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Fairness: Incarceration of Japanese
Americans During World War II
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GRADES 4
through 8
SUBJECT AREAS
• History
• Multicultural Studies
OVERVIEW
The purpose of this lesson is to have students consider one
of the fundamental concepts embodied in our constitution and
laws, the concept of equality. At a grade-school level, equality
can be interpreted as an idea of fairness, that "all people
are created equal." This must be a basic operative idea in a
country such as ours because of the various ethnic and racial
backgrounds of our population. Of course, children do learn
and understand that life is not always fair, that most of the
time many things are not fair. We strive for fairness in our
laws and in our day-to-day dealings with others, but we often
fall short of our ideals. On the level of human rights, however,
we in this country try to accord basic rights to every individual.
The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II
is now seen as a profound violation of our laws and sense of
fairness. It should be viewed in the context of its 1941 wartime
setting so that we can understand how such a thing could have
happened in our country. We should also try to understand: Why
were the Japanese Americans treated so unfairly?
MEDIA COMPONENTS
Film: Rabbit in the Moon
www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.html
This site has a lot of information on Japanese-American
internment and links to other helpful and relevant Web sites
www.densho.org
The Japanese American Legacy Project; has a section for
teachers
www.resisters.com
Web site for the film Conscience and the Constitution, about
the draft resisters
www.pbs.org/tvraceinitiative.rabbitinthemoon/index.html
Web site for Rabbit in the Moon
www.nara.gov/ex.hall/charters/billrights/billrights.html
Simple list of the Bill of Rights
www.janm.org/nrc
Japanese American National Museum’s Web site
http://www.asianlawcaucus.org/
The Asian Law Caucus Web site; click on "anti-Asian
violence" for articles and statistics
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
• Students will consider the concept of fairness as it
applies to individuals and countries.
• Students will consider the difficulties of adhering
to or challenging laws that might be unfair or unconstitutional.
• Students will explore fairness as it relates to stereotypes.
TIME Two class periods
(50 minutes each)
PRE-VIEWING ACTIVITY
Activity 1: Before showing the film to students, ask them
to look for incidents and issues about being fair.
A. What is meant by fairness? Where do we get ideas about
fairness and fair play?
1. Have the class brainstorm the concept of fairness, asking
them to come up with examples of fair/unfair dichotomies from
their own lives and everyday activities. Draw up examples
of what our society thinks of as fair and unfair. Show how
we generally have an understanding of what is fair and unfair
but that it is not always clear where to draw the lines.
2. Have the students come up with situations in which they
felt it was hard to decide when something was fair or unfair.
For example, how do doctors decide who is more deserving of
a heart transplant? When governments put budgets together,
how do they decide who gets funding? Why do some schools have
bigger budgets than others?
B. Are these ideas of fairness apparent in our laws, our culture,
our morals and our Constitution?
1. Bring the Bill of Rights into the discussion. Show how
it is part of our Constitution and how it undergirds our laws.
Our country is based on some fundamental concepts of fairness.
Point out that although we have our ideals and our country
is based on some fundamental concepts of fairness, we haven't
lived up to them. (Examples might be the treatment of Native
Americans and people of African and Mexican descent.)How do
the ideas in the Bill of Rights apply to our feelings about
race and national origins?
2. In our country, how do we apply these concepts of fairness
to different groups? How have the ideas of fairness and unfairness
been used in our country in the past? Have students write
an essay on the idea of fairness. If they were to imagine
a world where all things were fair, what would they change?
POSTVIEWING ACTIVITIES
Activity 1: Break students into two groups, and have each
group make a presentation to the class.
Group 1 — Create a presentation exploring the history
of Japanese Americans from immigration, through the attack on
Pearl Harbor.
1. Have students research the ways in which Japanese immigrants
were discriminated against from the time they first arrived
in the United States. Be sure to include the 1922 case of
Ozawa v. the United States, in which the Supreme Court ruled
that Asian immigrants were not eligible for naturalization
because they were not of the White race.
2. Some questions to answer: Why were Japanese immigrants
treated differently from European immigrants? How did they
cope with the differing laws and treatments? Were Issei (first-generation
immigrants to the United States) treated differently than
Nisei (second generation, U.S.-born children of Issei)?
3. Copy some newspaper headlines and articles from the start
of World War II and have students examine how the enemy was
depicted and by transference was projected onto the Japanese-American
community.(A good source for propaganda pictures is War Without
Mercy by John Dower, 1986.)
Group 2 — Have students research the following and prepare
for a debate in front of the whole class.
1. Students will need to take sides. One side will argue
the reasons the United States felt it was necessary for national
security to incarcerate Japanese and Japanese Americans. The
other side will argue why it was unfair and unconstitutional,
citing how other groups the United States was at war with
were not incarcerated. Look at the question of why only the
Japanese Americans on the mainland West Coast incarcerated.
Activity 2: Stereotyping
Introduce the idea of stereotyping first in general, then in
particular as applied to Japanese Americans at that time. How
was it possible to think of an entire group — men, women,
children — as so different and so dangerous?
A. What are our attitudes towards people who differ from us?
Consider race, gender, class and economic status, religion,
language, cultural and ethnic background, foods people eat,
the way they speak English, and individual differences like
whether a person is short or tall, fat or skinny.
B. We live in a culture that generally promotes multiculturalism
and fairness in our attitudes toward other people, but most
of us know that in real life we do make distinctions. Sometimes
the distinctions are in traits that we perceive as "better"
than other traits. How is it decided what are the good and bad
ones?
1. Have students pick one ethnic group and brainstorm two
lists: one containing "positive" traits and the other
"negative" traits, based on stereotypical ideas about
that ethnic group. Then go through the lists and ask whether
every person of that ethnicity could be thought of as having
each of those traits, crossing out the ones that would not
apply to every member of that ethnic group. More than likely,
every single trait will be crossed out. The point can be made
that stereotypes don’t apply to us as individuals. Refer
to the film in talking about how the Japanese Americans in
1941 were perceived and treated as inferior because of something
they had no control over. This brings us back to the theme
of fairness.
C. Discuss how in a time of war, ideas about the enemy
quickly transpose to stereotypes that come to dominate
the public perception of those among us who fit the
description. During World War II, the Japanese Americans were
put in the category of looking like the enemy and were therefore
thought to be the enemy. This happened to German Americans
during World War I, but not in World War II, as distinctions
were made between Nazis and other Germans.
D. Can we think of anyone or any country that is thought to
be a possible enemy (for example, Iraq, China, Cuba, and many
others)?
1. Have students write an essay based on today's news from
TV or newspapers on countries which are being portrayed as
potential enemies. Pick out stereotypical and attitudes expressed
that lump whole populations together.
E. How do we overcome these ideas about other persons? How
do our concepts of fairness and unfairness apply to these stereotypes
that we all have? How did we pick up these stereotypes? Where
do we see them? in the media? or within groups we associate
with? within our own families?
STANDARDS
History: Grade 4
Language Arts: Grade 4
Language Arts: Grade 6
Language Arts: Grade 7
WRITING
• Use structure, support and pre-writing for compositions,
revise them for word choice, identify and narrow topics, and
cite information correctly.
Language Arts: Grade 8
LISTENING AND SPEAKING
• Deliver specific, insightful and organized oral presentations
that use a variety of primary and secondary sources.
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