service from incarceration camps. My translation network map connects some of my sources (such as this one) with the Library of Congress: Tagore on the lightning talks slide. The Library of Congress source shows the different ways that Rabindranath Tagore’s name is romanized and translated. I saw a connection since with Japanese American names such as the names of these men, the name must be romanized and there are multiple ways to romanize their names (with some variations being more common than others).

I think that Jacky’s collection on “Education in the 1900s in China” can be connected to my collection. There are multiple texts in my collection looking at the education system during World War II. For example, one of the texts in my collection is on Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during the war, and another is on Army Japanese language schools. My collection also looks at the Japanese American experience in Internment Camps, which includes schools for the children that were incarcerated there. Jacky’s post mentions how people debated whether politics should be discussed about. This discussion about what should be included in the education curriculum is something that would have occurred in Japanese Internment Camps as well.

Sawyer Seminar

In the closing remarks of the Sawyer Seminar, my professor Christi Merrill said that human elements can change the way that we see the connection and histories between different texts. This is something that I experienced in class, since while looking for connections between my collection and my classmates’ collections, I had a difficult time finding a connection to Michael’s collection. However, since Michael is knowledgeable in Sufism (where I am not), Michael was able to find a connection between Sufism and Japanese Incarceration.

Category/Tags Name

I think that one category name that could connect my post with my classmates post is the category of “Historical Events”. Even if their collections are not truly focused on a historical event, there could be a certain event that affects their collection. For example, Kristen mentioned in her blog post that Japanese writing changed from traditionally being written right to left to be written left to right after World War II. Therefore, our collections could be connected in an even smaller category of “World War II”, but even more of our classmates collections could be included in the broader category of “Historical Events”

This screencast highlights a keyword of “Education” which can be connected both to Japanese Incarceration as well as the Military, and it shows three texts in my collection that can be connected to this keyword. As mentioned earlier, when connecting my collection to Jacky’s collection, there were schools in the Interment Camps for Incarcerated children as well as Japanese Language Schools for Military Intelligence at the University of Michigan. I also show how the catalog records of the three texts (The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, The Army Japanese language school, and The Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during World War II) are not tagged to be related to education at all. The second two texts do not have any tags, which can make it difficult for humans to make connections and impossible for bots to make connections between these texts

Important Links

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