RESEARCH General World Affairs | Education

SCHOOLS IN WARTIME
Book focuses on school response to Japanese-American internment

Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

2/1/2002

Photo by Bill Wiegand Education professor Yoon Pak uses the letters of Japanese-American students wriitten from their internment campas the centerpiece of her new book "Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle's Japanese Americans During World War II.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Sixty years ago this month – shortly after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor – an executive order was signed that imprisoned Japanese-Americans until World War II ended.

At Washington School in Seattle, that meant one-third of its students were gone by May, sent first to a detention center hours away and later to an internment camp in Idaho.

As they left, the seventh- and eighth-grade students of Ella Evanson wrote farewell letters to their teacher. In them, they lamented leaving school and friends. They thanked their teacher for her kindness. And some testified to their loyalty, clearly doubted by a country forcing them to leave their homes. "I am a American," one wrote at the end of a letter. "We all hope we will win this war," wrote another, adding in parentheses, "not the Japs."

Discovered years later, the letters now serve as the centerpiece of a new book, "Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle's Japanese Americans During World War II."

In it, author Yoon Pak, a University of Illinois education professor, uses the letters and other research to flesh out the conflicts felt not only by the Japanese-American students, but also by their teachers and principals.

The Seattle schools, Pak found, were part of an "interculturalism" movement in education that emphasized tolerance and pluralism as part of a democratic ideal. In a wartime atmosphere of growing hatred and suspicion, it was a message that Japanese-American students and their peers needed to hear, said Pak, a Korean-American who grew up in the Seattle area.

The message of tolerance got special emphasis at Washington School on the first day after Pearl Harbor, a Monday, when principal Arthur Sears spoke at a special school assembly. "He spoke to us about not hating each other first because we have mixed nationalities in this school," wrote one Japanese-American student in an assignment for Evanson. "Mr. Sears told us that if even we have a different color face, it’s alright because we’re American Citizen," wrote another.

At another school's assembly that day, according to a Seattle school system newsletter, the principal reminded her student body: "You were American citizens last Friday; you are American citizens today. You were friends last Friday; you are friends today."

In those instances and others, the Seattle educators "acted as moral agents … in the context of injustice," Pak wrote. "They knew that the political forces of the Second World War and the incarceration could not be stopped. … However, they knew that the principles of democracy, on which the United States stands, needed reinforcing, especially for their (Japanese-American) students."

Pak thinks the message and the attention made a difference for many of those students. Some of Evanson's students kept writing her letters, not only from their internment camps but also for decades after.