Research by Subject: Japanese American Incarceration Camp Research Guide: How did children cope with the camps?

Media

Life was very difficult for children in the camps. They had to leave their friends and the life they knew behind. Some of their belongings were stolen, and they lived in bleak camps under constant guard. They attended camp-school houses, which were crowded and lacked necessary resources like books and desks. Scared and confused, many of them developed trauma and other psychological issues. They couldn't understand the reactions of their parents, or being called an “enemy." Feelings of abandonment, guilt, and shame were very common. Their childhood became the camps. At the same time, their innocence and adaptability allowed them to enjoy what they could. They wrote letters, played games, and practiced martial arts (Ina 2001, Tong 2004, Takei 2020).

Children of the Camps
Provides a rare glimpse into the very private lives of a few of these Japanese Americans who have not previously talked openly about the trauma of their incarceration experience.
Farewell to Manzanar
In 1976, this made-for-TV film based on the book by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, was the first commercial film written, performed, photographed and scored by Japanese Americans about the World War II camp experience and broadcast on prime time television. told by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was seven years old when she and her family were taken by bus 250 miles to Camp Manzanar.
Rabbit in the Moon
Like many innocent Japanese Americans released from WWII forced incarceration camps, the young Omori sisters did their best to erase the memories and scars of life under confinement. Fifty years later acclaimed filmmaker Emiko Omori asks her older sister and other detainees to reflect on the personal and political consequences of the camps.

Primary Sources

Aiko Kawaguchi: Remembering Pearl Harbor
From the special Collections of the university of Washington Library, this student essay was written by child in the Minidoka Incarceration Camp on December 30th, 1942.
Setsuko Izumi Asano Interview
Oral history interview of Setsuko Izumi Asano, who was ten years old when she and her family were taken to the Rohwer Incarceration Camp.
From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps
Contains the first-person accounts of eleven former internees who recall their memories of youth in America's concentration camps. This collection traces each author's personal journey through war, giving voice to a history that has been silenced. This book also offers lesson plans for use by educators and students and for internees who wish to tell their own stories.

Secondary Sources

Exile within: the schooling of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945
The experience of these children left a tangle of social meanings that had not been inspected with the care it deserves until this book was written. Because they were schoolchildren, theirs was an educational history; and Thomas James tells it here, fully mindful of the irony of children studying democracy and its ideals while suffering as victims of the most undemocratic of all processes--imprisonment in a relocation camp solely on the basis of their race.
Race, Culture, and Citizenship among Japanese American Children and Adolescents during the Internment Era
Argues that Japanese-American children became more conscious of their being Japanese after WWII, and that camp life had altered their understanding of themselves and society.
The Little Exile
Autobiographical fiction based on the author’s own experience as a wartime internee, told from the point of view of a child. Find in CSU+. Allow three weeks for delivery.