Beginning in the 1930's a debate emerged within the American Anthropological Association over applied versus pure research. With a few exceptions the members refused to endorse or support the attempt to introduce applied anthropology as a discipline recognized by the Association. This refusal resulted in the creation of a separate organization, the Society for Applied Anthropology, in 1941. In order to prove the validity of their discipline the members of the Society needed an opportunity. That opportunity appeared with the signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the west coast. Members of the Society believed the employment of applied anthropologists by the War Relocation Authority would demonstrate the value of their discipline. When provided with this opportunity, however, applied anthropology failed.

This study examines the return of Japanese Americans to Portland, Oregon, following their mass incarceration by the United States Federal government between 1942 and 1945. This essay examines the motivations of both returning Japanese Americans and various groups within the white community with equal focus in the hopes of writing a history that provides agency to both groups. The return of Japanese Americans to Portland was an event with broader implications than a mere chapter in the history of Japanese Americans. The rise of the Japanese Exclusion League and other groups interested in preventing the return of Japanese Americans to Oregon had their roots partly in the Oregon progressive coalition of the 1930s known as the Oregon Commonwealth Federation (OCF). Unified behind the cause of public ownership of electricity distribution, racially exclusive progressives such as Oregon Governor Walter M. Pierce and civil rights progressives such as American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Gus J. Solomon sought to protect Oregon's producer class of farmers and workers from exploitation by Portland business interests. After the dissolution of the OCF in 1940 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the two progressive factions took opposite sides on the issues of the rights of Japanese Americans. In 1945, anti-Japanese organizers across the state, including Pierce, American Legion officials, and Portland politicians called for the permanent exclusion of Japanese Americans. The racist rhetoric of these organizers drew the ire of the Portland Council of Churches, civic leaders, and War Relocation Authority officials, who formed the Portland Citizens Committee to Aid Relocation, the main white group to help returners find housing and employment. Their arguments for tolerance depended heavily on the story of Japanese American military service during World War II. Responding to the shape of debates within the white community, returning Japanese Americans community leaders, especially Toshi Kuge and George Azumano of the Portland Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL), used the rhetoric of military service to demonstrate their Americanness after World War II. The rhetoric of valorous military service provided the ideological center of both remerging Japanese American leadership organizations and connections between the Nikkei community and white civic leaders. After the reestablishment of Japanese American community organizations in Portland, Issei leaders lead a successful fundraising campaign to support a legal challenge to overturn the Oregon Alien Land Law and fund the Portland JACL. Subsequently, between 1946 and 1948, the Portland JACL served as liaisons between the Japanese American community and the white Portlanders interested in overturning laws that challenged Issei social and economic rights. Despite their efforts, Japanese Americans in the early postwar period, along with other Portland minority groups,faced significant discrimination in housing options, employment, and even blood supply. Their experience demonstrates both the power and limitations of arguments for racial tolerance in the early postwar period.

The present thesis is a study of the women involved in the Anglican mission to the Japanese Canadians between 1903 and 1957. Drawing on a variety of primary source documents housed in the Anglican church archives in Toronto and Vancouver, as well as information gathered in interviews with three former missionaries, the study aims to determine who these women were, what their work consisted of, their reasons for choosing to work among Japanese Canadians, and what effects their efforts had, not specifically on the intended recipients, but on the women themselves. The thesis argues that much of the success of the mission, as measured by the number of Japanese Canadians who utilized its facilities and programmes, is due to the high level of involvement of local women. Until the World War II evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the coast of British Columbia, the mission's main facilities were located in Vancouver. In 1917 a male-dominated governing board took over the work, and attempted to 'professionalize' the mission during the interwar period. Still, of the over fifty middle-class Anglo-Canadian women, the majority were drawn from the local community, and a further seventeen Japanese Canadian women, originally from the mission's clientele, became involved in the work. A number of these women were employed as lay workers, and those who had the requisite training were engaged as professional missionaries, but more than half of the workers worked as volunteers. Work in the mission offered an attractive outlet through which these women channelled their energy, skills, and humanitarian propensities. It allowed Anglo-Canadian women to take on a public role while upholding contemporary notions concerning appropriate behaviour for their sex, "race" and class, while the Japanese Canadian workers gained the acceptance and esteem of their Occidental colleagues, and access to a respectable occupation at a time when they had few options to choose from. Thus by creating and largely maintaining the mission, a number of Anglican women, working within the confines of the maternal feminist ideology, built a sphere for themselves which encouraged their personal growth. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis concentrates on how nativism, through a series of discriminatory policies over the span of fifty years, influenced the creation of the Japanese American internment camps during the Second World War. By using the experiences of the first—and second—generations of Japanese immigrants, my thesis explores how nativism supported the creation of laws meant to preserve racial homogeneity, cultural superiority, economic segregation, and national security from the Japanese immigrants living in California during the end of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century

In the Spring and Summer of 1942, the population of West Coast Japanese were rounded up and forcibly moved from their homes to temporary camps and soon after to ten permanent relocation camps in the interior Western United States. This thesis traces the history of one such camp, the Tule Lake Relocation Center. In this thesis I argue that from its inception the Tule Lake Center was unique among the ten camps. The decision to build a permanent center at Tule Lake was based upon the unique potential the area provided for agriculture on a huge scale. The other permanent centers were located in remote inhospitable areas where large scale agricultural operations were impossible. The introduction outlines my key research questions and the methodology used. This section identifies my central theme, agriculture at the Tule Lake Relocation Center, and situates my own research within the existing scholarship on the Japanese-American Relocation. Chapter one is a review of the factors, including racial animosity, and wartime hysteria leading up to the decision to relocate every Japanese individual living on the West Coast. Chapter two discusses the little known history of how and why Tule Lake was chosen for a permanent relocation center. Chapter three documents the commitment of the War Relocation Authority to a massive agricultural project at the Tule Lake Center. Chapter four recounts the tumultuous registration period at Tule Lake. In the winter of 1943, the War Relocation Authority and the War Department combined to administer a loyalty questionnaire to every internee over the age of 17, revealing shocking disloyalty at Tule Lake. Chapter five discusses the decision of the War Relocation Authority to segregate Japanese Americans declared disloyal, and the choice of Tule Lake as the segregation center. Chapter six discusses the events, in particular the tragic accidental death of a farm worker, which led to the end of large scale agriculture at Tule Lake. In conclusion, I assert that War Relocation Authority blunders, including a lack of cultural sensitivity, led directly to the cessation of the agricultural project at Tule Lake Segregation Center.

This thesis studies the Supreme Court decision, Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) and its historical context, using a narrative perspective and reviewing aspects of narrative viewpoints with reference to legal studies in order to introduce the present study as a method of assessing narratives in legal settings. The study reviews the Supreme Court decision to reveal its arguments and focuses on the context of the case through the presentation of the public story, the institutional story, and the ethnic Japanese story, which are analyzed using Walter Fisher's narrative perspective. The study concludes that the narrative paradigm is useful for assessing stories in the law because it enables the critic to examine both the emotional and logical reasoning that determine the outcomes of the cases.