Author Research:
Joy Kogawa was born in 1935 in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was sent to an internment camp when she was very young. After World War II ended, her family moved to Alberta where she would graduate high school. In 1954 she attended the University of Alberta, where she studied education. She would later study music at the University of Toronto, followed by studies at the Anglican Women’s Training College and the University of Saskatchewan (Beeler). In 1957, she married David Kogawa. They had two children and divorced in 1968 (Beeler). She has won multiple awards for her books and poems. The most recognized book in Canada and Japan is Obasan. She is currently working on a memoir about her life through a leaf, it’s called.
The next event is based on her mother’s longing to be home. Her mother had dreamed of moving back home to Vancouver and Kogawa said in an interview that, “I would have done anything to get it for her.” She did her best by writing letters to her former residence, but there would never be a reply (Woodcock). Kogawa also said, “It's so tragic when I think about my mother's life. She clung to an entirely spiritual life but there was such an underlying sadness."At one point in the book Naomi is going through the letters sent from Aunt Emily to her mother in Japan. They don’t let Naomi see the letters early on her life and in a way those represent the letters sent by Kogawa. The letters have equal significance because the real ones are trying to help her grieving mother, while the ones in the book answer the most important question for Naomi Nakane.
Kogawa has spent her life internalizing, understanding and relating the repercussion of racism and internment during World War II (Woodcock). Her writing...
... middle of paper ...
...about her mother and Aunt Emily’s letters. However, I still knew what the outcome of the book was going to be. It’s partially my fault for not liking the end of the book, but overall it was one of my favorite reads.
Key Passages:
Mother removes the live chicks first, placing them in her apron . . . there is calm efficiency in her face and she does not speak. Her eyes are steady and matter-of-fact—the eyes of Japanese motherhood. They do not invade and betray. They are eyes that protect, shielding what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child.
The reason this passage holds significance is because it represents them as a people during this time. Essentially when the mother chicken kills her chicks, it represents the violation of innocence and the cruelty directed towards the most undeserving people.
Works Cited
http://www.georgewoodcock.com/joykogawa.html
Debra Rathwell is the Senior VP for AEG Live. Rathwell oversees the active New York office of AEG along with being a force in national touring. Rathwell has more than 30 years of experience in the industry and her dedication inspires me. I know she is well respected in the industry and I think it is impressive that she books on average 800 shows every year. Being a woman in the music industry is a big challenge, but Rathwell proves to me and the world that being hard working will help prove yourself. The first step that really started Rathwell’s career was during her last year at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Rathwell was Harvey Glatt’s assistant and went on to work as Bass Clef Entertainment, which partnered on shows with Canada’s concert leaders. This introduced Rathwell to the industry and the rest was like a snowball effect, one job led to another. Another step Rathwell took in her career was pivotal was joining Donald Tarlton for 12 years at DKD. With DKD, Rathwell managed a staff ...
Matsumoto studies three generations, Issei, Nisei, and Sansei living in a closely linked ethnic community. She focuses her studies in the Japanese immigration experiences during the time when many Americans were scared with the influx of immigrants from Asia. The book shows a vivid picture of how Cortex Japanese endured violence, discriminations during Anti-Asian legislation and prejudice in 1920s, the Great Depression of 1930s, and the internment of 1940s. It also shows an examination of the adjustment period after the end of World War II and their return to the home place.
Ringing in the New Year, we’ve chosen an individual who has created his own music and created interesting remixes of other songs over the course of (now) 16 years. We enjoy the twists he plays on his music and admire his efforts to take his music to live performance stage. Local to Brick Township, NJ, Brian Stewart (DJversion666) started out, born and raised, in Evansville Indiana, playing in a multitude of bands, playing bass and/or singing various genres of music. Upon moving to Nashville, he has done studio work, laying down bass tracks for commercials and advertisements. Continuing down the path of music Stewart attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He combines various genres and ties them all together with an industrial sound.
Beginning in March of 1942, in the midst of World War II, over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forcefully removed from their homes and ordered to relocate to several of what the United States has euphemistically labeled “internment camps.” In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston describes in frightening detail her family’s experience of confinement for three and a half years during the war. In efforts to cope with the mortification and dehumanization and the boredom they were facing, the Wakatsukis and other Japanese-Americans participated in a wide range of activities. The children, before a structured school system was organized, generally played sports or made trouble; some adults worked for extremely meager wages, while others refused and had hobbies, and others involved themselves in more self-destructive activities.
Emily was lying in bed when all of a sudden she heard a loud knock on her door in the middle of the night. She went to go see who it was and fortunately it was her good old friend Johnny Surrat whom she hadn't seen in a long time, Johnny had said he was away on business, well he came in and he talked to her and asked how her and her mom were surviving since their slave had been set free before President Lincolns death. He gave her twenty gold pieces and said he was on an important mission and that he didn't know when he would be back. Emily lived with her mother who was dying. And she took care of her mother till the day she died. When her mother died at first she was kind of relieved that it was all over yet she really missed her mom. Before her mother had died, her mother told her whatever she did not to go live with her uncle but her uncle somehow got legal custody of her. And she was sent to go live with him. Her uncle said that he was a doctor and he had many patients that would come to his house and he would help many people and she always wondered why her mom hated him so much he seemed like a good man.
During World War II, countless Japanese Canadians, and Americans, were relocated to internment camps out of fear of where their loyalties would lie. Because of this, those people were stricken from their homes and had their lives altered forever. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan highlights this traumatic event. In this excerpt, Kogawa uses shifts in point of view and style to depict her complex attitude and perception of the past.
The world is filled with different kinds of hatred caused by different reasons. For instance, people may hate others because of their gender, or for having different beliefs. Perhaps people hate others based on their cultural representation instead of who they really are as an individual, whether that representation is a religion or a race. This single fact of racial discrimination has caused many terrible and tragic events in history such as the holocaust, slavery, and among them is the evacuation and relocation of Japanese Canadians during World War II. In the novels ¡®Obasan¡¯ and ¡®Itsuka¡¯ by Joy Kogawa, the main protagonist Naomi and her family go through the mistreatment and racial discrimination, which occurred to all Japanese Canadians during World War II. Obasan, which focuses on the past, and Itsuka, which focuses on the present, are novels that are similarly based around Naomi¡¯s experiences during the war. These painful experiences leave Naomi with tormenting memories, which she will never forget or fully recover from. However, Naomi¡¯s strong beliefs help her to eventually overcome the immense hardships. Finally, Naomi¡¯s past is becomes the very soil that allowed fruition of her future. Both novels Obasan and Itsuka are similar in a way that it is focused on protagonist Naomi¡¯s experiences during the relocation, with her strong faith allows her to overcome the hardship and realize her past has constructed her future.
Baseball Saved Us exposes children to the grim aspects of the internment camps. It does not hesitate to point out the overcrowded living quarters in the desolate conditions of the desert camps or that Japanese Americans had to discard most of their belongings before leaving their homes. Yet, it is through these realistically dark details that this book teaches one of its most valuable lessons to children. Children need to know that Japanese Americans were unfairly persecuted and interned. Oftentimes history textbooks gloss over the Japanese American internment camps. Baseball Saved Us attempts to elucidate this overlooked subject and teaches children about the wrongful treatment of Japanese Americans during and following WWII. In describing the horrible conditions of the camps, this book serves as a positive ethical influence on children because it shows them how unfair it was for people to be forced to experience these hard...
Stanley, Jerry. I Am An American: A True Story of Japanese Internment. New York: Crown Publishers, 1996. Print.
John Dower's War Without Mercy describes the ugly racial dimensions of the conflict in the Asian theater of World War II and their consequences on both military and reconstruction policy in the Pacific. "In the United States and Britain," Dower reminds us, "the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor. On this, there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart -- and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the 'good German' in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies." (8) Conservative readers, don't fret - Dower isn't making this argument to exonerate the Japanese for their own racism or war crimes -- after all, "atrocious behavior occurred on all sides in the Pacific War." (12-13) Rather, Dower is exploring the propaganda of the US-Japanese conflict to delineate the "patterns of a race war," the cultural mechanisms of "othering," and the portability of racial/racist stereotypes. For "as the war years themselves changed over into into an era of peace between Japan and the Allied powers, the shrill racial rhetoric of the early 1940s revealed itself to be surprisingly adaptable. Idioms that formerly had denoted the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals of accommodation as well." (13)
Marsh, James H. "Japanese Internment: Banished and Beyond Tears." The Canadian Encyclopedia. N.p., 23 Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Jan. 2014. .
[4] Ann G. Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during World War II(Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1981), 161.
Japanese-American internment camps were a dark time in America’s history, often compared to the concentration camps in Germany (Hane, 572). The internment camps were essentially prisons in which all Japanese-Americans living on the west coast were forced to live during World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor Naval base in Hawaii. They were located in inland western states due to the mass hysteria that Japanese-Americans were conspiring with Japan to invade and/or attack the United States. At the time the general consensus was that these camps were a good way to protect the country, but after the war many realized that the camps were not the best option. Textbooks did not usually mention the internment camps at all, as it is not a subject most Americans want to talk about, much less remember. Recently more textbooks and historians talk about the camps, even life inside them. Some Japanese-Americans say that their experiences after being released from the internment camps were not as negative as most people may think. Although the Japanese-American internment camps were brutal to go through, in the long run it led to Japanese-Americans’ movement from the west coast and their upward movement in society through opportunities found in a new urban environment such as Chicago and St. Louis.
He’s been on several national tours and has earned his “Jersey Shore” rep opening for Bon Jovi many times and jamming with Springsteen on several different stages. Some would say he’s been through it all. And now, he’s going to do it ...
Dundes Renteln, Alison. "A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Japanese American Internment." Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1995): 618-48. doi:10.1353/hrq.1995.0039.