Identifying home: a narrative of Japanese American internment

Abstract

ABSTRACT This work explores how Japanese American children from San Diego, California dealt with the disruption in their notion of home during World War II after the passage of Executive Order 9066. The authors analyzed 243 letters from the Japanese American National Museum Clara Breed Letter Collection to uncover themes in children’s experiences of internment. The authors discovered that the children simultaneously struggled with displacement from their physical home and their identity as a U.S. citizen, sought to anchor themselves to San Diego to maintain their connection to both their home and identity, and worked to shape their new environment into a replacement home while distancing themselves from their Japanese heritage.