Japnese Internship

So the class wandered off campus for a rare college field trip. We went to check out a bronze Japaneses memorial commemorating the Internment of America Japanese during WW2.

I have been studying the Internment this whole semester in Professor Gotliffe's class, Mass Comm 136. I found the wall to be an accurate reflection of the things we have talked about. They showed the squaller conditions and the barbed wire, but the artists also let us know that there were still many aspects of a normal life going on within the camps, like: cub scout troops, art classes, and baseball in the field.
When we talk about concentration camps everyone thinks of the holocaust and those morbid black and whites that they showed us in 8th grade history. It's nice to see that she made sure to differentiate the experience of the Japanese internees from Holocaust victims. While they were both horrible, they are miles apart.
My favorite picture there is of a group of huddled soldiers hovering over a helmet while a japanese soldier cooks some sort of soup in it. This is supposed to be the 442nd armed battalion, the Japanese effort in Italy.
I think the wall is a nice reminder and even a pretty good crash course in the subject. In that sense it's more effective that even the likes of the Washington Memorial.