Letters

From September 1943 through 1944 was the time period of letters my group reviewed.  In the letters, we got to see when Tomio and Amy were dating.  They were talking about getting engaged, and in the last letter we read, they had just been married.  Amy’s mom was recovering from a stroke, which Doug says she never fully recovered.   Amy had also spent much time applying for better jobs than the one she had in the camp.  She eventually ended up leaving her church job.  Tomio and other Japanese American professors had left jobs at Yale due to the sentiments of the other white professors.  Tomio went to teach at another university, all while he was getting his masters in law at Columbia.  

Amy offered for Violet to come to her wedding, but one of the complications was it was “difficult to find housing with [the] Caucasians”.  This is remnant of segregation that the Japanese Americans of the time struggled with.  This segregation was also seen in the military.  The 442nd infantry regiment was “the most decorated unit in United States military history”.  (Takaki 402)  We also saw that “John [had] received his physical examination for the army.”  This leads back to show the contributions to the military.  Many of the Japanese ended up in internment camps, working in the war effort, or fighting in the military for the 442nd infantry regiment or the 100th battalion. This exemplifies the contrast between how much they contributed to the country, and how lowly they were treated to the society.  It’s much like in the poem “Cincinnati” when the speaker finally gets out of the internment camp, which was basically being held prisoner based on the fact they are Japanese.  They are being treated horrible, for example when someone had “[spit ] on [their] right cheek” (Yamada 81).  They were even called a “Dirty Jap” (Yamada 81).  It had been very clear they weren't liked, when they clearly hadn’t done anything wrong.  

One of FDR’s goals as well as part of government's goal was to relocate the Japanese Americans.  We can see by the jobs for which Amy was applying, and by what Doug said in class, she almost moved to Minneapolis.  The goal was that the Japanese Americans wouldn’t go back to their communities after the camps.  When Amy got Valley Fever, she went to the doctor.  Every time she went to the doctor, she had to see a new medic. It made it hard for her to trust her doctor being told every time it was a cold, when in reality it was something closer to tuberculosis.  This typifies the health care that the Japanese Americans had access to in the camps.  It wasn’t as effective as what the whites had access to out of the camps.