This month marks the passing of 70 years since the February 19, 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt, an act resulting in the forcible removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent. About two-thirds of those relocated to concentration camps scattered across desolate areas of the United States were U.S. citizens. To reflect on this milestone and its legacy, SPICE joined with the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) and the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia (NCTA) to co-sponsor “Commemorating 70 Years Since Executive Order 9066: A Panel Discussion on the Japanese-American Experience of World War II.” Moderated by Stanford Professor of Japanese literature and IUC Executive Director Indra Levy, the event drew a crowd of educators, students, and community members eager to enrich their understanding of this troubling chapter in U.S. history. Presentations were given by an esteemed panel: Professor Emeritus Donald Hata of California State University Dominguez Hills, writer and artist Dr. Ruth Y. Okimoto, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki, and journalist and filmmaker gayle yamada. Drawing on their diverse experiences, the panelists addressed how the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government does not, as Levy emphasized, “sit quietly in the past.”

A common thread connecting the presentations, raised both by panelists who spent their childhoods in the camps and those born after the war, was that the traumatic experience of the war years left an indelible mark on the Japanese-American community. In the words of yamada, “The Japanese-American experience during World War II defined us as a people. The war was not a personal experience for me but it defined who I have become almost without me realizing it.” Hata recalled that after the war, many families including his own lived in “fear of being singled out again as scapegoats,” and consequently “abandoned, rejected and suppressed Japanese language and culture. The desired goal was to be a 200% white American, an emasculated model minority devoid of any connection to their Japanese heritage.” Okazaki echoed this, explaining that he only realized years later how much the Japanese-American community in which he was raised was “acting out a post-camp experience…that’s why we had to be in Boy Scouts—it’s because of the camps—that’s why we had to be in every single sports league—it’s because of the camps…that’s why we had to be so American, that’s why we were constantly told not to stick out, to belong, not to get in trouble.” For Okimoto, the dislocation of being forced from her home and sent to the camps following Executive Order 9066 was paralleled by the challenges of then re-entering society following the end of the war: “We laugh about it now but it was very scary after the war to come back to a community being the only Japanese family and having people stare and chase us.”

The scars left by wartime experiences, panelists suggested, made it difficult for Japanese Americans to confront and openly discuss this period for many years. Yet, each of them discovered a way—teaching, archiving and creative reconstruction of the past—to explore the legacy of Japanese Americans in World War II, both for their own personal understanding and in order to share these stories with others. Hata found that his time at the IUC in Japan “brought clarity and a sense of identity and purpose to my life…I learned about Japanese history and about my Japanese immigrant heritage.” Hata later drew on this when he developed groundbreaking teaching materials in order to introduce the experience of wartime concentration camps into a college survey course on U.S. history. His text Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress, co-authored with Nadine Hata, first came out as a slim 15-page supplement at a time when there were no other suitable materials for teaching this history, and is today a core source in this field. Okimoto, on the other hand, discovered that drawing and painting were her “salvation,” for they offered a way to “express myself about those years that I could not talk about,” which in turn enabled her to document the history of the Poston camp where she and her family were imprisoned during the war in Sharing a Desert Home: Life on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Poston, Arizona, 1942-45 and contributions to From Our Side of the Fence.

Both Okazaki and yamada turned to documentary filmmaking to reveal unexplored aspects of Japanese-American wartime history. Okazaki’s many films have included a documentary on three men who challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066, an exploration of the life and art of Estelle Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians to enter the camps with her Japanese-American husband, and his third and most recent project All We Could Carry, from which Okazaki shared clips of poignant testimony of camp survivors. Yamada in turn was drawn to a project focused not on the camp experience, but rather the veterans of the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), including her father and many other Japanese-American soldiers who served in the Pacific War by translating intelligence, questioning Japanese prisoners, and bravely leading “cave flushing” operations. Yamada’s film on the MIS, Uncommon Courage, which she screened during her presentation, vividly demonstrated how these Japanese Americans employed their language and cultural knowledge to save lives on both sides of the conflict, all while many of their families were behind barbed wire in the United States. 

Okazaki affirmed that even after making three films on the subject he remains convinced that there are still stories yet to be told, because the discussion is, in a sense, just beginning. “It shocks me that the discussion is evolving so much still that even the terminology is still in discussion and evolving, and probably will continue to evolve.” Hata directly confronted this previously unexplored aspect—the insidious bureaucratic nomenclature represented in terms like “evacuation,” “relocation camp,” and “non-alien” (rather than U.S. citizen), which “cleverly obscured the reality that U.S. citizens, solely on the basis of their race, were herded without trials or due process into concentration camps as political prisoners, surrounded by barbed wire, watch towers, machine guns and searchlights, and soldiers with orders to shoot anyone trying to escape. Let us never forget what WRA [War Relocation Authority] was designed to do and did very efficiently.” Raising consciousness, diligently archiving the past, and identifying new stories and perspectives, emerged as shared concerns among the panelists, even as they emphasized that fighting historical amnesia was a future-oriented endeavor. Yamada noted that the kind of archiving projects she is involved with enable people of any ethnic background or race to “look at a moment in time—which was the war—and figure out for themselves how they could work through the same kind of issues that are being brought up.” “I hope that no other child in America,” concluded Okimoto, summing up the lessons of her presentation, “has to go through such an experience as that, to stand in a barrack, in a classroom, and have the teacher say ‘Ok children, it’s time to salute the flag.’…You’re in a prison camp but you’re saying ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag’…I hope that there’s no war where an ethnic group would be put in that kind of situation.”

The presentations were followed by a discussion, during which speakers fielded questions from the audience and elaborated on their stories and work. Panelists also remained after the event to meet with participants and sign books and DVDs. The video of the panel presentations is now available online, so that even those who could not attend in person can be inspired to learn more on their own, share this history with students, friends and family members, and ultimately work together to confront the troubling legacy of racial profiling and hysteria in the United States during World War II. “All four panelists were the model of courage in their personal discussions of the meaning of Executive Order 9066,” reflected Levy, “For those who were unable to attend the panel discussion, I am thankful that we were able to make a video record of the event. This recording will be an important part of the lessons I teach my son, and I highly recommend it to all parents and educators who are concerned about the legacy we bequeath to the next generation of Americans.”

SPICE staff members Naomi Funahashi, Rylan Sekiguchi, and Johanna Wee participated in the European Council of Independent Schools (ECIS) Annual Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 18 to 20, 2011. One of the teacher seminars that SPICE offered was titled “Divided Memories: Teaching about Bias and Perspective.” Sekiguchi and Funahashi introduced the important concepts of bias and perspective by engaging over 40 teachers from throughout Europe and Central Asia in an examination of textbooks from five Pacific Rim societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. The seminar was based on the SPICE curriculum unit, Divided Memories: Comparing History Textbooks, which was developed by Sekiguchi in 2009.

Funahashi and Sekiguchi facilitated a provocative discussion around the notion that because the past continues to influence the present, and because our sense of history helps shape our perception of the world, debates over how history is taught in schools can become extremely controversial and political. History textbooks, too, have become arguably the most politically scrutinized component of modern education. In part, this is because school textbooks provide an opportunity for a society to record or endorse the “correct” version of history and to build a shared memory of history among its populace. In small groups, teachers had the opportunity to first consider newspaper headlines that describe the same event in very different ways, and second to critically examine sample excerpts from five textbooks and consider the questions: How do textbooks from different societies treat such episodes? Do they present similar or dissimilar interpretations of history?

Wee, who staffed a SPICE booth at ECIS, has noted that SPICE’s participation in international conferences like ECIS has significantly increased the dissemination of SPICE curricula to countries that have not historically been reached by SPICE. Lastly, the successful ECIS seminar has prompted discussions about the possible creation of another “divided memories”-type curriculum unit with a focus on how various European textbooks depict particular episodes in world history. 

"The Stanford Report" covered the recently launched Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative, which brings human rights curriculum into the classrooms of California community colleges to transform students into globally-conscious citizens. Piloted in partnership with the Program on Human Rights, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies, the Initiative appoints human rights fellows to develop new curriculum for broader application in California and beyond.

Stanford helps bring human rights to community college classrooms

Globalization has meant that the whole world is connected to the whole world's problems. Yet most of today's students live in a world no bigger than a cell phone keypad.

So how do you explain to them that the clothes on their backs may be sewn by slave labor in Asia, or how international human trafficking may be behind an Internet porn site?

Tim Maxwell, an award-winning poet who teaches at the College of San Mateo, said the basic task of reading is becoming harder each year for the Facebook generation. "To bring unpleasant and challenging ideas into their world is really difficult," he said. He described "young people's increasing use of social media and other technologies that, rather [than] widening their worlds, effectively narrows them" to what is pleasurably entertaining.

The remedy? In an unusual move, Stanford is linking arms with educators in California community colleges for a four-year project called Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative.  Following a conference last June on "Teaching Human Rights in an International Context," which launched the project, Stanford has named eight new "Human Rights Fellows" from California's community colleges. Maxwell is one of them.

For more than 12.4 million young Americans, teaching takes place in one of the nearly 1,200 community colleges across the nation – and about a quarter of those community colleges are in California. But few major universities have engaged these institutions.

The new initiative will train students to be engaged as global citizens, said William Hanson, another fellow, who holds a law degree from Columbia and teaches at Chabot College. "We have to find a way to wriggle in."

With a stipend and "visiting scholar" status, the human rights fellows will work with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) to develop human rights curricula, plan human rights conferences and develop the initiative's website. The human rights curriculum they design could, they hope, seed similar programs across the country and the world.

My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics. Helen Stacy

"My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum" – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics, said Helen Stacy, director of the program on human rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

She said that human rights is typically pigeonholed as a "soft subject" in the social sciences or humanities, but such funneling "misses engineering students and IT students and math students."

For example, she said, students of computer science or statistics could be engaged in mapping human trafficking or drug smuggling. Young economists could study the supply-and-demand dynamics of crime.

The effort "to speak a language that speaks to all of the disciplines" could result in a human rights curriculum that extends into the high school and even the elementary school level, Stacy said. Moreover, the planned website with an online curriculum could help educators the world over – even an isolated educator sitting in Uzbekistan, she said.

For the Stanford faculty and staff who created the course, the beginnings go back a long way and are the fruition of years of experience, research and thought.

Gary Mukai's experience of human rights violations was firsthand: the director of SPICE recalls a childhood as a farm worker whose Japanese-American parents, also farm workers, had been detained by their country during World War II. "I grew up puzzled about many of their stories, and their stories certainly influenced my interest in developing educational materials about civil and human rights for young students," he said.

For instance, he recalled uncles and other relatives who volunteered or were drafted by the U.S. Army from behind barbed wire. Or stories about his relatives who received posthumous medals for their sons' service while they still lived behind barbed wire.

Richard Roberts, a Stanford professor of history, remembered reading William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, years ago. The questions it raised fascinated him: "Who will teach the teacher? Where do we learn? Who do we learn from? Who has the power to teach?"

He said universities typically teach an "isolated, really small segment" of the general population. Roberts, who studies domestic violence and human trafficking in Africa, said that when it comes to human rights, "That's not enough. We have to go beyond the rarefied segment."

One of the people on this frontline of teaching is Enrique Luna, a history instructor at Gilroy's Gavilan College. For him, Stanford represents something of a return: his father had been a cook at the university's dorms. Now Luna is an educator who looks for opportunities for students to participate with direct aid in their local communities and also with groups such as the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Tarahumara of northern Mexico.

To reach his students, he said, he creates loops "back and forth between reading and doing." When students are doing, they have a reason to read, and when they read, they are able to fix their understandings through application. "They do their best work when they're doing something. That's where the other disciplines pour in," he said.

A lunchtime session last summer was popping with ideas: Hanson was enthusiastic about possibly broadcasting Stanford lectures on human rights on his college's television station.

Another human rights fellow, Sadie Reynolds from Cabrillo College in Aptos, was just happy for the time to think and reflect. "It's hard to articulate hopes this early in the planning. I have a selfish hope of learning about this model so I can apply it in the classroom." She said she will present what she's learned at Stanford to a workshop at Cabrillo.

Those on the frontline of teaching don't get such opportunities very often:  "It's difficult to find time to develop this at community colleges," she said.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) honored two of the top students of the 2011 Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) at a Japan Day event at Stanford University on August 19, 2011. The RSP, an online course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors across the United States, recognized the students based on their coursework and exceptional research essays.

Japan Day featured welcoming comments by Professor Coit D. Blacker, FSI Director; an overview of the RSP by Naomi Funahashi, RSP Coordinator and Instructor; opening remarks on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations by Consul General Hiroshi Inomata, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco; and a lecture on post-earthquake Japan by Professor Emeritus Nisuke Ando, Kyoto University and Doshisha University. The program was highlighted by presentations by student honorees Lindsey Henderson and Mathieu Rolfo, who wrote research essays on Japan’s use of stories to construct a national identity, and on Okinawa’s role post-World War II, respectively. Professor Emeritus Daniel I. Okimoto and Professor Phillip Lipscy commented on the students’ essays. Gary Mukai, SPICE Director, facilitated the event.

Named in honor of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, a leading educator and noted scholar of Japanese history and culture, the RSP annually selects 25–30 exceptional high school students from throughout the United States to engage in intensive study of Japan. Through Internet-based lectures and discussions, the program provides students with a broad overview of Japan, with a special focus on the U.S.–Japan relationship. Prominent scholars affiliated with Stanford University, the University of Tokyo, the University of Hawaii, and other institutions provide lectures and engage students in online dialogue. The RSP received funding for the first three years (2004–06) of the program from the United States-Japan Foundation. Funding for 2007 and 2008 was provided by the Center for Global Partnership, the Japan Foundation. Funding since 2009 has been provided by the Japan Fund, FSI, Stanford University.

The RSP is currently accepting applications for the 2012 program. For more information about the RSP, visit www.reischauerscholars.org or contact Gary Mukai, RSP Coordinator and Instructor, at nfunahashi@stanford.edu.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) presented two workshops at the 2011 EARCOS Teachers' Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

On March 24, 2011, SPICE conducted a workshop entitled "The Atomic Bombings and Their Legacies." This session introduced upper elementary and secondary school teachers to activities and resources from the SPICE curriculum units "Examining Long-Term Radiation Effects" and "Sadako's Paper Cranes and Lessons of Peace." Given the recent events in Japan, SPICE focused on presenting content from the curriculum unit, "Examining Long-Term Radiation Effects," and worked with participants to develop classroom activities to engage their students in a discussion about nuclear issues.

On March 25, 2011, SPICE presented a second workshop entitled "Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health." This session introduced secondary school teachers to lessons and activities from two SPICE curriculum units: "Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health" and "TeachAIDS: A Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Prevention Curriculum."  Participants engaged in a series of interactive activities and learned about new online teacher resources from SPICE and TeachAIDS, http://teachaids.org/.

The East Asia Regional Council of Schools (EARCOS) is an organization of 120 member schools in East Asia. EARCOS' mission is to inspire adult and student learning through its leadership and service.

The 2011 SPICE catalog is now available.  SPICE has four curriculum units featured in this year's catalog.

Inter-Korean Relations: Rivalry, Reconciliation, and Reunification

This curriculum unit provides students with a multifaceted view of inter-Korean relations, asking them to study the relationship through the lenses of history, politics, economics, security, and socio-cultural and human dynamics. Finally, students apply their knowledge of inter-Korean relations to consider future prospects for the Korean peninsula.

Indigo: A Color That Links the World

This teacher's guide was developed specifically for teachers in the New York City Public Schools to encourage the use of Indigo: A Color That Links the World, Calliope: Exploring World History (September 2010, Volume 21, Number 1) and the study of the Silk Road in their classrooms. The indigo issue of Calliope and the teacher's guide were developed in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project as part of its Silk Road Connect education initiative.

Early Encounters: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, 1860

This graphic novel tells the story of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to leave Japan after over two centuries of isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Chronicling encounters with foreign leaders, cross-cultural mishaps, and unlikely friendships that develop despite barriers of language and politics, the graphic novel follows the embassy's voyage to San Francisco, Washington D.C., and other cities on the East coast.

Sadako's Paper Cranes and Lessons of Peace

In collaboration with the Tribute World Trade Center Visitor Center (Tribute Center) in New York City, SPICE has developed educational materials that help students to reflect upon the impact of September 11th and the humanitarian efforts that took place in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center.