Internment and resilience: Researching the lives of Japanese Canadian high school graduates

1. Assemble at the Steveston Museum and Post Office. Gather students out front to set the stage for the lesson. It’s a real-world setting students can relate to, and provides a tangible starting point for the learning experience. Have students face the building to take in their surroundings.
2. Land acknowledgement. Begin with a land acknowledgement of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language group to promote cultural awareness and understanding among the students.
3. Distribute worksheets. Provide the worksheets to give students a structured way to engage with the material and help guide this learning throughout the activity.
4. Teacher enters first. Lead by example and check-in with the post-office clerk to ensure it’s OK for the students to enter.
5. Group work. Allow students to work in groups of no more than three. Due to tight corridors, small groups are required. Students are able to discuss answers quietly when completing the sheet. Students will respectfully circulate and explore the museum exhibits and actively engage with the material. The teacher should circulate among the groups, provide guidance, answer questions, and facilitate discussions to deepen students’ understanding of the content.
6. Closure: Collect worksheets as students leave the Steveston Museum.

1. Assemble outside Murakami House. Gather students out front to set the stage for the lesson. It’s a real-world setting students can relate to, and provides a tangible starting point for the learning experience. Have students face the building to take in their surroundings.
2. Land acknowledgement. Begin with a land acknowledgement of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language group to promote cultural awareness and understanding among the students.
3. Distribute worksheets. Provide the worksheets to give students a structured way to engage with the material and help guide this learning throughout the activity.
4. Scavenger hunt. Students explore the premises both inside and outside Murakami House.

1. What does ethics mean?  Ethics examines the rational justification for our moral judgments; it studies what is morally right or wrong, just or unjust. In a broader sense, ethics reflects on human beings and their interaction with nature, and with other humans, on issues of freedom, responsibility, and justice.
2. When doing historical research on Japanese Canadian survivors, whose story is it? What are the ethics behind this? Does a person’s life story belong only to them, their families, their cultural group, to Canada, or to anyone in the world? In your groups, discuss this last question and share your results. Discuss as a class.
3. Historical researchers follow ethical codes of conduct. A few considerations include a) informed consent, b) potential for harm, and c) results communication. In doing our classroom research in school, how can we honour these considerations? What might we do? Discuss as a class.
4. We need to realize the stories of Japanese Canadian internment survivors are not fiction; these survivors are actual people with histories, lives, and trauma connected to their experiences. In addition, many survivors are beloved elders and ancestors. If we were to do an advanced project ethically, we would need to a) inform families and allow them to opt out, b) consider whether the study might cause further trauma, and c) let families know our results.
5. For our activity today, we will write an introductory letter to a family, and provide an outline of our activity. We will not actually send the letter as we are not doing an extended project but will address some of the considerations of ethical research.
6. In the past century, the main way of communicating with people was with letters. Today many people use email, texting, or messaging. For this activity, you’ll draft a simple professional letter using accepted formatting.
7. Look at Handout 3.1: Sample letter to Japanese Canadian families and come up with a letter addressed to your survivor’s family. Again, you won’t need to send the letter; this is an exercise in the ethics of historical research.
8. Students work on their letter while the teacher circulates for questions and support.
9. Modified activity: create a fill in the blank worksheet where students can add names, contact information and a survivor’s name by hand.
10. Extension activity: if you had to find a way of contacting the family in today’s world, how might you do this? How might your letter change in formatting or content based on the media and person you’re sending it to?

HOOK: This school yearbook was published in 1942 and was written by students in September 1941. On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour was bombed by Japan. In the spring of 1942, Japanese Canadians in Richmond were forced from their homes and sent to incarceration camps. Before you open the yearbook, what might you expect the attitude to be towards Japanese Canadians by European Canadian students? What might be the attitude of Japanese Canadians to their situation? We’ll find out more from this primary source during this lesson.

Activity can be set up as stations or offered as a package.

1. Students answer the questions on their yearbook worksheet in accordance with their station number.
2. Split students up into groups and get them to start at a station.
3. Three stations:
   1. 1942 annual – Opening messages
   2. 1942 annual – Life in a BC high school in 1942
   3. 1942 annual – Second World War in high school
4. Rotate each station every 20 minutes. Students should visit two stations on the first lesson day and two stations the second. This activity will take two 60-minute lessons for each student to rotate through each station.
5. Closure: Summarize the importance of primary sources, historical photographs, and the impact of a high school community.

1. Warm-up. Share modern yearbooks with students. What kind of things do graduates write these days?
   • Share some celebrity yearbook images from People magazine and/or gather some old yearbooks from your school and set them on a table for the students to look over.
   • Yearbooks are great ways to look into the past, with an eye on the future. This was especially true for Japanese Canadian students in 1942, the year they were forced to leave school and their homes.
   • In 1940s Canada, yearbooks were a valuable keepsake of a student’s years at school. As students of history, these student-written yearbooks are useful resources for learning about peoples, school activities, values, etc. One common tradition in the 1940s was to include short student poems instead of summary paragraphs or quotations. From looking at these poems, we can learn more about individuals, their interests and activities, and also gender and racial stereotypes of the time.
2. Look at the graduation photos and poems in the Richmond High School yearbook from 1942. In table groups or pairs, read through the descriptions first to get a sense of personality and the style. For additional readings, examine comments with a critical eye. What type of comments are written about men, and women? Are they different for Japanese Canadian men and women? Is there a pattern? This historical yearbook can give you a sense of some of the attitudes, expectations, and stereotypes of people at that time.
3. Note: some words were used differently in the 1940s. Gay = happy (not queer), dark = refers to dark hair (not skin colour), bookkeeping = accounting, and commercial = secretarial or business studies.
4. Share possible patterns and observations with the class.
5. Other things to examine: what courses, activities, future plans did different cultures and genders have in their write-ups? How might the words “hopes to get through the end of the year” be ominous?
6. To encourage deeper study, provide the students with Handout 5.1: Historical yearbooks and stereotypes. The worksheet uses word clouds to help students see patterns. Word clouds are visual organizers that take data and make repeated words larger than other words. We can see patterns by the size of the word; the more often a word is mentioned, the larger it becomes.
7. Complete the word cloud worksheet, and look at the summarizing word clouds.
8. Teacher reviews student responses. What other observations were made about gender and culture?
9. Finally, are there any hints of the Second World War in the write-ups? Which quote might read as particularly ominous considering the incarceration that is about to happen for Japanese Canadians?

Warm-up As students walk into the classroom, have the following linked photo up on the projected screen:
Nikkei Memorial – Steveston

Conduct think-pair-share or ask students to write answers on their personal whiteboards (if supplied). Ask students to analyze what they see in the photo. Do they know where this installment is? Have they seen it in person? Do they know what it represents? Hold a class discussion after answering all questions.
Teacher reads the excerpt below aloud to the class.

1. Hand out one QR code card to a pair of students – there are 17 cards in total.
2. Ask students to answer the following questions on either a piece of paper or mini whiteboards. Each question asked will be researched, then discussed with their partner, written down and shared out loud with the class – pick three to five students per question. Repeat cycle for all questions.
   1. What is your person’s custodian case file number? What does this number represent?
   2. Write down the year and location your person was born.
   3. Where was your person interned?
   4. List two (personal) consequences your person experienced from displacement and dispossession. E.g., bike taken away, farmland sold etc.
   5. Did your person write any letters or have any personal documents uploaded to their case file? If so, what does it say? If not, why do you think they didn’t do this?
3. Final reflection. Still within their pairs, have students answer the following questions:
   1. What did you learn about Japanese Canadian internment through researching an individual person?
   2. How does understanding this history inform your perspective on social justice and equity?

1. Note: Complete lesson #3 for an understanding of ethical research and permissions. Other lessons #4 to 6 would be good for setting up context. Lessons on asking good research questions, primary versus secondary sources, how to cite, and how to research would support this activity. Some suggestions are found on the project assignment.
2. Students choose a 1942 Richmond High School graduate to research. Using their 1942 annual, the Landscapes of Injustice archival database, and other sources, they will:
   1. ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze ideas from primary sources.
   2. determine the significance of Japanese Canadians’ contributions to Canada.
   3. determine and assess the long- and short-term causes and consequences of internment.
3. Go over the project assignment with students.
4. Allocate time to digital resources in class or outside of class as best fits in your context.
5. Use the assessment rubric.

Warm-up
Students complete the Notice & Wonder image analysis activity (first sheet of lesson booklet).

1. Note: Teacher does not need to conduct all activities within this lesson. Students are allowed to work in pairs.
2. As a class, complete the vocabulary sheet together. Have the instructor read out the words and definitions and ask students to construct the vocabulary word into a sentence. Read out one to three examples as a class. Have students draw their own images.
3. Complete the Causes and Effect organizer. Do an exemplar with the class for the first word in the middle.
   1. E.g., Displacement – causes: Government and Custodian instructed to gather and remove Japanese Canadians. Consequences: Japanese Canadians removed from school and placed into other schools or weren’t able to attend due to work. Students then do two more words.
4. Complete Read and Take Notes portion of lesson
5. Complete Answer and Explain portion of lesson
6. Complete Short Answer Questions portion of lesson
7. Complete Reflect and Discuss portion of lesson

Warm-up
Ask students to select a favourite song they are listening to currently. Next, ask them to select a song they resonate with emotionally (cannot be the same as the first song). Get them to compare why they like the two. Conduct think-pair-share. This activity forces students to consider the deeper meanings and examples of how lyrics impact their moods.

1. Complete Image Analysis portion of lesson
2. Complete Read & Take Notes portion of lesson
3. Complete Short Answer Questions portion of lesson
4. Complete Answer & Explain portion of lesson
5. Complete Reflect & Discuss”portion of lesson