A Study Guide for Dwight Okita's "In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Dwight Okita's "In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers" excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535825832

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In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers

Dwight Okita

1983

Introduction

Dwight Okita's poem In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers briefly tells the story of a young Japanese American girl in the days shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. At this time, an order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt stipulated that all Japanese Americans must report to relocation camps to be interned for the duration of the war. Also known as internment camps, the facilities were in reality prison camps where Japanese Americans were detained without cause. Okita's poem, written in the form of a letter from the narrator to the U.S. government, makes clear the absurdity of Order 9066 and the underlying fear and racism that allowed it to be enforced. Okita states that he was inspired to write the poem because of his mother's experience during her teenage years as an internee at a relocation camp. The poem, first published in 1983, has enjoyed significant popularity in the ensuing years and has been widely anthologized. Okita's 1992 poetry collection Crossing with the Light includes In Response to Executive Order 9066 and is easily available in libraries and bookstores.

Author Biography

Okita was born August 26, 1958, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fred Yoshio Okita and Patsy Takeyo Arase. His father was from Seattle, Washington, and his mother from Fresno, California. When the United States entered World War II after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, many Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were placed in internment camps by order of the U.S. government. Fred Okita, according to Claudia Milstead, writing in the The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic Literature, was only at the camp briefly because he soon joined the 442 Battalion, an