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This No-No Boy attended court and became an activist over issues of civil rights following the internment camps. He was a no-no boy.

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Fred T. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to go to the government's incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. After he was arrested and convicted of defying the government's order, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

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After release from internment camps, it was a challenge to re-assimilate into society. There were new stereotypes and prejudices following the internment camps.

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Relationship with Japan Before Pearl Harbor

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Relationship with Japan Before Pearl Harbor

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For a greater context of the novel, it is important to understand the progression of United States relation with Japan. What was the relationship like before WWII and the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

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STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION - American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.

(MUSIC)

In recent programs, we talked about how the rise of Fascist leaders in Europe threatened American neutrality in the nineteen thirties.

(SOUND: Adolf Hitler)

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany created the most obvious threat. But there was also Benito Mussolini in Italy and Francisco Franco in Spain. These leaders challenged both the idea of democracy and the security of some of America's closest allies.

Hitler's invasion of Poland and the spread of war in Europe in nineteen thirty-nine made Americans wonder if they could remain neutral much longer.

The United States would finally go to war against Hitler and the other Axis nations. But its first battle would not be in Europe at all. Instead, the United States would enter World War Two following a surprise attack by Japan on the large American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Relations between the United States and Japan had grown steadily worse throughout the nineteen thirties. Both nations were important industrial powers. But they had very different ideas about the economic and political future of East Asia, especially China.

(MUSIC)

Until the late eighteen hundreds, Japan had been a nation with ancient political traditions and little contact with the Western world.

Visits by Commodore Matthew Perry and American warships helped open Japan to trade with the United States and other nations in the eighteen fifties. And in the years that followed, Japan took major steps toward becoming a modern industrial nation.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, Japan was a strong country. But it lacked oil, rubber and other natural resources of its own. For this reason, Japanese political leaders looked with envy at the Dutch, French and British colonies across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. And Japanese business leaders saw huge markets for their products in nearby countries like Korea and China.

Japan's desire to use East Asia to gain natural resources and sell manufactured products was in direct conflict with American plans for Asia. This was especially true concerning China. Washington created an "Open Door" policy toward China. It wanted to keep China's natural resources and markets free from control by Japan or any other nation.

(MUSIC)

For this reason, Americans were very concerned when Japanese forces invaded the Manchuria area of China in nineteen thirty-one. And they watched with great interest the efforts of Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to oppose the Japanese invaders.

The United States was also very concerned about protecting its imports of oil, tin and rubber from Southeast Asia. This area of the world was a major supplier of these resources in the nineteen thirties. The Middle East had not yet become a leading producer of oil.

In these ways, the United States and Japan were competing for the same resources and Asian markets. However, there also was a good deal of trade between the two nations. In fact, Japan depended on the United States for most of its metal, copper and oil.

This trade with Tokyo became a major concern for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Congress in nineteen thirty-seven.

(MUSIC)

In the summer of that year, more Japanese troops moved into China. They quickly captured much of the Chinese coast.

Much of the metal, oil, and other materials that Japan used for its war effort in China came from the United States. Americans did not like selling Japan materials to use against China. But the trade was legal because of a nineteen eleven agreement between Tokyo and Washington.

However, the American government told Japan in nineteen thirty-nine that it would end the earlier agreement. It would no longer sell Japan materials that could be used for war.

(MUSIC)

Washington's decision made the Japanese government think again about its expansionist plans. And the announcement a month later of a non-aggression treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union gave Tokyo even more cause for concern. The Soviet Union could be a major opponent of Japanese expansion in East Asia. And it appeared free from the threat of war in Europe.

These two events helped moderates in the Japanese government to gain more influence over foreign policy. A moderate government took power in January nineteen-forty.

However, this period of moderation in Tokyo did not last long.

(MUSIC)

In the spring of nineteen forty, Germany launched its blitzkrieg, or lightning invasion, of Europe. The Nazis captured Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and finally France.

Extremists in the Japanese government saw the German victory as their chance to launch their own attack on European colonies in Asia. They quickly began negotiations with Hitler to form a new alliance. And within months, militant leaders overthrew the moderate government in Tokyo.

The new Japanese government was headed by a moderate, Prince Konoye. But the minister of war was an expansionist, General Tojo. Tokyo wasted no time in taking action. It forced France to give Japan permission to occupy northern Indochina. And Tokyo also demanded that Britain close the Burma Road to the Chinese city then known as Chungking.

(SOUND)

The Burma Road was a major route by which the United States was supplying China with munitions as part of the Lend-Lease Act.

These events caused relations between Tokyo and Washington to become even worse.

In the second half of nineteen forty, President Roosevelt banned the export of metal and oil products to Japan. His administration also lent money to China.

(MUSIC)

America began to supply Chiang Kai Shek's government with a fleet of P-40 fighter airplanes with volunteer pilots, led by Army aviator Claire Chennault, to train Chinese pilots. The squadron became known as the Flying Tigers.

American representatives quietly began to meet with British and Dutch officials, to discuss joint defense plans for possible Japanese attacks in the western Pacific.

Washington and Tokyo held long negotiations in nineteen forty-one. The American officials hoped the negotiations might delay Japan from launching an attack to the south. They also thought that a delay might give more moderate leaders in Japan a chance to gain more influence. And for a time, the American plan worked. Japan did not make new acts of aggression.

(MUSIC)

Again, events in Europe caused this situation to change. Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the middle of nineteen forty-one. This prevented Moscow from doing any fighting on its eastern borders. So Japanese troops were free to invade southern Indochina.

President Roosevelt reacted to Japan's invasion of Indochina by taking three major steps. First, he took control of all Japanese money in the United States. Second, he brought the armed forces of the Philippines under American command. And, third, he closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping.

Once again, a conflict developed between moderates and extremists in the Japanese government.

More moderate leaders such as Prime Minister Konoye urged one more effort to reach an agreement with the United States. But the Japanese army and navy believed that the time had come to go to war to end American and European power in East Asia forever.

Negotiations between Japan and the United States continued through the final months of nineteen forty-one. But the two nations were on the edge of war. They were as close to hostilities as Washington was with the Nazi government in Berlin.

(MUSIC)

American military officials captured secret messages from Japan during this time. They learned that Tokyo was planning an attack of some kind unless the United States suddenly changed its policies. However, the American officials could not discover exactly where or how the attack would be made.

Almost everyone in Washington expected that the Japanese would attack south of Japan. They were wrong. The military leaders in Tokyo were planning a surprise attack on America's main Pacific military base, at Pearl Harbor. That will be our story next week.

(MUSIC)

Our program was written by David Jarmul. You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION - American history in VOA Special English.

___

This was program #190
To find earlier programs, type "Making of a Nation" in quotation marks in the search box at the top of the page

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American History: US-Japan Relations Before World War Two

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STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION - American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember. (MUSIC) In recent programs, we talked about how the rise of Fascist leaders in Europe threatened American neutrality in the nineteen thirties. (SOUND: Adolf Hitler) Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany created the most obvious threat.

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No-No Boy was a very impactful novel, but it is only one perspective. There are other books published on Japanese interne

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15 books that address Japanese American internment

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Numerous authors have written about the period of Japanese American internment during World War II; here are 15 titles worth checking out.

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During No-No Boy, Ichiro's mother receives letters from family telling of the struggles in Japan. This perspective is often overlooked when focusing on internment camps; what was happening in Japan following WWII?

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This poem is a response to recent government action reflecting internment camps following WWII.

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Sarah Kay at UC Irvine - Poem about Japanese-American Internment Camps

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No-No Boy shows the significant effects the internment camps had on Ichiro. These effects are seen after internment. It is important to be aware of modern day internment camps and form opinions on what is acceptable and what is not. Are internment camps happening again?

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Staff members of AFSC's Immigrant Rights Program in Newark joined advocates from across the nation in a protest against the family detention policies of the US government on May 1 in Dilley, Texas. The Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit company, runs the largest immigrant family detention center in the United States in Dilley that will detain up to 2400 mothers and children. AFSC staff attorneys Mich Gonzalez and Lloyd Munjack and legal assistant Andrea Huerta provided legal services to the women and children detained at another family detention center in Karnes, Texas owned by GEO Corporation the week following the protest. The descriptions of the interview with families are from that detention center. - Lucy
Three weeks ago I ate my dinner under the stars in Austin, Texas and I felt nauseated. I smiled and tried to enjoy the conversation and the view of the sunset over Lake Travis, but I just felt heavy and sick to my stomach. It was day one of my week volunteering for the Karnes Pro Bono project with RAICES, a non-profit organization in San Antonio, Texas. The project helps the immigrant families detained in the Karnes County Residential Center.

For the last 18 months, I have worked almost exclusively with men and women who are detained solely due to their immigration status. I knew well in advance that Karnes was different, in that the US government was also detaining children in this facility. Despite my experience and knowledge, I was naïve. Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of seeing mothers and their babies in jail.

I am an attorney at the American Friends Service Committee's Immigrant Rights Program in Newark, New Jersey, where I counsel immigrants and represent them in their deportation hearings. I spend three to four days out of my workweek inside of the immigration detention centers in New Jersey.

Federal law allows non-citizens to be detained to ensure they attend all of their hearings or because they are deemed a danger to the community. Immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive. Yet nearly all of the over 350 detention facilities are built and run on a corrections model. They are jails. Billion-dollar companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group run many of these immigration jails.

The GEO Group runs the Karnes family jail. One of the bleakest moments during my week as a volunteer attorney was when I had to explain to one of the women that the logo on all of the staff polo shirts belonged to a company and not to the federal government. When I told her that this company receives a certain amount of money per day for every bed they fill, including that of her 3 year-old daughter, she shook her head in disgust and cried.

During the week I spoke with eight women and their children. I cannot recount every story I heard that week in detail, nor would I want to, but there were many threads of commonality.

All of the women were from Central America and none had made the decision to leave their homes and flee their countries lightly. They feared for their lives or for the well-being of their children. The majority suffered severe violence or witnessed acts of torture.

One of the women was a schoolteacher in Honduras. She lived with her husband and three children who were all approaching adolescence. She enjoyed her home, and she loved teaching children. When gang members tried to forcibly recruit her pre-teen sons, she refused, and their lives were all threatened. She and her husband sold everything they owned in order to pay for their safe passage to the United States. When she and her children arrived at the border, they walked right up to the border patrol agents. She explained that they needed help. She told me she regretted this decision now, but she never knew she and her family would be treated like animals in this country.

Another of the women suffered such severe domestic violence that she had visible scars on her arms and legs. Before she spoke to me about it, she asked her 7 year-old son to please wait just outside the interview room. I gave him some sheets of paper and a pen to draw on. She did not want him to hear her recount the abuse she had suffered at the hands of his father.

All of the children I met that week were sick with a visible sinus cold or flu. None had eaten well in the last two weeks since being in the US government custody. None had been given medicine, despite requests. Some of the toddlers were still nursing and others were so exhausted that they slept in their mother's arms throughout my one to two hour interview. All of the women complained that the rooms were too cold at night. They sleep four bunk beds (eight beds) to a single room. They are issued only one sheet per bed. Instead of having their children sleep in a separate bed, they sleep together in the bottom bunk. They explained how they use the sheet from the top bunk to create a shield around the bottom bunk from the cold air blowing through the vents. They all asked guards and officers repeatedly to please adjust the air and were refused.

One of the little girls did not want to enter the interview room with me. It was the first time in my life that a child looked at me with fear and distrust in her eyes. This interview took the longest because for the first half-hour she cried that she just wanted to go home. I won her over by playfully joking that we should exchange shoes. I said I liked hers better because they lit up. She finally laughed because she knew there was no way my feet could ever fit into her tiny pink sneakers.

All of the women told me about the time they spent in the so-called hieleras (ice boxes) after being apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security. Each one recounted in detail how gruff border patrol agents initially detained them in a steel-like room with no beds and no windows. They all spent two days and one night in the first hielera that was so cold that no one could sleep, and the children cried day and night. They were all given a small sandwich they each described as barely edible for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Each recounted how their children refused to eat. Then they were all moved from the first hielera to a second hielera where they spent three days and two nights. This one, they explained, at least had mattresses strewn on the floor, but was still freezing cold and the food remained unchanged.

The weekend before I started at Karnes, two AFSC co-workers and I participated in a rally at the other Texas family immigration jail located in Dilley. There were over 800 of us from all walks of life chanted, sang and shouted as we marched down Highway 85 with our signs, banners and large paper puppets. I met people of varying ethnicities, nationalities and immigration status. Many were US citizens that had family, friends and community members touched by immigration detention policies. Many had travelled from other states - like us - to participate in the march. The organizers, activists and participants included children, the elderly and disabled. A few walked with canes and on crutches and others rolled down the highway in their wheelchairs in the blazing hot sun. Some looked proud and empowered, others justifiably sad and angry.

After the march, formerly detained men, women and children shared their stories. The man I had seen marching on crutches explained how he lost his arm and leg while traveling on a train through Mexico to get to the United States. He spoke about the humiliation he suffered in immigration detention when the officials did not know how to hand or ankle cuff him due to his disability; instead they wrapped a chain around his waist. He said that he never cried more in his life than during the months he spent in immigration jail and that he would rather march a hundred miles on his crutches in pain as a free man than let others endure such degradation.

One of the women spoke about her solidarity with the mother's hunger strike that the women in the Karnes facility organized and urged us to join. It felt like a victory that day seeing hundreds of people gathered together and hearing people speak out about their experiences. The Dilley facility - run by Corrections Corporation of America - alone has 2,400 beds contracted for immigrants. It is a huge complex that can only be described as a modern day internment camp. The mass for-profit jailing of immigrant women and children who are seeking safety demands all of our attention.

It is scary to think we are all complacent to what is happening. But the truth is I was nauseated after day one and even after day two during my week working out of Karnes. But by day three I was able to eat my dinner without a stomachache. Everyday as I walked into the facility, there were kind, everyday people working there. Many were mothers themselves. But they were willfully ignorant or they had bought into the story being sold to them. They had come to view this immigration jail as acceptable. As a "family residential center."

We cannot allow this practice to continue or to become normalized. We cannot sit idly by and watch as these gross human rights violations continue to be justified. We must all stand up and shut these facilities down.
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Family immigrant detention centers: The new internment camps

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Staff members of AFSC's Immigrant Rights Program in Newark joined advocates from across the nation in a protest against the family detention policies of the US government on May 1 in Dilley, Texas. The Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit company, runs the largest immigrant family detention center in the United States in Dilley that will detain up to 2400 mothers and children.

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Economic Effects of Internment Camps on Those Imprisoned

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Economic Effects of Internment Camps on Those Imprisoned

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After release from internment camps, the location of the internment camp impacted projected economic success. This article explores the economic impacts of Japanese-Americans being imprisoned.

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Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 drew the United States into World War II and spawned a massive wave of shock and fear across the country. It also prompted the U.S. government to round up and send more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps.

Scholars have long studied this dark chapter in American history and its denial of basic freedoms, but until recently little was known about the long-term economic effects on the lives of the people who were interned, their businesses, homes, and possessions hastily left behind.

Harvard economist Daniel Shoag and Nicholas Carollo, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the paper "The Causal Effect of Place: Evidence from Japanese-American Internment," found that the economic consequences of confinement lingered among internees even 50 years later, and varied greatly on where they were placed.

Between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese-Americans, 70 percent of them born in the United States, were forced to leave their homes on the West Coast and incarcerated in makeshift camps in desolate areas until after the end of World War II. When the Japanese Exclusion Act was revoked in 1945, the inhabitants were released, but their economic prospects were markedly, and forever, changed.

"Internment is a tragic period in American history," said Shoag, associate professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "There was some random component to where people were imprisoned, and yet these randomly assigned locations had a big impact on people. It affected the lives of the internees in every single economic outcome you can think of - income, education, housing, socioeconomic status, all sort of things, and their descendants as well."

Prior to the war, most Japanese-Americans had similar incomes and educational backgrounds, but after they were assigned to 10 camps across seven states - Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming - their economic fates changed. All internment camps were prison-like compounds, with barracks, watchtowers, and barbed wires, but some were close to wealthy regions and others to depressed areas.

The study found that those internees who were sent to richer regions, where the local population earned close to the median income, had better opportunities upon release and did better economically than those who were sent to poorer places. Internees who were sent to wealthier locations earned more and were more likely to complete college and work in higher-status careers. Those who were put in poor, rural areas far away from cultural centers received less education, lived in worse housing, and earned less money.

"The long-term impact of being put in a poorer place was large and dramatic," said Shoag.

The economic effects of internment could be measured across generations, the study found, and affected the internees' children. Their economic outcomes affected the values they held as well: Those from better-off areas tended to be more assimilated into U.S. society, and were more materialistic and optimistic, said researchers, based on survey data from the Japanese-American Research Project (JARP), a three-generation study (1890-1966) directed by the late UCLA sociologist Gene Levine.

Those sent to poorer areas found it harder to get ahead. Many of them failed to get higher education, and their children's futures were compromised, said Shoag.

"One of the things we look at is what happens when you're put in a hard place," he said. "How much does being randomly put in a place with low mobility affect the cross-generation correlation? We found that the next generations suffer."

Researchers used detailed administrative data from the U.S. government, which helped to track nearly 90 percent of the surviving internees during the process of making restitution payments. With data spanning five decades, researchers were able to measure outcomes for the internees, their children, and their grandchildren. The researchers found that in 1980, nearly 40 years after the Japanese-Americans were first interned and 35 years after they were released, those who had been placed in the poorest camp (Rohwer, in Arkansas) still earned 17 percent less than those placed in the camp in the most affluent region (Heart Mountain, in Wyoming).

The findings have broad implications for immigrants and refugee settlements. Policymakers and governments officials need to understand the importance of location assignments for the economic futures of immigrants, said Shoag.

"It's important for how we think about people's placement, from a policy angle," he said. "If we have refugees with similar incomes coming in, let's say some to Boston and others to Flint, well, the ones in Boston are going to make more money and get more education than those in Flint. This is an important consideration not just from an economic point of view, but also from an urban economics model."

The research found that many internees chose not to go back to their original homes on the West Coast, both because they feared racial enmity and because of housing shortages. Many wound up remaining in communities near their former internment camps.

"People do get stuck," Shoag said, "and this has consequences for future generations."

Shoag said government officials should keep in mind the long-term effects of any policy involving placement or relocation when they deal with immigrants or refugees resettlements. The location can help to determine their future.

"There have been discussions about allowing refugees into the country, maybe sending them to depressed parts of the country to bolster population," he said. "But when you send a refugee family to a low-income place, that is going to have a huge impact on them, their families, and their future generations."

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Location of WWII internment camp linked to long-term economic inequality

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Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 drew the United States into World War II and spawned a massive wave of shock and fear across the country. It also prompted the U.S. government to round up and send more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps.

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This is a collection of newspapers form the time of Pearl Harbor and the internment camps. This is an important context for No-No Boy that takes place in Seattle.

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The Northwest Enterprise was a weekly publication and the region's most prominent African American newspaper. On Friday, December 12, 1941 the Enterprise published an editorial by E. I. Robinson titled "Let Us Keep Our Record Clear." In it, the editor spoke about how there was no need to lose one's head or commit crimes in the name of patriotism.

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Seeing people describe stories from when they were placed in internment camps helps realization of how recent internment camps were. The video of the internment camps compared with video interviews with personal stories helps bring more realism to the history of these events.

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Untold Stories | Manzanar: "Never Again" | The National Parks

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At the heart of this film is the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar & the words of Sue Embrey.

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A college student at Berkeley during the Pearl Harbor attack reflects on the United States after being forced into an internment camp. She states, “the government made a mistake, and they apologized,” Asako Tokuno said. “Made redress. And tried to make things right. You can’t eliminate all the feelings and the hurts that happened, but the fact that, what other country would do so ... do that? I kind of wonder. So, there are a lot of great things about our country. And I don’t think I’d ever want to live anywhere else.”

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THE WAR . Search & Explore . Themes & Topics | PBS

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Tarzan. at the camp's movie theater, and to the delight of her parents, they began dating seriously. Shiro left the camp to work at the War Relief Association in Washington, DC, then was inducted into the Army in May of 1944, and sent to train at the Military Intelligence Service's Japanese language school in Minnesota.