Soviet Union leader Stalin is deporting people he believes to be anti-Soviet sending to prison war camps, forcing them into slavery, and/or to be murdered. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, military servicemen, writers, business owners, musicians, artists, and also librarians were all considered enemies and were added to the list for complete genocide or extermination in other words. The first deportations took place on June 14, 1941. In the meantime the USSR wiped out Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the map during Stalin’s reign. Between the Soviet and Nazi forces these countries did not exist during the period of the Genocide.
Farewell to Manzanar Were you aware that during World War 2 ten internment camps were scattered all around the United States. These internment camps housed approximately 100,000 Japanese-Americans causing them to experience massive hurt and immense despair all because they had Japanese ancestry. Well this was actually experienced by the Wakatsuki family in the autobiographical novel, Farewell to Manzanar, which was written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. During 1942 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor which automatically triggered World War 2 and caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066, sending everyone of Japanese ancestry in the West Coast to internment camps. The Wakatsuki family was sent to the filthy, unhealthy, and unorganized internment camp of Manzanar.
Upon the bombing of the two cities, the Japanese citizens that lived near the explosion had been through a devastating and horrifying experience. These experiences are told by John Hersey in his book “Hiroshima”, where he interviews survivors from the bombing. One of the survivors he interviewed was named Miss Tashinki Sasaki; she worked as a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works during the crisis. When the blinding flash from the bomb had taken place, she was about to talk to the female worker on her right but had become paralyzed with fear from the light. Within seconds the ceiling collapsed along with a bookshelf that fell on Miss Sasaki, leaving her unconscious for three hours.
In the book “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” Iris Chang cements her feelings of utter disgust toward the people who committed the atrocities that occurred in the City of Nanking in China during the late 1930’s. Chang begins the book with a long introduction and forward showing the many facts that she later uses to show that the Japanese soldiers were “turned into murdering demons” by the Japanese command at the time (58). Chang couples these facts with many varying first-hand accounts of the actions that took place in and around the city of Nanking. Alongside the accounts she also uses a timeline which described how the events unfolded in order to show how the Japanese cruelty grew as the occupation of the city dragged on. Chang even included accounts from members of her own family to show how wide spread the effects of the holocaust were.
Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era. After World War II she created a number of photo-essays, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman, for Life magazine Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps, highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal. [7] Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, age 70.
My name is Natsuki Momoko. I was just 12 years old on February 19, 1942, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese Americans to be excluded from society and put in “relocation centers” in fear that we were spies for our enemies in the war. Any American of Japanese descent was a suspected threat to the United States during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. None of us were given a defense or trial. We were sent based solely on race and nationality.
Lange faced the hard choice of either photographing what the government would have had her photograph, or photograph the truth of the horror she saw. Dorothea Lange was one of the most influential women photographers of her time, 1895- 1965. As a child Lange dealt with polio; which gave her a limp for the rest of her life and possibly fed into her desire to photograph some of the darker sides of what was going on in Japanese internment camps. Lange attended Columbia University studying photography. Lange did many collections; her first big one being the Native Americans in the southwest.
It is in this context that Joy Kogawa situates her novel Obasan. Obasan follows the fragmented story of Naomi, a young Japanese girl living in Vancouver at the start of World War II, and her experience of displacement and being viewed as an enemy in her “[her] own… native land” (42; ch. 7). Naomi experiences the issue of racial discrimination at a young age. Placed between the Nisei and Canadian culture she is being “sawn in half” (70; ch.
“Seventeen Syllables”: A Double Entendre “‘Seventeen Syllables’: A Symbolic Haiku” by Zenobia Baxter Mistri shows how the tale offers multiple perspectives that must be peeled back layer upon layer. The tale records a Rosie’s awakening to sexuality, and depicts Tome Hayashi’s devastating annihilation. Before the story is told there is a brief biographical that talks about Yamamoto’s life during the Jappanese Relocation Act which incarcerated 110,000 Japanese in Poston, Arizona. Yamamoto moved to Massachusetts for a summer during war but returned to camp and was later hired by Los Angeles Tribune. The story depicts the cultural barrier that haiku creates between Tome, Rosie, and Mr. Hayashi.
An example of difference is that during World War II the Japanese-Americans were detained in concentration camps throughout America as they entered war with Japan. The Two Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanjing disrupted the populations around Hong Kong and Guangdong. The Treaty of Nanjing forced China to pay for financial protection to Western imperialist powers. The Chinese government levied high tax on peasants, in which many peasants lost their land. Those peasants had easy access to ships to go to the United States and other places.