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| Japan: Aggressor vs. Victim
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What's Happening
In our American Studies: The Asian American Experience class, students are asked to do a community service project. This project gives students the opportunity to "give voice to the voiceless (Professor Kodera)." The voiceless may include recent immigrants who literally do not speak the language to talk about their hardships or maltreatments. The voiceless may also include Asian American women victims of domestic violence who are too scared to report their abusers. For our community service project, we would like to draw attention to the "voiceless" victims of the Rape of Nanjing and Japanese Internment. The way to approach our objective is to examine how people learned these two events. We would interview a group who are of Chinese descent and a group who are of Japanese descent. In addition to their ethnicity, the interviewee's generation, neighborhood where they grew up, and grandparents' participation in the war would also considered in explaining why the victims have remained "voiceless".
We also would like to find out people's current views of Japan. Although we must differentiate the Japanese of the Rape of Nanjing from the Japanese Americans of the internment camps, are there people who think of Japan as one? Do people, Chinese people still feel resentment towards those of Japanese descent after what happened in the Rape of Nanjing? As a famous proverb goes, "the apple does not fall far from the tree". Also, how do the Japanese feel about the United States' insistence on internment? As part of our project, we would also explore these questions.
Background Information
Japan showed aggression in the Rape of Nanking where the country captured China's city and tortured the civilians there in unimaginable ways. The Rape of Nanjing occurred between December 1937 and March 1938. In this brief time, the Japanese killed as many as 300,000. 1 Most of the victims were women who were raped and tortured to death. Some methods used were body mutilation such as the cutting off of breasts and limbs. Other methods include forced incestuous acts. Sons were forced to rape mothers and fathers to rape daughters. Standing and anticipating their deaths, Japanese soldiers would "clap their hands and loudly laugh alongside."2 Although such acts were committed by the Japanese, but the country still tries to deny that the atrocities happened.
1
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holoaust of WWII. Basic Books: 1997.
2 Nanjing University. "Japanese War Crimes: Rape of Nanjing", 2002. [http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dyue/wiihist/njmassac/nmintro.htm#njm_index], 2003.
Japan as a Victim
Executive Order 9066 was the fateful document which tore 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens and half of whom were children, from their homes and into internment camps.1 This legal document can be examined as the US punishment for the Japanese surprise attack and victory at Pearl Harbor, but that would only be scratching the surface. An analysis of Asian American history shows that Japanese internment was only a culmination of Anti-Asian sentiment, which had been occurring years before, coupled with a desire to find a scapegoat. Even before Pearl Harbor, many white Americans were openly hostile to the new Japanese and Asian presence in America both because of racism and economics. The media and the government only reflected this anti-Asian sentiment and began to alienate the Japanese through vicious headlines such as "THE YELLOW PERIL-HOW JAPANESE CROWD OUT THE WHITE RACE" and blatantly racist legislation whose aim was to suppress the Japanese Americans.2 With the advent of Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066, and the resulting creation of internment camps, it gave the xenophobic American population the perfect opportunity to disfranchise the Japanese.
However, even in the present day, the memories of Executive Order 9066 and the US internment camps live on. Now those who were interned have aged or died. And yet most have felt the need to tell their friends and most importantly their family of their experience as Japanese Americans living in the 1940s. It is to them that this project is dedicated and to them in which this history will live on.
1 Author Unknown. "It Happened in America...February 19, 1942," 2002.
[http://www.jainternment.org], 2002.
2 Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 10.
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