Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Relocation Camp Experience of Estelle Ishigo

Lesson One: Departure

The students should have read about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Show a transparency of the evacuation poster (Text) on the overhead.

Ask the students to read it carefully and discuss the following questions:

1. What dates are on this poster?
2. To whom is this poster directed? (All people of Japanese ancestry)
3. What does this poster direct them to do?
4. Why?
5. How do you think you would feel if this poster were directed toward you?
6. Why do think they wanted to intern Japanese Americans citizens when no crimes were committed?
7. Handout a graphic organizer shaped like a suitcase and have students use words and pictures to determine what they would want to bring for an indeterminate stay.
8. Discuss the difficulty of leaving your home with only a few days notice for an indeterminate time. Ask students how they would dispose of large items like appliances, homes, cars, etc. Ask them to consider how such an experience would affect their plans for the future like graduation, college, career, and marriage.

While the students study the drawing, read the following quotation from box 79, folder 3 Manuscripts and drafts for Estelle Ishigo's short story, Lone Heart Mountain. No date. 44 pp.

“It was very hard to know what to put in that duffle bag to decide what to take, there was no way of knowing what might happen what we really might need - "one hundred pounds of baggage" read the order -no more. Our furniture was stacked in a corner for men from the government warehouse to take away. Home was gone.

Hollow echos (sic), impersonal and cold, answered our footsteps, slowly, with heavy heart we lifted our bundles, left the door to walk away and report at that ordered meeting place.

Gathered around the church that early May morning were four hundred and fifty of us standing in groups with bundles and baskets piled at the curb. Red Cross women brought trays of hot coffee, but nothing could quell the fear and bitter weeping of some, the dreadful uncertainty of what might happen-what it might be like.

They began loading bundles into trucks, and we saw some of the baggage of those who had not weighed their "100 pounds" carefully left lying in the streets."(Lone Heart Mountain manuscript, p. 1)

Living Tableau: In order to develop historical empathy, select several students to stand in front of the projected transparency and assume the place of people in the drawing. Ask the students, posing as participants, the following questions:

1. Why are you here?
2. What are you feeling?
3. What have you brought with you?
4. What have you left behind?
5. What are your fears about where you are going?
6. What would you like other Americans to know about you?

Pass out the letter from Edo Mita to Estelle Ishigo and ask the student to read it carefully. [Letter from Edo Mita to Estelle Ishigo. 13 August, 1942. Box 77. Folder 4. Estelle Ishigo Papers (Collection 2010) Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.]

Ask the students to read the document carefully and discuss it in pairs. Then ask the following questions:

1. What type of document is this?
2. What does the letterhead suggest about the author?
3. What does the document tell us about the author?
4. Where is the author and why is he there?
5. What does the document tell you about the conditions where the author lives?
6. What has he heard about conditions where Estelle Ishigo is?
7. What does the document tell you about evacuation and relocation?
8. Who was forced to evacuate and who was not?
9. What does the document tell you about the idea that military necessity caused Japanese American internment?
10. What questions are left unanswered about the document?