| At the heart of this project are questions regarding memory and knowledge of Japanese
and Japanese American internment during World War II. A sample of fifteen College of Eastern
Idaho (CEI) students were interviewed to see how they remembered internment and whether
their memories were accurate. CEI’s campus is only 150 miles away from an internment site,
Minidoka National Historic Site, and all but one study participant attended high school in a state
which was home to an internment camp (e.g., Idaho, Utah, California, and Colorado).
Participants were asked how they viewed two current policy issues with parallels to
internment (immigrant detention on the US side of the US-Mexico border and possible
reparations for US slavery) and whether their views are influenced by their memory and
knowledge of internment. The Narrative Policy Framework was used to examine how
participants viewed narratives, history, and current policies. Cognitive science and collective
memory were also central to this project.
This dissertation shows that internment is not a salient event to the participants. Most
participants had some memory and knowledge of internment, but it was disjointed. A majority of
participants could select the most accurate narrative of internment, in a relatively artificial testing
environment, but they failed to recall wider details and facts contained in the narrative when
asked open-ended questions. Even the details participants did recall existed as orphans,
unattached to any wider story arc or narrative structure (i.e., characters, a plot, and a moral), and
over half of the participants who identified the correct narrative of internment repeated the
erroneous claim that military threats necessitated the exclusion and internment of Japanese and
x
Japanese Americans. There is also little connection between internment and the two current
policy issues. Though some participants said their views on the current policy issues were
influenced by internment, their explanations were vague and failed to make substantive causal
connections between their knowledge of internment and current policies.
Keywords: Japanese internment, Narrative Policy Framework, collective memory, Idaho |