Sociology 4940: Worksheet--"Unfinished Business"

1. How was the decision made to put Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast into "relocation camps" at the beginning of World War II?

2. Define these terms:

Issei

Nisei

Sansei

3. Briefly describe the experience of the three men profiled in this movie:

A. Min Yasui

B. Fred Korematsu

C. Gordon Hirabayashi

4. In 1982, lawyers for these three men brought a writ of error to overturn these men's convictions. What was the basis for their writ, and whose conviction had been overturned by the time of the video?

Sociology 4949: Group Project--"Unfinished Business"

1. Why did the U.S. government set up internship camps for Japanese immigrants and their children and not for Germans or Italians? Do you see the responsibility as lying primarily with the government officials who made the decision, or was the larger society also responsible in some way? Why wasn't there more of an outcry at this decision? (To get more of a sense of how communities on the West Coast responded to the relocation of Japanese-Americans, see the video, "Family Gathering," in the UMD library; it tells the story of the Yasui family in more detail.)

2. Why do you suppose that the governor in Hawaii (part of the U.S. but not yet a state) refused to apply this kind of policy to the even more numerous Japanese and Japanese-American population living there?

3. One divisive issue within the camps was the question of how to respond to the U.S. draft of young Nisei men for service in the 442nd Regiment, an all-Japanese-American regiment that became the most decorated regiment to serve in the U.S. army during World War II. Many of the men who served in that regiment had parents and siblings who were interned in what President Franklin Roosevelt initially termed "concentration camps." What if you'd been in the position of these your Nisei men? Do you think you'd have served, or that you'd have resisted the draft, and why?

4. In this case, the whistleblowers (those who raised the issue of wrong-doing and the need for compensation) were mostly Sansei (third generation Japanese-Americans). Why did they see this as important so many years after the actual relocation?

5. In 1989, President Bush signed legislation offering an apology to the Japanese-American community for the relocation camps and authorizing a payment of $20,000 each to surviving internees? Why do you think it took so long for this to happen? Based on what you've learned in this course, do you think the U.S. owes an apology to any other race or ethnic groups?