Jonathan van Harmelen

jonathan

Jonathan van Harmelen is currently a Ph.D student in history at UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of Japanese-American incarceration. He holds a BA in history and French from Pomona College and an MA from Georgetown University. He can be reached at jvanharm@ucsc.edu.

Updated February 2020

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Kizuna 2020: Nikkei Kindness and Solidarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Quarantine in Camp: Stories of Other Pandemics

By Jonathan van Harmelen
5 May 2020

Shortly after leaving Topaz to attend the University of Montana, Missoula, Miyeko Taketa received a letter from her friend Pearl Nugent in February 1944. Nugent, the wife of Reverend Carl Nugent of Topaz’s Protestant Church, shared one interesting story that might interest readers today: “Yesterday our seven week scarlet fever quarantine came to an end and I went shopping, free as the air, the first time I’ve been out since we returned from Topaz on Christmas afternoon.”1 While Pearl Nugent had the freedom to leave the camp regularly unlike those confined, her story …

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“Infamy’s legacy: Tule Lake and repatriation remembered”

By Jonathan van Harmelen
10 Apr 2020

One of most divisive chapters of the Japanese American incarceration is the story of Tule Lake. While established as a traditional War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp, it was declared a “segregation center” by the WRA to meet Congressional demands issue loyalty oaths and begin military recruitment within camp. Of the 120,000 Japanese Nationals, and Japanese Americans that were incarcerated starting in 1942, about 10,000 were labeled as “No, No” Boys: troublemakers who refused to answer two questions of the infamous ‘loyalty oath’ related to loyalty and mili…

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Hung Wai Ching: The Founding of the Varsity Victory Volunteers and relations between Chinese and Japanese Americans

By Jonathan van Harmelen
20 Mar 2020

The study of relations between Chinese and Japanese Americans during WWII is a small yet growing field. Although both immigrant communities shared experiences of racial discrimination, tensions between Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities increased drastically following the invasions of Manchuria and China. Following Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment forced Chinese Americans to distinguish themselves and take a position against their neighbors. Yet as historian Greg Robinson notes in his column for Discover Nikkei, a number of Chinese Americans stood as advocates for the Japanese …

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Eugene Rostow’s Japanese American articles: A Reconsideration - Part 2

By Greg Robinson, Jonathan van Harmelen
30 Jan 2020

Read Part 1 >> Eugene Rostow’s twin articles appeared in late summer 1945. The overall thesis of both pieces was that the indefinite “internment” of West Coast Japanese Americans under prison conditions, and the severe property losses they had sustained, had been a grave injustice - “the worst blow our liberties have sustained in many years.”1 Worse, by upholding the government’s actions in the “Japanese American cases,” the Supreme Court had converted a “wartime folly” into permanent legal doctrine.2 Rostow asserted that i…

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Eugene Rostow’s Japanese American articles: A Reconsideration - Part 1

By Greg Robinson, Jonathan van Harmelen
29 Jan 2020

In the annals of civil rights, a special place should be reserved for Eugene Rostow. In 1945, even as Japanese Americans remained confined in camps by official order, Rostow, then a young law professor at Yale University, published a pair of articles that criticized their wartime treatment. In his first article, “The Japanese-American Cases - A Disaster,” published in the Yale Law Journal in mid-1945, Rostow presented a powerfully-reasoned critique of removal and incarceration as America’s “worst wartime mistake,” and refuted the official justifications offered. …

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Discover Nikkei

Japanese migrants and their descendants

Jonathan van Harmelen

Kizuna 2020: Nikkei Kindness and Solidarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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