Archaeology of Japanese Internment Camps

From 1942 to 1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt established Japanese internment camps with Executive Order 9066. This policy stated that people of Japanese descent, including those who were U.S. citizens, would be held in isolated camps. This act was a result of the government's reaction to the Pearl Harbor attacks and World War II. To this day, this incarceration of Japanese Americans and immigrants is considered one of the worst violations of American civil rights in the 20th century. Although there are a significant number of primary sources and documents pertaining to these internment camps, archaeology still can provide a unique, nonbiased, evidence-based look into how those forced to reside at these camps lived and survived. 

The Granada Relocation Center, otherwise known as Camp Amache, has extensive documented archival sources, but archaeology has still provided a unique look at how Japanese families worked to maintain their traditional values. Over 7,000 individuals were forcibly relocated to Camp Amache, and over two thirds of them were legal U.S. citizens. The families lived in their own quarters but typically ate in a cafeteria setting. Children, who would usually eat with family, started to form relationships and eat with each other rather than their family, thus challenging traditional Japanese culture. Archaeologists recovered tableware in residential areas, thus suggesting that parents were serving food in their quarters to try to maintain traditional Japanese cultural values. 

Granada Relocation Center, or Camp Amache, circa 1942. (Photo
courtesy of National Park Service)

In American neighborhoods children usually played outside in the street or other communal areas. Archaeologists discovered a variety of children's toys in pathways and other common areas in Japanese internment camps such as Amanche. Marbles were the most common, and although the parents were under financial hardship, they made a point of ordering toys for their children from American mail order catalogs as a way to assimilate into American culture. Parents played a balancing act between maintaining traditional Japanese family values, while ensuring their children assimilated into American culture. The archaeology at Camp Amanche shows tangible evidence of how parents managed that intricate balancing act while under hardship.

Many World War II Japanese relocation centers are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including Manzanar, Ninidoka and Amanche. However, overall there are not many other U.S. Asian sites listed except  a few mining sites, cemeteries and a few Chinatown and Japanese military administrative centers. This discrepancy fails to capture the wide range of Asian heritage in the United States. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy in the number of archaeological sites that have been studied on the west coast compared to that of the eastern seaboard, and there are fewer studies of Japantowns compared to Chinatowns. Hopefully, as community archaeology and other research continues to increase in the study of Asian American communities these discrepancies can be fixed and we can better understand Asian heritage in the United States.