Propoganda: the Japanese Internment
Braedon Lyons
Durring the japanese interment the public perception of the events that were taking place and what was happening in actuality were two vastly different things, this was in large part due to the US goverments heavy pro-internment propaganda and the general cencoring of any negitive details of the program. The first photo we see above is a US propaganda peice, in this photo you can see a Japanese family boarding a train as they are moved to the interment camps. In the picture you see smiling faces, in fact the only person in the picture who apears to have a negitive atitude is the young girl in the center of the picture. Regardles of her evident frown she still holds up her index and middle finger as best she can. Holding up the index and middle fingers to form a V sign was a gesture popularized by Winston Churchhill at the start of the second world war, the V standing for victory. The bigest selling point in this picture is the american flag the young boy is waving, this is aimed to tell the public that the Japanese people are not only going along with this relocation but suport it, patrioticly even. The second Picture you can see was taken by a member of the internment camp to send to a freind though the mail. The key part of how this picture contrasts to the other is the fact that not a single person in the picture of the mess hall is smiling. We sudenly go from 4/5 people smiling to 0/100+, this is the kind of picture that the american public would not see.
The other thought the American government pushed on the general public through propoganda was the belife that anyone of Japanese decent was against the US, and as an extention of that, againt the people of the US. It is because of propoganda that you can see in the first picture that many americans belived anyone who was Japanese was an Enemy to them. In the picture above you see a man with "you" writen on his back staring at a picture of 2 faces, one of them being Hitler and the other being a Japanese man. Something that this propoganda poaster fails to inform its viewers on is the fact that roughly %60 of people of Japanese decent who were going to internment camps were US citicens. The bottom picture was taken at a school 2 days before the Japanese were relocated to interment camps, in the picture you can see multiple young girls of Japanese decent doing a practice that all US schools still do to this day; reciting the pledge of allegiance. These are girls who's families have lived in the US for generations, they are far more patriotic to the US than they are to any other nation. Yet the US government makes them out to be the enemy, this is a wartime tactic that employs basic phycology. If people are given a common and visible enemy then they will work more cohesively as a team and be overall more motivaded to beat that enemy.