DISQUS

DudeB · 1 year ago

Good job on doing your research. There is a lot of history that public schools do not teach us. In fact, most of the stuff they don't teach us is all the good stuff. I myself am an Asian-American studies minor and have done a lot of personal research on many Asians Americans and their heritage as well as our history here in America. Good job sir.

WOTDsctoo · 1 year ago

That was very informative!

I think writing about things your teachers (or other people for that matter) don't know much about is a good idea. In addition to possibly scoring higher, it makes the report seem like it actually has a point. Regurgitation of commonly known things, like reports are usually done, just feels so weightless. More original reports/investigations are more fulfilling!!!

Anyway, your grandmother was a sneaky one. The sword wielding relatives should have lived with her in Hawaii.

BZou · 1 year ago

Wow, I never knew about this thing dealing in Hawaii, the history books in school really did skip over this whole chapter. And yeah it was a horrible thing that the Japanese on mainland America was forced to give up their lives just because of some paranoid white folks in government.

St · 1 year ago

"My family’s sword was taken. Bastards!"

Oh you mean that's your family's swords my family has been using as an oversized toenail clipper for the last half century?

クリス · 1 year ago

Reading this makes me want to go back to Hawaii and visit the memorial at Pearl Harbor, then maybe stop by the swap meet at Aloha Stadium (＾∇＾) I need some new shorts.

To keep this Hawaii x Japanese theme going, how about mentioning the Japanese influence on Hawaiian cuisine, spam musubi anyone? （￣ー￣）ニヤリ~

koichi · 1 year ago

Kinda wrote about that over on koichiben:
http://www.koichiben.com/2008/07/hawaii-no-oish...

but, i definitely don't feel qualified to talk about this...maybe erin will, since she's the one who actually lives there 0_o

クリス · 1 year ago

Yea, I noticed the article a couple weeks ago, but couldn't fully comprehend it all because my kanji reading skills still sucks（￣へ￣*）but then again, I've had my fair share of dining in Hawaii, so I can some-what relate.

And for the record, Matsumoto's shave ice is the business, anyone says otherwise, 'yo mama'. The only thing bad about Matsumoto's is that the lines can sometimes get long.

MidgarZolom · 1 year ago

"My family’s sword was taken. Bastards!"

My grandmother gave away the family sword to some movers while my dad was growing up. My grandfather was in the military so they moved around a lot. You know women, she probably thought it was dangerous or something. I always thought it would have been sweet to have that thing.

Tofugu_Erin · 1 year ago

"You know women", eh?

Ana_chan · 1 year ago

I'm no feminist, but I'm not sure I liked the "you know women" part either.

Tofugu_Erin · 1 year ago

"My family’s sword was taken. Bastards!"

Do you know who you sound like here? Think about it, haha.

koichi · 1 year ago

Hey now, stop taking away my fun

Tofugu_Erin · 1 year ago

Haha, it sounds just like him.

Neat-o article, though!

Fredy · 1 year ago

"Farewell To Manzanar" I had to read that in high school. I think. Yeah, I did. Sophomore year. Short sentence. I was still reading books that year. By senior year I did not even read the sparknote. Just listened in class. Thanks to IB, I'm done with English forever. Unless I want to go to graduate school and maybe I'll need more English then.
Japanese internment is a very interesting topic and I always wondered about Hawaii but surprisingly never looked it up.

クリス · 1 year ago

I was thinking of the same book when I saw this article in my RSS Feed. Decent book, unfortunately I had to read it twice while in school; once in high school and a second time in my first year of college.

Caitlin · 1 year ago

Did the US government heavily monitor the Japanese population for communications to Japan, or was it as easy as it seems for your great-grandmother to mails supplies back?

Chester_King · 1 year ago

Two words........


Midget submarine.






.

koichi · 1 year ago

I feel like she must have been doing it before the war was between America and Japan, since there was a good several years for her to do it before communications were (probably) cut off. Though, I could be wrong, maybe they had ways to send things, considering how Japanese the Hawaii population was. That's a good question, and I don't know how to answer it :(

djarno · 1 year ago

Beware of Grandma Tojo! Do your patriotic duty and dispose of your cigarette boxes properly.

But, honestly, does a hachimaki really require that much work?

koichi · 1 year ago

Well, it requires a thousand stitches for good luck, preferably one from each person, but I doubt she would have been able to pull something like that off.

Livvi_Spatula · 1 year ago

"She would walk around the streets of Nu’uanu, picking up cigarette packaging and pulling out the aluminum linings, then send it back to Japan so they could make weapons and bombs."

Did a lot of Japanese people actively (for a certain value of active :P ) support Japan during WW2?

St · 1 year ago

Well, besides the economic aspect of interning one third of your population, there are four other reason why Japanese-Americans were not put into internment camps
1. Less anti-Asian sentiment compared to the states on the west coast
2. No statehood, meaning no outlet for existing anti-Japanese sentiment on the federal level
3. Hawaii was already under martial law since december 7th 1941, so there was no perceived need for any special meassures.
4. The persons involved. Delos Emmons, commanding general in Hawaii, seems to have operated on the assumption that Japanese-Americans were loyal citizens. His counterpart on the west coast, general John DeWitt, on the other hand was much more racist, assuming that loyalty was determined by ancestral blood ties, hence that Japanese-Americans were disloyal.

"Did a lot of Japanese people actively (for a certain value of active :P ) support Japan during WW2?" In all seriousness, there wasn't a single case of Japanese-Americans sabotaging the US war effort or actively supporting Japan during the entire war.

emiko · 1 year ago

reminds me of 'farwell to manzanar'

C · 1 year ago

St is correct. Not a single American of Japanese ancestry was ever charged with sabotage/treason/etc. Internment was racist bullshat of the highest order. There was never any "military necessity" for it, and the people in charge knew it too.

Fitzy · 1 year ago

Is this the paper you wrote for Mr. Wolf?

koichi · 1 year ago

I don't think so ... I can't remember which teacher it was, but it was the IB paper we had to do. Maybe this was at the end of middle school and not high school... I think I may have switched parts of my life up, come to think of it...though, I'm pretty sure it was for some IB class, and it was some research thing everyone had to do, which doesn't sound very middle schooly. Who knows, memory has gone downhill. We old man, we old.

JackTamaki · 1 year ago

My school has the IB Program too! I'm a senior this year, and my extended essay topic is why internment was handled differently in Hawaii, focusing on the economic factors. I wrote a paper on internment a few years ago in a non-IB class, so this seemed like a natural next step. It's going to be about 14 pages long, but I wonder if I can keep it that short. Hahaha. It's really interesting, so I'm having fun with all of my research. :)

Viet · 1 year ago

Hahaha Mr. Wolf. The guy could totally have yakuza street cred if he cut off his broken pinky.

Fitzy · 1 year ago

It must have been, since you took off to Japan after that and then you just had regular non-IB classes for the most part when you came back. I think... I just remember making retarded busy work papers in his class and we had to use the CIA factbook all the time >.>

I also totally thought I would be smarter then I was 10 years ago, but I still have the attention span of a 13 year old sadly... There was a pinnacle I think at around 19, totally lost it now. Good thing I'm going into film, blame everything on the producers and go from there.

karab1n3r_k90 · 1 year ago

i know the reason!
because the japanese may know the top secret things
confidential missions and they may know what will the army and the opposing army do...

Ana_chan · 1 year ago

Nice article! Writing about something teachers usually don't specialize in is nice. I guess we're all sick of repeating the same old quotes over and over--it reminds me of a friend who couldn't be bothered about learning over-used quotes; he just put his own thoughts and made up a name. Nice technique, too bad it won't work above a certain level T__T
I'm doing a short thesis--don't ask, the French schooling system is just plain weird--on the Japanese American Internment and I appreciate the fact that people are still interested. Sadly, most people in France don't even know about the internment in the US. So thanks for this article!

Kristen · 1 year ago

Very late, but I am glad you wrote about this! My family was interned during WW2 and such. But I work in a "Nikkei Traditions" gift shop that sells a documentary about why the Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not interned.

I find it very cool that something like this was posted! There aren't too many people out there who know about it.

krys · 1 year ago

my great grandpa was one of those interned from hawaii...

vintage_natalia · 1 year ago

At my college we hosted International education week. I had a table set up and had random students answer basic trivia about the world. This just reminded me of a students answer. Someone thought pearl harbor was in japan. He he :)

mountaincritter · 10 months ago

I picked this topic for a school paper, too. Mainly because the school wasn't going to teach anything about it (shock, shock).

megan · 10 months ago

my grandma, a full blooded japanese, was living in hawaii at the time with her father, mother and sister. she was originally from stockton california because her father, kenso nushida, was playing baseball. i dont know if you heard of him. but she moved to hawaii when she was ten and the bombing came a year later. but she had family on her mother, jane fujishige's, side living in california. my great-great-grandfather,( i forget his name, but it started with a T) was one of the cooks at the camp in arizona. he had to sell his farm. im not too sure about the story, but i know that he was a good cook and everybody liked his food. unfortunately, he died there.
my grandmother, iris nushida, said that they were going to intern the japanese in hawaii to molokai, but it never happened. the japanese had it tough in hawaii also. i mean, the government took away all their stuff in the house, my grandma was called a Jap by some navy boy, and during school, they felt a separation between the haoles(white kids) and the japanese.
anyway, i really liked what you wrote and it kinda reminded me of that book under the blood red sun, you might have heard of it, but just the part about the sword. haha.
i totally get what your'e saying, im just saying, in hawaii, it wasnt paradise for them.

dosanco · 2 months ago

Or maybe Japanese in Hawai'i weren't sent to camps because Hawai'i wasn't even a part of the US! The "mainland" as you were calling it was the only land. Hawai'i didn't become a state until 1959--4 years after the war.

Joyce · 1 month ago

My interest in the topic was renewed after my recent visit to the Noguchi Museum in Queens, Long Island, NY. Amazing Japanese-American, actually a citizen of the world and an artist ahead of his time. As a New Yorker, he was exempt from internment but nevertheless ASKED to be interned in Arizona. It took him 4 months to talk his way out again. I am learning Japanese in anticipation of my retirement from Europe to the Big Island.

mmmkikuniku · 1 month ago

Heey, saw this a year too late. But as a side note, I've hypothesized that Japanese Americans living in Hawaii during WWII can to some extent still speak Japanese because there was less anti- Japanese sentiment compared to the mainland. (being 1/3 of the population on an island helps!). Us mainland Japanese Americans can't speak Japanese for crap! Plus we still call the otearai. . benjo. Haha.