Essay on the japanese american national museum

The museum I visited was the Japanese-American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California. Although I have been to Little Tokyo a few times before, I never had the chance to visit the museum.
Upon entering the Japanese-American Museum, I noticed its delicate presentation. The way the respective heritages were presented made the museum very interesting. It has been a great establishment for thousands of people and given them a place to study history.
One of the places I visited in the Museum was the ongoing exhibit called “ Common Ground: The Heart of Community.” This exhibit gave viewers an overview of the 130 years of Japanese American history. Objects on display shows things used from the Issei generation, to World War I up to the present. These includes boxes used for storing raisins from Japanese American farms, wedding attires during those periods, tools used in pharmacology, desks from Japanese schools, and a barracks from Heart Mountain. A separate section for World War II where anti-Japanese articles and signs are displayed was also present. Aside from the articles, it also features pictures from the camps and medals from the 442nd battalion.
Opinions from some Japanese – Americans who have been onetime residents of the concentration camps during World War II can be seen in another exhibition room. While in class, we learned that Japanese-Americans were put into internment camps during the Second World War. The imprisonment has been one of the US Governments’ swift actions as a result of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many of their reactions included being alienated because of what their motherland had done to Pearl Harbor. The government perceived the Japanese-Americans living in areas such as California and Hawaii as a threat to national security, thinking they would create chaos on national soil since the enemy had attacked a location so close to the mainland.
Many Americans had lost loved ones serving the country during the Pearl Harbor bombing. Japanese-American families were arrested and forced to vacate their homes and businesses to buzzed of to internment camps, many of which are located in the deserts of California, Nevada, Arizona and even far our states like Idaho. This is because of the fear that these Japanese-American nationals are loyalists who can spread propaganda to the rest of the community. Life at the internment camps had given them a hard time. Apparently, the Japanese-Americans were put into these camps for no real reason, except for the fact that the government was ” fearful”. Later on, the government officially gave an apology to some of the surviving Japanese-Americans who had lived in these camps.
The Japanese American National Museum plays an active role in educating people about historical events. The museum affects the ever changing community especially the new generations of Japanese-Americans and people with multi-ethnic backgrounds is such a way the it gives the new generation a connection to the previous generation. The museum does not serve exclusively for those of Japanese ancestry. By working with other ethnic institutions, it attempts to bridge the gap between ethnic differences, thus showing how it is community based, rather than ethnically based. Visiting the museum has been a great experience for me. It gave me a deeper understanding of what the older generation has to endure as a result of a threat to our national security.