Japanese Internment
By: Izzy BeckerBogan
The truth....
We live in fear of everything that is different.
Share a coke with your friend... the Chinese
This ad campign is clearly telling us that Chinese=good and Japanese=bad. We are saying that the Chinese are our friends and they are nice and good people. We can be friends with them and share our drink with them. But the Japanese are bad and dangerous. They hurt us and they are violent so we shoud lock them away and shun them. The ad says good winds have blown you here meaning that bad winds have blown the Japanese here and they should all leave. We lived in this constant fear of people who are not like us. We try to inprison them and make them feel like they don't belong so they will leave.
Simple Man
Look at this man. He seems nice and like a good citizen who is just doing his every day buisness but he has been treated as an outside. A violent creature who should not be here in this country just because he is Japanese. Most likely this man was just minding his buisness when suddenly people started treating him differently and he was shunned by the people you used to call his friends. He was probably fired or let go from his work. All this was done to simple, every day people like them because of our fear of something bad happening.
Simple Girl
This girl did nothing wrong. She is a sweet little girl who was put in a camp and treated like a prisoner because of her race. Like the simple man this girl has not hurt anyone or done anything to deserve this treatment. But she is treated like this anyways because she is an alien who we believe should go back to her "home plantet". She is not an alien but just a little girl, much like the one in When the Emperor was Divine. This girl had friends and a life but it has been ripped away from her because of something that happened to our country that made us scared of everyone like that person.
How to tell Chinese vs Japanese
This is an old newspaper article about how to tell Japanese people from Chinese people based on how they look. Not only is this ad extremly racist, but it is bais as well. The article that goes along with the picture talks about how the Chinese are our allies and we should help and make sure people know the difference so they are not mixed up with the Japanese "aliens". This picture just shows that people have these conceptions in their heads that all Japanese are bad people and they are all vicious and dangerous and should all leave.
The Real Enemy
This shows a very harsh image of a Japanese soldier attacking an inncocent woman with a knife. This was a streotype image of the Japanese at the time. They were thought of as these violent, dangerous creatures and all they did was hurt us. This was not the reality though. The Japanese are dipicted as these monster that we should exterminate from the country. The monster is shown attacking the innocent looking woman because she is vulnerable and it shows how the Japanese attack and destroy innocent people's lives.
The Facade
This picture shows some Japanese-Americans who were working in the internments camps. They were tending to crops that were most likely going to be used for the food for the people in the camps. The picture was taken to make life in the camps look not as bad as it really was. It was described to the public as a nice place to live, sort of like a litte neighborhood. The people are supposed to be happy even though they are being treated like prisoners. The camp is like a prision and they are made to feel like they have commited this horrible crime even though the only crime they "commited" was being Japanese.