This document provides a brief overview of the political and judicial discrimination that the Japanese-American community faced during World War II, including descriptions of Hirabayashi v. U.S. and Korematsu v. U.S., and how, over 40 years later, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, sought to right the wrongs that the Japanese-American community faced.

The high school lesson uses video and written oral histories of Japanese American internees about the discrimination they faced before, during and following their internment, and their feelings about the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

This Educator Resources page includes over sixty individual biographies in the form of “ID Booklets.” Nearly all of these booklets were written by former internees or their families. The files are in .pdf format and may be downloaded and printed. Additional booklets will be added to our website as they become available.

Teaching Activity PDF. By Moé Yonamine. 18 pages.Poetry, photography, and text are used in this role play to teach about the often untold history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII.

Teaching Activity PDF. By Katie Baydo-Reed. 10 pages.Students hold a “tea party” and a mock trial to connect with a challenging novel.

Teaching Activity PDF. By Mark Sweeting. 4 pages.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. government sent individuals of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to internment camps. The Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases challenged the government’s right to restrict the liberty of this population of citizens and noncitizens. The Supreme Court upheld the government’s actions in each case. Three Supreme Court Justices discuss these landmark cases—specifically, the balance the court tries to strike between individual rights and national security in times of war in light of the Constitution’s provision that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”                                  

Farewell to Manzanar begins on the first Sunday in December of 1941, the day Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It is a day that changes Jeanne's life and the lives of everyone in her family.
According to the authors, Farewell to Manzanar is a "web of stories tracing a few paths, out of the multitude of paths that led up to and away from the experience of the internment." That web of stories links Jeanne's search for her own unique identity to the wrongs done to Japanese Americans during the war.
The accompanying study guide encourages students to think about the following central questions: 
How do our confrontations with justice and injustice help shape our identity? How do those confrontations influence the things we say and do?

This lesson plan uses the story “Hidden Memory” by professional storyteller Anne Shimojima. In this story, Shimojima tells about the experience of her family in the United States, especially during the time of World War II when some of her family were sent to the internment camps.