A rather free-ranging discussion at school this morning raised an interesting question. We were discussing the 442nd RCT and the question arose: Were there any Blue Star/Gold Star banners on display at Japanese Internment camps? Over the course of the war thousands of men joined the 442nd and were killed/wounded. Did the government allow the banners in the camps? Did anybody in the camps care about the banners, or were they too pissed off at the government to display a patriotic item like a banner?
From the Manzanar National Historic Site website, there is this quote taken from the paper published by the internees themselves:
“Manzanar has its first gold star mother. We had dreaded the day when some family in Manzanar would receive the fateful telegram….” Manzanar Free Press article on Pfc. Frank Arikawa’s death
BTW: I grew up about 70 miles from Manzanar. It’s a pretty sobering reminder to me every time I drive by it on US 395, which is often, as I now own property nearby.
Manzanar was one of the internment camps where Japanese citizens of the United States were held during World War II. A blue star banner was put in the window of a house to indicate that a member of the household was serving during the war. There was a star for each member of the family on the banner. A gold star banner indicated member/s of the household who had died.
A mother of a dead service member was called a Gold Star Mother.
So certainly there was at least one woman who could display a gold star but it doesn’t answer the question of whether blue or gold stars were displayed at that or other internment camps.
Here’s a photo fromMinidoka (a different camp) with a sign listing all of the internees who were serving. That’s exactly what the Blue Star flags represented.
First of all, I didn’t say it did. I said I assumed the result (that’s called reaching a conclusion based upon one’s experiences leading to an intuitive guess).
Second of all, if the camp’s own internal newspaper, written and produced by the internees themselves, was talking about her as a gold star mom, I think it’s fair to believe that there would be at least some mothers who would display their pride in their son(s) serving and dying. Otherwise, why would they use the terminology?
The majority of the internees were patriotic and not bitter, though not completely, e.g. about 20% expressed some degree of unwillingness to support the government, though for varying reasons.
Look at the Description field; the three sisters are sharing an apartment, probably in Ohio, once internees were allowed to move from the camps to the middle of the country.
I can’t give a definitive answer, but I’ve never heard of any reason a Blue or Gold Star Banner wouldn’t be displayed in the various camps.
