Japanese Tenacity

Sara Pena Anthony Diep Ryan Cabrera Ashton Williams Senior Website

The Topic: The selection of a topic is certainly a crucial part to the project. It was important that we not only took into consideration our ability to collect enough information from primary and secondary sources but most importantly how passionate we could be on the topic. We searched for an event in history that represented the struggles of a group of people and how they overcame these hardships resulting in a lasting effect in history. We couldve chosen from a number of topics. However, we found a chemistry within the layers of demoralization and outright injustices the Japanese Americans had to face due to actions over which they had no control. It was an ideal topic. The Research: It is always difficult to begin the long journey down the road to search for pertinent information under such a relatively broad topic. We began looking at the information available to us through the archives at the university library on our campus. We made sure to look for primary sources that consisted of experiences from the Japanese Americans that were relocated to the internment camps and secondary sources that gave information on the historical events that led up and followed executive Order 9066. We searched for images and videos that encompassed the information we were choosing to represent and found to be vital to presenting our theme. The Project: We selected to do a website because we felt it was the best way to represent our strengths as a group due to our ability to customize code rather than just using the templates provided by Weebly. With a website, we were able to take complete advantage of media, most importantly video, to project the emotion that is interlaced within this topic. A website also provides an accessibility that the other categories did not offer since whoever feels interested in learning about the tenacity of the Japanese can access the website. In order to create the website, we assigned each person to make a page that will cover the components of the Japanese internment we found to be the most essential. We made sure that upon putting everything together we edited every page as a group to make sure it portrayed the information in the way we wanted it to. The Theme: The authorization of Executive Order 9066 and the resulting internment of Japanese Americans represent a turning point because it changed how we as a nation viewed the extrinsic ethnicities that settled in our country. The act of having internment camps triggered a turning point in history in the year 1988, well after the imprisonment of Japanese- Americans. The Civil Liberties act of 1988. Signed by President Ronald Reagan, was a document that granted the Japanese and Japanese-American Citizens $20,000 each and the United States Government confessed that their actions were based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership.