Order 9066 disrupted Japanese Americans' lives on an individual, family, and community level.
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There was a brief period following this order where some Japanese American families were able to move outside the exclusion zone. However, those unable or unwilling to move were soon incarcerated at government camps.
Both options meant families were forcibly uprooted from their homes, lives, and communities. Families had as little as a week to pack their belongings, as well as sell or lease their businesses and properties.
View the full map HERE.
"Japanese American Life During Internment," National Park Service, last updated May 12, 2020, (https://www.nps.gov/articles/japanese-american-internment-archeology.htm)
In Redmond, this order deeply affected two Redmond High School seniors, Chizuko Tamaye and Kaoru Tokunaga.
A 1942 poll showed that 93% of Americans supported measures to force unnaturalized Japanese Americans to move from their homes on the coast. And, 59% supported similar measures affecting Japanese Americans who were American citizens—including those who had been born in the United States.
On December 18, 1941 the local, East Side Journal published an essay by Redmond High School student Alice Grabner, a classmate of Kaoru and Chizuko. Her writing shows the perspective of one Redmond community member—just days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—calling for clear thinking and compassion.
Did knowing her classmates affect her perspective?
What About Freedom Now?
"Surely, our life, based on freedom of speech and though, will raise our people above such an attitude in regard to the Japanese people, who, as a whole, are proving to be as good Americans as the majority of the white-skinned Americans. Remember, there are really very few who can truly be called Americans, and like our ancestors, the parents of today’s Japanese citizens came from their homeland in search of the freedom to be had here. "
Click here to read the full essay.
With the passing of each year, the citizens of this country value and cherish more and more, the elusive quality of freedom. Freedom is like a bit of blue, seen through the scurrying of fleecy patches of cloud. Although the sky at this time is darkly overcast with ominous cloud-shapes, an occasional touch of blue reassures us that it is and will be there until the end of time.
From every corner of the globe, people came searching for a home where they could live there own lives as they saw fit to live them. They found a home in America. People of every color, every religious sect, each with his own set of ideals, searched for a country where their reason for living would not be questioned. They found in America just such a country.
These people worked together, not because they were forced to, but because they wanted to. Together, they built the framework of our government; a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Today we are again fighting for freedom; just as hard as those men of history did. They fought the clinging hands of their old customs, and the ways of the land they came from. Today, we fight the domination of the world by one man, whose subjects have never had the freedom that is our blessing.
Hitler is deeply condemned by people of this country for his persecution of the Jewish race. Surely, our life, based on freedom of speech and though, will raise our people above such an attitude in regard to the Japanese people, who, as a whole, are proving to be as good Americans as the majority of the white-skinned Americans. Remember, there are really very few who can truly be called Americans, and like our ancestors, the parents of today’s Japanese citizens came from their homeland in search of the freedom to be had here. Until a Japanese man, woman, girl, or boy is definitely proven guilty of treason, they should be given all the consideration that our Constitution states is due to any citizen of the United States.
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