Letters

Takiki's account of Japanese internment camps correspond quite accurately with Amy's letters to Violet. Amy mentions that the work she was allowed to do within the camp was the twelve-dollar wage of an "unskilled laborer," as Takaki describes in his book (396). Amy was sick during the time of her writing, and, giving the living conditions, this is not unsurprising: "in the camps, the internees were assigned to barracks, each barrack about twenty by 120 feet, divided into four or six rooms. Usually a family was housed in one room, twenty by twenty feet" (395). It is amazing to me that Amy managed to keep up this letter correspondence while she was sick, during these living conditions, and in between working. If I was not made aware of the context of the letter, I probably would not have guessed that this letter was written during imprisonment, as the tone sounds remarkably optimistic.

Amy manages to look on the bright side of things in her letters and mentions the positive experiences she had with Eleanor Roosevelt visiting the camp. She talks about how E.R. talked with the internees personally and even ate with them. According to Amy she was very well liked. Interestingly Takiki writes a good deal about President Roosevelt's failings, but I have not seen him mentioning anywhere about Eleanor Roosevelt's visits to the internment camps. Perhaps it is simply not mentioned in our assigned reading, but in general I think Takiki tends to dwell more on the negative treatment of Japanese-Americans and understate the attempts made to counterbalance it. 

Amy refers to the whites as "Americans" in her letter, and does not seem to identify herself as an American. There was a lot of discourse during the time that the Japanese were American too, but Amy does not feel this way, at least she does not express it in her private correspondence. Takiki talks about how Captain Inouye was turned out of a barber shop, even after serving as an American in World War II and winning medals and awards for military heroism. Yamada writes in her poem "Cincinnati" that even after the war and after she was set free from her internment camp, she was still treated with discrimination: "Freedom at last...my first day in a real city where no one knew me. No one except one hissing voice that said dirty jap..." (81). When Yamada says "no one knew me" she means implicitly that she is not truly known "as an American"--for the Americans will only "know" her as "a Jap." Amy takes this differentiation for granted in her letters, showing that very few Japanese really believed they were Americans or had little hope of really becoming one.