Learned from the Japanese American National Museum - Essay Example

The Japanese American National Museum, Educates as it Inspires The Japanese American National Museum is hometo a heartrending image documentation of Japanese Americans from the 1920s to the 1950s. The museum is situated in a very site-specific setting − Little Tokyo, which is one of the three remaining in California, where around forty Japanese towns flourished before World War II. In 1884, Japanese people started migrating to Los Angeles, and by the start of the twentieth century their population reached over thirty thousand.

During the war, all the Japanese in the West Coast were forced to live in concentration camps. After the war, some of them returned to Little Tokyo to start a new life, and slowly the town was revitalized. In the early 1970s, the town needed a reformation and soon it became the business center for the Japanese-American people. Business boomed − Japanese restaurants, stores, and movie houses emerged. The people arrived at a consensus, which is to launch a historical museum that would preserve and remember their history and culture, hence, the opening of the museum in 1992 (Suga).

The museum’s ongoing exhibit, titled “Common Ground: The Heart of Community,” integrates hundreds of entries, documents and pictures gathered by the National Museum and showcases over 15 decades of Japanese American history, dating back from the first generation of the Issei through the World War II internment to the present. The exhibit depicts how the civil rights of 120, 000 Japanese Americans were abused and how they were sent to prison simply because of their cultural heritage (Suga).

One of the most important artifacts on show is an original Heart Mountain barracks; its structure saved and preserved from the concentration camp in Wyoming. In 2010, museum volunteers and the museum’s staff produced a series of short videos sharing the volunteer’s personal experiences associated with artifacts from the exhibit, “Common Ground: The Heart of Community.” The exhibit also displays fabrics, paintings, photographs, and includes spoken histories of Japanese Americans. Such spoken histories come to life as docents share their personal stories.

However intimidating, the word “docent“ simply derives from the Latin word, “docere” which means “teacher.” It therefore reminds us that the museum is an educational foundation with the objective of protecting, explaining and sharing the Japanese American accounts (JANM). Touring us around the museum was volunteer docent, Bill Shishima, born in Little Tokyo in 1930. Shishima recounted how he and his family were incarcerated for 3 years at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a remote desert facility in Wyoming during World War II.

  Historical footages, such as Remembering Manzanar, is an exploration of the experiences of over 10,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans. Another video, the 9066 to 9/11: America’s Concentration Camps, Then… and Now? shows the similarities between the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans after the September 11 World Trade Center attack with the treatment of Japanese Americans during the World War II. These remarkable similarities reveal the significance of the Japanese American camp experience and its present relevance.

The tour convinces us, visitors, to describe our own personal relationships to the Japanese American experience through reflections on how prejudicial reports from the war and statements from our own communities influence our democratic system nowadays. After my visit to the museum, I became profoundly interested in the Japanese American history. A book by Roger Daniels (1999), Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion, enlightened me and provided me with answers I was looking for.

The book tells the unjust laws passed against the Japanese people and discusses what relationship existed between the U.S. and Japan prior to World War II. It depicts the anti-Japanese sentiments among Americans, the Japanese immigrants and the Japanese American settlers. The book reveals the development of the anti-Japanese movement in California from its beginning in the late nineteenth century until its triumph when the immigration act that bans the Japanese entry to the US in 1924 was passed.

The author was successfully able to document the anti-Japanese movement history and the fight to prohibit the Japanese, as well as the Chinese from entering the United States. The anti-Japanese movement consequentially brought about not just the exclusion of the Japanese but also of all people of Asian origin. Truly, the Japanese American Museum is certainly a first rate museum that not only educates but inspires. It is without doubt worth visiting and re-visiting regardless of the price. This museum will always remind us of the fragility of our basic civil rights, how it can happen to any group of people, Asian or not, and how its consequences concern the rest of us.

Works CitedJapanese American National Museum. 1998-2013. 14 March 2013. Suga, Yasuko. Re-thinking Museum Display: designing ‘locality’ at the Japanese American National Museum. n.d. 14 March 2013. Daniels, Roger. Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Ca: University of California Press, 1999.