japaneseamerican

This image needs to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise...

Yes, please rotate the image! It's hard to read as it is now. (Japanese is written top to bottom, starting on the right side of the paper.)

Thanks for the comments! I've rotated the image, hopefully its easier to read now! Mary U.S. National Archives

Thank you!

Amazing that they were still smiling. :) -- Seen in your 1930s-40s in Color set. (?)

I am wondering/pondering the same thing. Why?

I love that they always kept their morale up even though they were being held in camps like prisoners. They managed to continue living as if they would outside of those camp walls.

Smiling politely at the camera, with a dignity all their own. What happened to the Japanese internees was really shameful.

If you see lots of internment photos and films, as I have, the incarcerees usually look happy. These were their family photos, not conscious documentation of the injustice they were living under. muI think the daily life they built in the camps, which was filled with a lot of pretty "normal" activities like employment and pastimes, didn't leave much time for sitting around and looking miserable over the hardships and fundamental betrayal dealt them by the U.S. government. Also, photography by incarcerees was officially banned in the camps though the restriction was eventually relaxed. This undoubtedly caused a lot of negative sights to be hidden from cameras. I've read that Dorothea Lange took a lot of photos that revealed the harsh realities of the internment camps, but I haven't found them online yet -- hopefully they'll be available soon.

From Matt O'Brien, "Photos of Dark Historical Event Emerge," Oakland Tribune (16 November 2006), online here:
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20061116/ai_n168...

"I don't even remember the picture being taken," said Satsuki Ward, who was barely 10 years old when she and her family members were uprooted from their East Bay home in May 1942. "It was utter chaos."

Ward, now a 76-year-old Fairfield resident, found out about Lange and her photographs of Japanese-American internment much later. The portrait of the Mochida family wearing identification tags around their necks made the pages of Newsweek magazine and other outlets, and helped expose a dark moment in American history.
....
Miyuki Hirano of Sparks, Nev., another one of the surviving Mochida siblings, remembers seeing her face on that book's cover.

But while they occasionally see reminders of their youth in print, it took many years for Mochida family members to be able to talk frankly about what happened to them, said Kayoko Ikuma, 69, of San Mateo, who was 4 when Lange took her photo.

Ikuma said witnessing the treatment of America's Muslim population has made her try to share her experience more.

Their parents avoided discussing the internment after the war. Their father, who had owned a successful flower-growing business in unincorporated Alameda County, returned from the camps unhappy, spent the rest of his life in domestic labor and took to drinking.

The Lange photographs, and the Mochida children's more vivid memories of years spent in the Utah camp, is all they have left from that time.

Pennylrichardsca, thanks for letting us know about this fascinating article about the Mochida family. This is definitely one of those haunting photographs of children where you wonder whatever happened to them. It's a sad story.

You might be interested in checking out nearly 4,000 photographs taken by the War Relocation Authority of the Japanese American Internment during World War II that are available in our online catalog. We have a webpage that allows you to click on links for search topics within this group of photos:
www.archives.gov/research/arc/topics/japanese-americans/

We hope to get those photos on Flickr at some point, too.

Thank you for sharing these incredibly powerful photographs.

Very moving...

You are welcome! This has been one of the more talked about photographs we've shared on the U.S. National Archives photostream. We recommend that you investigate earlier posts for the image which lead to more information about the young girls in the photograph.

Jerry (U.S. National Archives)