[00:06:12] Host: Maybe a sentence or a paragraph.

[00:06:14] Stephanie: Yes. I don't even think I learned about it in class. I think I learned about it through other people in Japanese American cultural groups. Then I went home and asked my family about the Japanese American Incarceration and said, "What is that?" They said, "Don't talk about it, and don't ever say those words in front of your grandparents."

I was largely self-taught. Back then, the Japanese American National Museum didn't exist. My aunt had told me that they were thinking of making a museum like this, and they were looking for people to be in focus groups. I joined the focus group and realized that the story that they were trying to tell was also through images. It made me think about art museums and exhibition spaces as ways of reaching a general public that doesn't always get reached. Not everyone is going to read a book. Not everyone is going to be taught this in class, how do you get the actual world to understand this?

I started doing focus group things with the Japanese American National Museum. One of the first things that I learned, they'd asked me to participate and work with them and they were doing an off-site exhibition, or they were working in tandem with UCLA to create an exhibition of this artist, Miné Okubo, who illustrated her entire camp experience. That's how I was introduced to what it looked like at the times because there were very few photographs or home videos or all of those things because cameras, video cameras, whatever, still cameras were contraband, so people illustrated their experience, but those images never really got out. You very rarely see that.

Miné Okubo, luckily, she had a show in UCLA in the early '90s. She had a show at the Skirball maybe 15 years ago and had a show with the Japanese American National Museum last year. She published a book that looks at her entire stretch of finding out about the Executive Order 9066. Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066, being interned, and then what her life was like afterwards. The book is called Citizen 13660.

It made me start to look for other images of incarceration. In 2020, when the Warren Society Program asked me to teach a graduate class on the Japanese American Internment, I thought, “I would like to do it entirely through visual images. I'd like to do it through photographs, films and drawings, and the artwork that people created in the camps rather than a standard history to push the visual narrative of how the images that we see or didn't see were the things that allowed us to imagine camp in ways that were easier for us to imagine.”

[00:09:07] Host: There was a propaganda element at play where photographers were paid to capture the images to put America's mind at ease that this was a community in the camp. The Ansel Adams and the--

[00:09:24] Stephanie: Dorothea Lange’s.

[00:09:25] Host: Dorothea Lange. Photos that make it seem like, "Look, the kids are in school and they have gardens." That's really all we have image-wise. It definitely skews America, in general, our view of what happened.

[00:09:42] Stephanie: Ansel Adams in his altruistic heart, he wanted to show the Japanese Americans as Americans. He was very clear about his intentions were right. The book that he published-- Why can I not remember the name? It has a picture of a smiling Japanese American woman in a nurse's uniform and people in their military outfits, people playing games, a beauty queen, it is all the things. Born Free and Equal is the name of the title of the book. Born Free and Equal is intended to show that all of these people in these incarceration camps are just like everybody else. They're loyal Americans. Everybody is smiling, everything is beautiful. They're like John Ford films where they're being shot from down low. There is this towering person like Superman. They're very positive images, also because they wanted to show that in spite of all this, they're persevering.

Dorothea Lange's images actually weren't like this. Actually, in her diaries, you see, she was very critical of the incarceration. She felt that this was completely unjustified. Her photos were censored until much later. Her photos were very rarely ever used. When you see them now in places like the Japanese American National Museum, they're always shot in dark confined corners, or people who aren't smiling. They're exactly the opposite of Ansel Adams.

There was another person named Toyo Miyatake who had smuggled a lens into the camp and then built a camera box around it. He's famous. He shows up in-- I think he might be a character in Farewell to Manzanar. He shows up in a lot of these discussions about Manzanar, that there was a guy who was taking pictures and the camp director let him. More recently we're finding that there were other people like Patti Hirahara's grandfather and father, Frank and George Hirahara were taking pictures also at Heart Mountain. They had built a dark room under their barracks.

There's another series of images called Colors of Confinement where there are color images that were taken of people living in camps. Five years ago when my grandmother passed away, one of the things we found was an entire photo album of images of their family at Heart Mountain that are snapshot photos, which I'm not clear where they came from. She had passed away, so we could never ask her. She never shared these with us. She has an entire photo album of Heart Mountain.

It makes me think about who took these pictures in the camps. Then she had them in one of those little sticky, page by page, stick the photographs into and the little clear plastic thing goes over. They're in terrible condition because, for the last 80 years, we did not know this existed. It was never really- Nothing is archival. When I taught this class, I was interested in using Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, some of the other photographers, Miné Okubo's images, but then George Takei's They Called Us Enemy graphic novel had just come out. I thought that it was so interesting that all of a sudden there's a graphic novel on the internment.

George had written about it in his biographies, and he probably was the person who spoke about it most. The highest profile person that spoke about it regularly. The class was just images of internment. We wanted to use this as a vehicle to understand incarceration because I also thought that if you can see the humanistic depictions of things that I had learned about when I was doing the focus groups with the Japanese American National Museum but you don't think about, the fact that the latrines where they had to go to the bathroom were a series of toilets next to each other in an open shared space.

There weren't any partitions. The women would go in the middle of the night to try to use the restroom so nobody would see them because they were embarrassed if there were no walls and no doors on any of the stalls, or there were no stalls, or there are stories of women who would go with a blanket and then cover themselves with a blanket or put a giant box or things around them. I'm like, "That's just horrific."

I thought, "How do you really teach this experience? How do you share with other people what this must have been like?" I don't know what it's like, but I've learned enough about it through these representations that I thought using visual representations are visceral, but they're also in a lot of ways less threatening than text. I thought with graduate students, first of all, they need to look at primary source documents, anyway. They need to look at visual documents as data. That was part of that impetus. Then in class, there was a student in my class, Winston Andres, who said, "What about the comic books that were being created during World War II outside?"

He's like, "I read in George Takei's biography, George had found a comic book or a Superman strip during World War II that depicted Superman going into the camps, dressed up, first of all, like Superman and yellow face, dressed up like a Japanese person to go root out the spies in the internment camps," which he does, which is super problematic because if what people learn about incarceration camps comes from fictitious Superman who finds something that no one else found and are not reading newspapers or government reports, because, who would? At the end of the day, they're going to be like, "There must have been spies in there." They must be incarcerated for a reason. The Yellow Peril is fully justified. All the--

[00:15:32] Host: It all goes back to who tells the story, right?

[00:15:34] Stephanie: Yes.

[00:15:36] Host: Who is telling this history or who's telling this as it's happening? If there's only one side that you're getting, that's all you have to believe.

[00:15:46] Stephanie: Yes. That sent us on this question about what did the other comics look like, so we started looking at those. This was a project he wanted to do in class for his final paper, but there wasn't actually enough data and there wasn't enough-- It's really hard to just figure out. You can't just put Japanese American and comic books into a search engine. You'll find a few things, but not that many. The things that are out there, we found, but we thought, "What else is being made?"

In that time period, we also found out that because the Japanese Americans are reading the newspapers in camp, they saw the Superman comic strip and they wrote back to it. We were then wondering, "How were they representing themselves in this?" Those were the two questions. Because it was not something that was possible for Winston to do that semester and because in the next two years following that class, Kiku Hughes released the book Displacement. Frank Abe released the graphic novel WE HEREBY REFUSE.

Prior to that, there was a Bombshells' Wonder Woman comic that shows Wonder Woman trying to stop the Japanese Americans who are being herded off to an internment camp because, in the revised Wonder Woman, she thinks that this is a violation of civil liberties, which is very different from World War II Wonder Woman. I had some of those when I was a kid. We had lots of old comic books, and I thought-- One day I was looking through them and I'm like, "What are these bucktooth yellow slanted-eyed monsters?" This is really how they're characterizing Japanese people in these comic books, which was also really eye-opening for me as a kid to be like, "This is how they think about people of Japanese descent in America especially during World War II." The project spiraled out of that class and specifically from the Superman comic book that George Takei had identified and said he couldn't get the rights to reproduce in one of his publications at the time.

I was raised on comic books. I grew up in a household that had Wonder Woman comic books from World War II. They had everything. I've been going to Comic-Con probably since I was eight. I've always been interested in the visual part of popular culture. I'm more interested in what most people like than what academics like because to me that's the driving force and how people are getting educated about this history through things like popular culture and propaganda like the Yellow Peril. It made me realize that this is something that I actually should have studied a long time ago. I should have been paying closer attention to how we shape racism in popular culture, or how different ideologies of different times allow people to represent things in different ways.

For me, I had applied for a seed grant to Chapman to just do a small-scale project on this, which turned into a larger project as we started to find more things, but also realized we needed more resources. What we want to do ultimately is to create a fully comprehensive archive of all of these images that existed, both the comic books about the incarceration you have these things like Captain Midnight and Green Hornet who have internment camps. One specifically says Tule Lake on their cover. This is how you know that this is a good guy because he's stopping all of the people who are at Tule Lake running out of these camps where there's no evidence of these kinds of things happening.

Then I wanted to also look at what was being created in the camps, because they had their own newspapers, both as responses to what was happening outside, but just also their everyday day-to-day representations through short comics. How do you convey what's happening in a way that is entertaining, critical, and accessible to all the people in the camp? Also, any kind of censorship that's occurring at the level of the US government as they're printing newspapers, it's also going to get through that.

What are the stories inside the camps that they're telling to each other to help create solidarity and find ways to just persevere through what has to be a pretty hideous situation, but also what's happening on the outside that's making it a hideous situation for them?

[00:20:20] Host: There was so much that I learned in just going through your website and going on the journey that it takes you on, but I'd love for you to talk about one of those camp illustrators, Chris Ishii. I think it's such a fascinating story, and I'll let you share it, but it was just so wonderful to read, his whole purpose behind what he created. It wasn't about revolt, it was about, like you said before, trying to create a sense of normalcy for the people inside the incarceration camp.

[00:20:59] Stephanie: I think that's the thing that is so interesting. We always think about these things as these people must be battling all of these things every day, but really, they're just trying to survive in the best ways that they know how. What's interesting is that so many of these people were incredibly talented artists, they were incredibly talented writers, they already established themselves in these communities and so the bulk of the people that were incarcerated were citizens. They were not Japanese nationals. They were US citizens because they were born here.

They were young, and they were idealistic, they spent a lot of time trying to make sure that they went to different kinds of schools and got educated. Ishii was an animator already. Before he was sent to the internment camps, he had already been somebody who wanted to be an artist. He worked for Disney.

[00:21:58] Host: Not just an animator, he was a Disney animator, which was the premier. It still is.

[00:22:06] Stephanie: You find that there are actually a lot of Japanese American artists who ended up working for Disney or ended up working for the film industry. One of the things he wanted to do was to create this character, Little Neebo, which stands for Little Nissei Boy. It's this silly little kid with funny hair that's running around this incarceration camp. He's intended to demonstrate experiences, I don't know that it's happy-go-lucky, but it's just like, "This is what it's like."

What is interesting about people who were kids in the camps is that what a lot of them remember is they didn't have school, they ran and went around with their friends all day, and they didn't really have the same critical lens on what was happening. George Takei talks about this. He reminisces about all the things now later that he realized were so challenging for his parents, but at the time was just kids running around. My aunt said that. I had asked her, and she was probably also trying to make this sound better, I said, "You were nine in the incarceration camp. What was that like?" She's like, "I just remember that I thought it was fun because we had freedom."

[00:23:24] Host: You go on a train ride, you're around other kids.

[00:23:26] Stephanie: You're around other kids, there's no school, you get to eat with your friends. You get to play with your friends because your parents are all busy either working or stressing out about stuff. It's like a giant, huge playground, except for the snow and the 120-degree weather and the barbed wire and the people with rifles pointed down at you. As a kid, if you're just running around in this giant playground with your friends, there is a different understanding of what that's like.

Looking at people like Chris Ishii and what he was trying to do and the stories about the different artists that were all trying to create a shared sense of community and solidarity through these experiences. Because, again, there wasn't a lot of critical writing being shared, they weren't writing stories in the newspapers about the conditions, but they could do these humorous little short things that I think did help create some sense of community.

There's this idea, the perseverance, this shikata ga nai attitude that they always say that the Japanese have that it can't be helped or nothing can be done about it so they just persevere. Part of that really is like, "How do you live with this situation that is so different from any other situation you've ever experienced?" I thought it might be interesting to look at these kinds of objects as some small bits of resistance, like being able to assert agency through these kinds of animations that are sharing the day-to-day life in a way that is acceptable to a US government censoring crew.

[00:25:22] Host: It is the dual of like, "We're still here, we're still going to persevere," as you said.

[00:25:30] Stephanie: It is community-based because other artists drew this character, but he made this as a shared character for other people to use as a vehicle and it really became, in my head, like this representational mascot that everybody could hold onto and share.

[00:25:50] Host: I think that there is an element to this comic or graphic novel that goes beyond still images that we have. Those still images, we have very limited context to what it is that we're seeing, but these illustrations, especially when we get into the graphic novels, tell you stories that really put you in a place that a still image or a photograph couldn't do. As I was reading through Frank Abe's book WE HEREBY REFUSE, I was learning so much more about that experience in the camp and about that resistance and rebellion than I had learned in all of the research that I had done.

[00:26:41] Stephanie: It's surprising that his book covers so much ground that most people don't know. When I read that, I remember thinking, "I've read about all of these things in piecemeal places, but never seen them all together all at once," which was never the story about the camps that you hear about. The story that you hear about most really is about Toyo Miyatake smuggling in a camera and people letting him take pictures, but Tule Lake is monstrous. The No-No-Boy situation is horrifying. Just how also being in that situation made people really suspect of everything that was happening to them.

Then that was always turned against them. They also very much vilify the JACL and Mike Masaoka. I never understood why my family-- Because I said, "Why aren't we part of the JACL? Why don't we go to those things?" Because we grew up in a Japanese American community. We went to Little Tokyo every Sunday. My grandfather would just-- The nicest, happiest little old man, but if you said JACL in front of him, he just went off. I never understood that because I didn't know about internment camps until I was in college. Then I was like, "Oh, that's interesting," things that I learned as somebody who should have had access to this history.

[00:28:08] Host: Just for context, a lot of the people from the JACL, the leaders wanted everything to just happen or go away. It was more of just sit and let it happen. When you had this younger generation, it's like, "No, this isn't right." That's where the clash was. It's this, "We're citizens. We're American citizens. We shouldn't have to do this." "Well, no, if you just do this, everything is going to be fine."

[00:28:39] Stephanie: That's what America teaches you. You are individualistic, you stand up for your rights, and then no. One of the reasons that I wanted to look at this specifically is because I want people to understand how we become racist or why we fear other cultures. There are ways in which our society just naturally creates enemies that it needs for whatever reasons that justifies its exceptionalism, or its defenses, or its whatever it happens to need at that moment, and that people don't-- They're not born racist.

They're not born as dichotomist Eastern and Westerners, but lots of theories about why Asians are the model minority or why they're perpetual foreigners are really based in Western imaginations of creating another that reifies this normalcy of what a Western sensibility is. You need to have a foreigner in order to have a community that is protected from that thing. If there's no enemy, there's no reason to have community.

In looking at how you created a Yellow Peril, how you created the situation that created Executive Order 9066 so that you had all of the United States fear 0.2% of the population of people of Japanese descent required actually mobilization of resources, of ideology, of propaganda, but if we can see how that happened in the past, we might be more critical and aware of what is happening in the present. I think it was moments when you would hear politicians bring out the Japanese American internment history as justification for incarcerating Muslims or incarcerating any other--

[00:30:31] Host: Immigrants at the border.

[00:30:32] Stephanie: Immigrants at the border, Arab-Americans after 9/11, they're all of these ways that people still look at that history as justifiable and usable today. For me, it was important to contextualize the way that we weaponize difference as an educator but also because, like me who did not know about the Japanese American history in World War II, when I teach this at Chapman, I often, this semester, or last semester because now we're at a different semester, had students in my class who had never heard of the internment whose families were interned.

These are Japanese American kids, who at this point I assume everyone has heard of the incarceration during World War II, but then again, only three of them knew who George Takei was across the entire class of 22, which was heartbreaking to me because I was so excited that George Takei was going to come and speak to them about his book, but it's just surprising what people know and don't know. I tell them all the time, it's not their fault. There's a lot of history to know, but this is an important part of history that I feel could very easily have disappeared if it wasn't for conscious attempts, for George Takei, for Frank Abe, but also for a community of people to be ready to help support these stories being told.

The website project and the exhibition project is there to educate any teacher who wants in on how to teach this content in this way. I think the comic books, I think the visual narratives are really much more accessible. These are kids who were raised on comic books and anime. Anime is frightenedly gigantic now. Really, they know how to read graphic novels. It's funny a lot of my peers are like, "I don't know how to read a graphic novel." I'm like, "What?" It's interesting that they're just so otherly oriented, they're like, “Well, it's not really a book.”

[00:32:25] Host: That was something else I was going to ask, it feels like it's a generational, not an attempt, obviously, there's a purpose behind making these as a graphic novel, but you are reaching out to a younger generation specifically. There has to be some kind of a guided messaging system to hit these younger readers and then hopefully expand this narrative and this history.

[00:32:53] Stephanie: Yes. I want them to see it when they're in the sixth grade, even not in its full content, but then when they see it in the eighth grade, it's not completely foreign. Then by the time they get to high school and college, they can actually think about it critically. I think that's also the mistake that it's a one-shot history, you learn about it once. I think the way that we've conceptualized the website and the physical exhibition to go along with it is to just always continue to change and add to it and make it dynamic and vibrant.

We're putting in the podcast, we're putting in short video lessons, we're creating curriculum for everybody to be able to have tips on how to teach this because one of the things that we get most often from faculty who are trying to teach is this, "How do you teach this content without upsetting students or how do you do this in a way that's sensitive?" or "How do you do this?" We have to have these difficult conversations because that's how people learn to be critical and that's how they learn to grow. With things like removing ethnic studies or removing critical race theory from the classroom, which is a terrifying thought to me, will create a bunch of uncritical, unthoughtful students with a decontextualized sense of self. In whatever way we can do to help create any parts of history and make them invisible, accessible and make people want to learn more about it even if it's because it's a comic book and it's artistic and interesting and it makes them think of Pokémon is at least an entryway.

[00:34:28] Host: We want to thank Stephanie Takaragawa. For more information, visit chapman.edu/wilkinson. Chapters podcast was produced by Past Forward and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library. For more information, visit pastforward.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.

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