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Final Edits for Poston War Relocation Center:

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAMP/ LOCATION

Poston War Relocation Center was located in Yuma County, Arizona, about 2 ½ miles east of the Colorado River. When the location was chosen to be a site for the Japanese internment, “the Colorado River Indian Reservation Tribal Council opposed the use of their land for a relocation center, on the grounds that they did not want to participate in inflicting the same type of injustice as they had suffered.”

When Poston was chosen as the site for the relocation center, the Colorado River Indian Reservation Tribal Council adamantly opposed the use of their land because they did not want to be involved in inflicting the same injustive they faced on the Japanese internees. After the council was ultimately overridden,

Burton, Jeffery F., Mary M. Farrell, Tetsuden Kashima, and Richard W. Lord, Confinement and Ethnicity : An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003) 215.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAMP/ DIFFICULTIES

“The Poston relocation center provided the research group with an artificial community settlement that was undergoing forced and accelerated development.” Supplies were lacking for the construction of the camp as “some equipment, essential to the speedy completion of the work did not appear.” One example given in Leighton’s account of the camp tells of how 140 trucks of supplies were approved and ordered, and only 25 were received.

Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 55.

Richard T. La Piere, “Minority Motivations: A Case Study,” Far Eastern Survey 14, no. 13 (July 4, 1945): 182.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAMP/ CONSTRUCTION

“The pine specified for construction was in short supply, so heart redwood was substituted. When the redwood shrunk much more than expected, millions of feet of thin wood strips had to be ordered to fill the cracks.” This cost the construction crew time and money, and made for poor living conditions for the internees.

Burton, Jeffery F., Mary M. Farrell, Tetsuden Kashima, Richard W. Lord, and Tetsuden Kashima, Confinement and Ethnicity : An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003) 215.

WRITTEN ACCOUNTS/ ADDITIONS

Passing Poston: An American Story: All three accounts from Ruth Okimoto, Kiyo Sato, Leon Uyeda and Mary Higashi.

Three accounts of the internment at Poston are given in the film Passing Poston: An American Story from Leon Uyeda and Mary Higashi, Kiyo Sato, and Ruth Okimoto.

Passing Poston: An American Story is a documentary recounting the experiences of 4 Japanese-Americans in Poston. Their names are Kiyo Sato, Ruth Okimoto, Mary Higashi, and Leon Uyeda. Kiyo Sato's story (recounted above) is from when she is a young girl, and has to face the tragedy of her citizenship being taken away. Ruth Okimoto gives an interesting perspective of the internment as a young girl as well. She remembers soldiers coming to her front door with rifles to take them to Poston, and being behind barbed wire in the middle of the desert. She reflects on this time in her life filled with anxiety through art and is trying to understand her feelings about such a surreal part of her life. Mary Higashi relives the moment she entered the barracks and realized she would have to live with almost nothing. She also talks about how this handicapped her for life, as she was never able to finish college. Lastly, Leon Uyeda gives the opposite side of the internment story saying he somewhat enjoyed the camp. He liked being surronded by other Japanese people, and not having to bombarded with racial hostility.

LIFE AT POSTON

Life at Poston for the Japanese internees was difficult from the start. Japanese-Americans across the West Coast were uprooted from their lives and placed in different camps around the United States, including Poston. Because of hurried construction and lacking supplies at Poston, living conditions for internees was barely suitable. Barracks were made with redwood, which shrunk more than expected and created cracks throughout the buildings. Weather also added to the difficulties of living in the camp because of its location in the desert. Extreme heat during the summer, reaching up to 115° F, and extreme cold in the winter, reaching as low as -35° F, added to the frustrations of internees. Outbreaks of disease were another common factor across most camps that contributed to the increasingly difficult life. Poston was included in this as tuberculosis was rampant with 140 reported cases. Care for these sick was also lacking, which led to death or disability that could have been avoided.

All of these factors contributed to the rising tensions of the people in Poston.

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied. Washington D.C. and Seatle: The Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and the University of Washington Press, 1997.

Burton, Jeffery F., Mary M. Farrell, Tetsuden Kashima, Richard W. Lord, and Tetsuden Kashima, Confinement and Ethnicity : An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003) 215.

Questions to Ask McCoy:

Is there a rubric for this assignment?

How much do you want us to write?

Should I try and find citations for things that others wrote but didn't cite?

Can I delete things I don't think are necessary?

3 Potential Articles:

Poston War Relocation Center

Poston War Relocation Center was one of the many camps for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This article has some good information but needs a lot of reevaluation and fixing to make it a useable and reliable Wikipedia article. There are an extensive amount of citations that need to be created in multiple parts of the article. There are also unfinished portions that need to be updated given more detail. There is also a long poem that pertains to the camp, but it should not all be included. More detail and research needs to be given to this article, especially in the portion about life at Poston. The life at Poston section of the article is almost entirely based off of one poem that is included in full in the article. I am favoring this article.

Nobutaka Ike

Nobutaka Ike was a detainee of one of the Japanese American internment camps during WWII. There is very little is written about him in the article, so a lot of information would need to be included about Ike's life that is not already. The article relies heavily on one article by Stanford with no other sources supporting it. I would love to learn more about this man, but I need to know there are other published sources about him. He may have this little bit of information because that is all that can be found about him. The article seems to be neutral, just lacking content.

Akira Makino

Akira Makino was in the Japanese navy and was the first to admit experiments were being conducted on people. He has a very interesting story that would be great to expand on. Citations would need to be added, and some information would definitely need to be added about him. The references at the bottom seem somewhat reliable, but they are almost all from online news pages. There were no primary sources, just secondary. I would need to research him personally, as well as what he admitted to. But, I need to be very specific to Makino and his case and not branch out into anything else. This seems like a great topic, but there is potential to be very little information about him. Similar to Ike, the article is neutral in tone and language, but it is lacking in content.

Article Evaluation: 2017 Berkeley Protests

Talk:2017 Berkeley protests

The first sentence is vague and confusing. "A series of protests and clashes between organized groups in the vicinity of the University of California" does not tell me a whole lot about what happened, who was involved, or why its important. This is explained well throughout the article, but this gives a confusing start. I also think there could be better word choices in place of "Neo-nazis" and "white nationalists". Also, in the section of the timeline under "September 24-27", nothing written about the 25th and 26th seemed relevant to the rest of the article, and there was nothing written about the 27th. Just include the information about September 24th and leave out the rest.

I thought the rest of the article flowed nicely and was informative. Everything seemed up to date and was all relevant to the topic. Nothing became distracting or seemed out of place as the article was informative and nicely written. I liked how it was set up as a timeline rather than one long section to read through. It spaced the article out nicely and made it easy to find the information the reader is looking for. The article seemed fairly neutral. The left and right political parties were represented pretty equally and neither seemed to have a noticeable bias.

The talk page had some insights that would benefit the article. They also touched on the "Neo-nazi" and "white supremacist" word choice that I talked about earlier. They also mentioned some minor fixes like adding a couple sources and potentially changing the article to "2017 Berkley Riots" instead of protests. Overall, no major changes but definitely some things that would make the article better.