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Reviews
Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle's Japanese Americans during World War II
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by Yoon K. Pak
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RoutledgeFalmer, New York, 2002. Photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 219 pages. $21.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Robert C. Sims
Boise State University, Boise, Idaho
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The intriguing quotation in the title of this work embodies the
wartime dilemma Nisei schoolchildren faced as they tried to reconcile
the principles of democracy they were taught with the reality of
being treated as enemy aliens. This study is based on student papers
from seventh- and eighth-grade classes at Washington School, located
near the Seattle Central District. The papers include essays written
just following Pearl Harbor, some by non-Nisei students, along with
letters written to Ella Evanson, a teacher at the school. Some of
the letters were written in early spring, prior to the children's
removal from Seattle, and others from Puyallup Assembly Center in
Washington State. The author uses this material to examine the "process
by which Washington School and its students, administrators, and
teachers coped with the news of the incarceration" (p. 156). Some
might be misled by the title, for the book, unlike most works on
the wartime experience of Japanese Americans, focuses on the responses
of schools and students to events prior to incarceration.
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1
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The author provides a context for these accounts in a detailed look at citizenship and character education in the Seattle public schools from the 1910s to the 1940s, noting the shift during the 1930s to an emphasis on tolerance and inter-culturalism, an educational approach that emphasizes learning about other cultures as part of a democratic ideal. This accounts for more than a third of the text and is an important contribution to understanding educational policy in this area. As the author points out, however, it is one thing to examine curriculum guides and quite another to know "the extent to which educators actually used them" (p. 85). In this case, the author uses the students' writings to show how Washington School attempted to deal with the crisis. |
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These writings reflect the Nisei students' internalization of the school's "citizenship, tolerance, character, and democratic education programs" (p. 93) and reveal strong affirmations of their American identities, which this work seems to suggest is evidence that Nisei students had taken their citizenship education to heart. While it is clear that these students were affirming their identities as citizens, it is equally clear that they were aware that many Americans, and even their government, saw them as suspect. The dissonance the students experienced is evident in the materials presented. |
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One chapter is devoted to oral histories of three individuals who were thirteen and fourteen years of age at the beginning of the war. The author concludes that their instruction in citizenship, particularly the emphasis on tolerance and interculturalism, helped shape their self-identities as Americans. Each of these students recorded his or her struggle with the reality of discrimination and the challenge to his or her identity as an American. This was the least convincing part of the book, in that the conclusions about the impact their education had on their ability to deal with the events associated with their removal and incarceration are indeterminate. |
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Does this story have implications for teachers and school administrators today, as they try to teach lessons of democracy in a world in which racism and discrimination persist? This book offers an answer in the affirmative, particularly if schools do as Washington School did and provide students with hope and the "promise of what democracy can offer in the face of injustice and ambiguity" (p. 148). |
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