Japanese Alien and Japanese-American Poets In U. S. Relocation Camps Es

On February 19, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the infamous Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese Aliens and Japanese Americans in concentration camps because of the so-called military threat, they posed. In 1945, poet Lawson Fusao Inada wrote the following poem, titled Concentration Constellation, which refers to the various relocation camps that were used to contain these massesIn this earthly configuration,We have, not points of light,but prominent barbs of darkBegin between the Golden States highest and lowest elevationsand name that locationManzanar. Rattlesnake a railway systemsouthward to the zone of Arizona, to the homeif natives on the reservation,and call those Gila, Poston.Then just take your timewinding your way acrossjust make yourself at homein the swamps of Arkansas.for this is Rohwer and Jerome.But now, you weary of the way.Its a big country, you say.Its a big history, hardlyhalfway through - with Amachelooming in the Colorado desert,Heart bay window high in wideWyoming, Minidoka on the moonof Idaho, then down to Utahsjewel of Topaz before findingyourself at northern Californiasfrozen beach of Tule LakeNow regard what sort of shapethis constellation takes.It sits there like a jagged scar,massive, on the massive landscape.It lies there like the rusted electrifyof a twisted and remembered fence. As Inada points out with his analogy to a constellation, the United States government had constructed many camps and scattered them all over the country. In other words, the impoundment of Japanese-Americans was not merely a blip in American history it was instead a catastrophic and appalling forced remov... ...bstone Publishing Company, 1983.Matsura, Artist. Impressions of Gila, 1. Gila News Courier. 7 October 1942 4.Mori, Taisanboku, et al. Poets Behind Barbed Wire. Eds. Jiro Nakano and Kav Nakano. Honolulu Bamboo Ridge Press, 1983.My Gila Diary. Gila News Courier. 17 October 1942 4.Nelson, Cary. Japa nese American Concentration Camp Haiku. Online Available at http//www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/haiku.htm, 2003.Okihiro, Gary Y. Whispered Silences Japanese Americans and introduction War II. Seattle University of Washington Press, 1996.Roripaugh, Lee Ann. Beyond Heart Mountain. New York Hudson Books, 1999.Tule Lake Committee. Kinenhi Reflections on Tule Lake. San Francisco The Tule Lake Committee, 1980.Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. Seattle University of Washington Press, 1982.