Wartime Incarceration and Gender Segregation

Name:
Course:
Instructor:
Date:
Response paper: Tina Takemoto's ' Looking for Jiro Onuma a Queer Meditation on the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II'
"Common sense tells us that among 110,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans, some of them were LGBT individuals. Nevertheless, seeing Onuma's photographs from Topaz startled me. These pictures did not simply illustrate what I thought I knew or could confirm about wartime incarceration through written documents and records (Takemoto 244)."
In the article Takemoto touches on Japanese American experiences during WWII, with particular focus on Jiro Onuma a gay man and association with other queer Japanese American men. For the queer Japanese people, there were challenges during incarceration, where they faced discrimination for being Japanese while they also had to be careful how they showed their queer tendencies. The passage gives a glimpse of family stories during incarceration, where there is surprisingly little information about the LGBT community. Th...