Through Our Eyes — The Young Buddhist Editorial

Through Our Eyes: The Japanese American Experience

To celebrate Day of Remembrance, YBE gathered a collection of stories, art, and reflections based on the experiences and feelings that surround the Japanese American experience during World War II. **Through Our Eyes: The Japanese American Experience** celebrates Japanese American Culture and aims to continue telling important stories that are often pushed aside in American History.
Submitted pieces could be any type of writing or art medium. The topic could explore anything including, but not limited to, internment, the Japanese American experience, the lost parts of American history, or any other focus of interest.

Introduction:

An Introduction to Through Our Eyes by Toshi Steimetz, YBE Team

In 2016, I was a junior in high school and as many students do, I chose to take AP History. While others hated this class, I found it interesting and relevant to learn the entire history of the country I was born and raised in. For the first few months of the course I was thrilled to dive into the lives of our founding fathers, the Revolutionary War, and the foundations of America. However, as time went on and the course reached areas of history I am more familiar with, I quickly realized that Asian American history was not included in the national curriculum for the class. In turn, this meant that Japanese American Internment in WWII was not taught to millions of students across the nation.

Day of Remembrance, February 19th, is an important date to the Japanese American community because it marks the day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the forced removal and incarceration of 120 thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast in 1942. This extremely violent act left a lasting impact on the Japanese-American community and country as a whole.

Luckily, I attended a very progressive school and on Day of Remembrance, my teacher took 15 minutes to discuss Japanese Internment. Although I was glad my teacher recognized the flaws of the course, I couldn’t help but think about the countless stories from the Japanese-American experience that would go untold and possibly even forgotten.