Race, Culture, and Citizenship among Japanese American Children and Adolescents during the Internment Era

by Benson Tong


"As we got off the bus, we found ourselves in a large area amidst a sea of friendly Japanese faces," recollected then twelve-year old Nisei Florence Miho Nakamura in her memoirs. It was a poignant day. Uprooted from San Francisco in April, 1942, and sent off to the Tanforan Assembly Center, Nakamura and her family were victims of racial lumping, of anti-Asian sentiments that reached a crescendo during World War II. Their incarceration in the assembly centers and later, at the socalled relocation centers (typically scholars label them concentration camps), were turning points in their lives. Japanese American children like Nakamura faced a unique struggle. Nakamura recalled that she "didn't know where we were," or why the uprooting occurred. Like most children and adolescents, she had limited knowledge of the origins of the internment, although she knew that a period of disruption had set in. The "evacuation," however, had been carried out on a community- by-community basis, and so she found solace in kinship and pseudo-kinship ties that were replicated at Tanforan. As a dependent of her parents she "was not frightened because" she was with her family, and "with them, I [she] felt safe." Like most children, she could continue to rely on the protection of her parents. Yet other things did change. For children and adolescents, being imprisoned in a harsh environment, questions were raised, issues debated, and relationships strained. Along the way, the children and adolescents were forced to confront in one way or another more abstract notions of race, citizenship, and culture.