What Do You Stand For?
During the war, Japanese Americans took various paths to prove their patriotism.
Most Japanese Americans complied with the orders to enter incarceration camps to support the war effort and underscore their loyalty to their country. Others resisted, showing their loyalty to American values and ideals by challenging the discriminatory incarceration. Some Japanese Americans fought in the U.S. military to prove that they were American through and through. Others resisted the draft; why serve a country that incarcerated you and ignored its own founding document?
In all, their choices boiled down to their personal answers to two questions: Why or how should you prove your loyalty? And who decides who is loyal?
"You fought the enemy abroad and prejudice at home and you won.”
- President Harry S. Truman to Japanese American soldiers after World War II
Students at the Raphael Weill Elementary School began the day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance just before the Japanese American children among them were forced to leave with their families. Second-generation Japanese American children in San Francisco lived bicultural lives. They were tied to Japan through their immigrant parents and connected to the American culture around them. Dorothea Lange, San Francisco, California, April 20, 1942.
