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This month marks the passing of 70 years since the February 19, 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt, an act resulting in the forcible removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent. 91�Թ� two-thirds of those relocated to concentration camps scattered across desolate areas of the United States were U.S. citizens. To reflect on this milestone and its legacy, 91�Թ� joined with the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) and the National Consortium for Teaching 91�Թ� Asia (NCTA) to co-sponsor “Commemorating 70 Years Since Executive Order 9066: A Panel Discussion on the Japanese-American Experience of World War II.” Moderated by Stanford Professor of Japanese literature and IUC Executive Director Indra Levy, the event drew a crowd of educators, students, and community members eager to enrich their understanding of this troubling chapter in U.S. history. Presentations were given by an esteemed panel: Professor Emeritus Donald Hata of California State University Dominguez Hills, writer and artist Dr. Ruth Y. Okimoto, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki, and journalist and filmmaker gayle yamada. Drawing on their diverse experiences, the panelists addressed how the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government does not, as Levy emphasized, “sit quietly in the past.”

A common thread connecting the presentations, raised both by panelists who spent their childhoods in the camps and those born after the war, was that the traumatic experience of the war years left an indelible mark on the Japanese-American community. In the words of yamada, “The Japanese-American experience during World War II defined us as a people. The war was not a personal experience for me but it defined who I have become almost without me realizing it.” Hata recalled that after the war, many families including his own lived in “fear of being singled out again as scapegoats,” and consequently “abandoned, rejected and suppressed Japanese language and culture. The desired goal was to be a 200% white American, an emasculated model minority devoid of any connection to their Japanese heritage.” Okazaki echoed this, explaining that he only realized years later how much the Japanese-American community in which he was raised was “acting out a post-camp experience…that’s why we had to be in Boy Scouts—it’s because of the camps—that’s why we had to be in every single sports league—it’s because of the camps…that’s why we had to be so American, that’s why we were constantly told not to stick out, to belong, not to get in trouble.” For Okimoto, the dislocation of being forced from her home and sent to the camps following Executive Order 9066 was paralleled by the challenges of then re-entering society following the end of the war: “We laugh about it now but it was very scary after the war to come back to a community being the only Japanese family and having people stare and chase us.”

The scars left by wartime experiences, panelists suggested, made it difficult for Japanese Americans to confront and openly discuss this period for many years. Yet, each of them discovered a way—teaching, archiving and creative reconstruction of the past—to explore the legacy of Japanese Americans in World War II, both for their own personal understanding and in order to share these stories with others. Hata found that his time at the IUC in Japan “brought clarity and a sense of identity and purpose to my life…I learned about Japanese history and about my Japanese immigrant heritage.” Hata later drew on this when he developed groundbreaking teaching materials in order to introduce the experience of wartime concentration camps into a college survey course on U.S. history. His text Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress, co-authored with Nadine Hata, first came out as a slim 15-page supplement at a time when there were no other suitable materials for teaching this history, and is today a core source in this field. Okimoto, on the other hand, discovered that drawing and painting were her “salvation,” for they offered a way to “express myself about those years that I could not talk about,” which in turn enabled her to document the history of the Poston camp where she and her family were imprisoned during the war in Sharing a Desert Home: Life on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Poston, Arizona, 1942-45 and contributions to From Our Side of the Fence.

Both Okazaki and yamada turned to documentary filmmaking to reveal unexplored aspects of Japanese-American wartime history. Okazaki’s many films have included a documentary on three men who challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066, an exploration of the life and art of Estelle Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians to enter the camps with her Japanese-American husband, and his third and most recent project All We Could Carry, from which Okazaki shared clips of poignant testimony of camp survivors. Yamada in turn was drawn to a project focused not on the camp experience, but rather the veterans of the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), including her father and many other Japanese-American soldiers who served in the Pacific War by translating intelligence, questioning Japanese prisoners, and bravely leading “cave flushing” operations. Yamada’s film on the MIS, Uncommon Courage, which she screened during her presentation, vividly demonstrated how these Japanese Americans employed their language and cultural knowledge to save lives on both sides of the conflict, all while many of their families were behind barbed wire in the United States. 

Okazaki affirmed that even after making three films on the subject he remains convinced that there are still stories yet to be told, because the discussion is, in a sense, just beginning. “It shocks me that the discussion is evolving so much still that even the terminology is still in discussion and evolving, and probably will continue to evolve.” Hata directly confronted this previously unexplored aspect—the insidious bureaucratic nomenclature represented in terms like “evacuation,” “relocation camp,” and “non-alien” (rather than U.S. citizen), which “cleverly obscured the reality that U.S. citizens, solely on the basis of their race, were herded without trials or due process into concentration camps as political prisoners, surrounded by barbed wire, watch towers, machine guns and searchlights, and soldiers with orders to shoot anyone trying to escape. Let us never forget what WRA [War Relocation Authority] was designed to do and did very efficiently.” Raising consciousness, diligently archiving the past, and identifying new stories and perspectives, emerged as shared concerns among the panelists, even as they emphasized that fighting historical amnesia was a future-oriented endeavor. Yamada noted that the kind of archiving projects she is involved with enable people of any ethnic background or race to “look at a moment in time—which was the war—and figure out for themselves how they could work through the same kind of issues that are being brought up.” “I hope that no other child in America,” concluded Okimoto, summing up the lessons of her presentation, “has to go through such an experience as that, to stand in a barrack, in a classroom, and have the teacher say ‘Ok children, it’s time to salute the flag.’…You’re in a prison camp but you’re saying ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag’…I hope that there’s no war where an ethnic group would be put in that kind of situation.”

The presentations were followed by a discussion, during which speakers fielded questions from the audience and elaborated on their stories and work. Panelists also remained after the event to meet with participants and sign books and DVDs. The video of the panel presentations is now available online, so that even those who could not attend in person can be inspired to learn more on their own, share this history with students, friends and family members, and ultimately work together to confront the troubling legacy of racial profiling and hysteria in the United States during World War II. “All four panelists were the model of courage in their personal discussions of the meaning of Executive Order 9066,” reflected Levy, “For those who were unable to attend the panel discussion, I am thankful that we were able to make a video record of the event. This recording will be an important part of the lessons I teach my son, and I highly recommend it to all parents and educators who are concerned about the legacy we bequeath to the next generation of Americans.”

The 2012 91�Թ� catalog is now available.  91�Թ� developed five new curriculum units in 2011.

Nuclear Tipping Point: A Teacher's Guide

The documentary Nuclear Tipping Point tells the story of how four Cold War-era leaders—former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former Senator Sam Nunn—came together to address the threat of nuclear power falling into the wrong hands. Produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), the film is narrated by actor Michael Douglas and earned wide media attention when it came out in 2010. 

Now, through a partnership between 91�Թ� and NTI, the film is accompanied by a new teacher’s guide for classroom use of the documentary. The guide underscores the importance of teaching for critical literacy and addresses specific connections to the National Standards for History in the Schools. Student activities include multiple choice quizzes, persuasive writing and analysis, and ideas for creative projects. 

China in Transition: Economic Development, Migration, and Education

China in Transition introduces students to modern China as a case study of economic development. What are the characteristics of the development process, and why does it occur? How is development experienced by the people who live through it, and how are their lives impacted? How do traditional cultural values—such as China’s emphasis on education—contribute to and/or evolve as a result of modernization? Students examine these questions and others as they investigate the roles that migration, urbanization, wealth, poverty, and education play in a country in transition.

Legacies of the Vietnam War

The 20-year war in Vietnam was a prolonged and devastating conflict. In its aftermath, South Vietnamese civilians fled from the Communist takeover on perilous boat journeys that led to the formation of diasporic communities. Others faced lengthy detention in post-war re-education camps. This unit aims to help students learn and appreciate these and other important legacies that have shaped Vietnam and the world at large.

Angel Island: The Chinese-American Experience

Angel Island: The Chinese-American Experience is a graphic novel that tells the story of Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1940. It offers a stark contrast to the more celebrated stories of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island on the East Coast and poses important questions about U.S. immigration policy, both past and present.

An Introduction to Ukraine

As the second-largest country in Europe, Ukraine has always stood at a crossroads of cultural influences. It is a key part of Europe–and the management of its relationships with other countries (in particular, Russia) is key to the future of the whole of eastern Europe. This unit seeks to provide high school teachers and students with a broad introduction to Ukrainian history with activities that touch upon Ukrainian culture.

91�Թ� staff members Naomi Funahashi, Rylan Sekiguchi, and Johanna Wee participated in the European Council of Independent Schools (ECIS) Annual Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 18 to 20, 2011. One of the teacher seminars that 91�Թ� offered was titled “Divided Memories: Teaching about Bias and Perspective.” Sekiguchi and Funahashi introduced the important concepts of bias and perspective by engaging over 40 teachers from throughout Europe and Central Asia in an examination of textbooks from five Pacific Rim societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. The seminar was based on the 91�Թ� curriculum unit, Divided Memories: Comparing History Textbooks, which was developed by Sekiguchi in 2009.

Funahashi and Sekiguchi facilitated a provocative discussion around the notion that because the past continues to influence the present, and because our sense of history helps shape our perception of the world, debates over how history is taught in schools can become extremely controversial and political. History textbooks, too, have become arguably the most politically scrutinized component of modern education. In part, this is because school textbooks provide an opportunity for a society to record or endorse the “correct” version of history and to build a shared memory of history among its populace. In small groups, teachers had the opportunity to first consider newspaper headlines that describe the same event in very different ways, and second to critically examine sample excerpts from five textbooks and consider the questions: How do textbooks from different societies treat such episodes? Do they present similar or dissimilar interpretations of history?

Wee, who staffed a 91�Թ� booth at ECIS, has noted that 91�Թ�’s participation in international conferences like ECIS has significantly increased the dissemination of 91�Թ� curricula to countries that have not historically been reached by 91�Թ�. Lastly, the successful ECIS seminar has prompted discussions about the possible creation of another “divided memories”-type curriculum unit with a focus on how various European textbooks depict particular episodes in world history. 

"The Stanford Report" covered the recently launched Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative, which brings human rights curriculum into the classrooms of California community colleges to transform students into globally-conscious citizens. Piloted in partnership with the Program on Human Rights, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (91�Թ�), and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies, the Initiative appoints human rights fellows to develop new curriculum for broader application in California and beyond.

Stanford helps bring human rights to community college classrooms

Globalization has meant that the whole world is connected to the whole world's problems. Yet most of today's students live in a world no bigger than a cell phone keypad.

So how do you explain to them that the clothes on their backs may be sewn by slave labor in Asia, or how international human trafficking may be behind an Internet porn site?

Tim Maxwell, an award-winning poet who teaches at the College of San Mateo, said the basic task of reading is becoming harder each year for the Facebook generation. "To bring unpleasant and challenging ideas into their world is really difficult," he said. He described "young people's increasing use of social media and other technologies that, rather [than] widening their worlds, effectively narrows them" to what is pleasurably entertaining.

The remedy? In an unusual move, Stanford is linking arms with educators in California community colleges for a four-year project called Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative.  Following a conference last June on "Teaching Human Rights in an International Context," which launched the project, Stanford has named eight new "Human Rights Fellows" from California's community colleges. Maxwell is one of them.

For more than 12.4 million young Americans, teaching takes place in one of the nearly 1,200 community colleges across the nation – and about a quarter of those community colleges are in California. But few major universities have engaged these institutions.

The new initiative will train students to be engaged as global citizens, said William Hanson, another fellow, who holds a law degree from Columbia and teaches at Chabot College. "We have to find a way to wriggle in."

With a stipend and "visiting scholar" status, the human rights fellows will work with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (91�Թ�) and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) to develop human rights curricula, plan human rights conferences and develop the . The human rights curriculum they design could, they hope, seed similar programs across the country and the world.

My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics. Helen Stacy

"My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum" – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics, said Helen Stacy, director of the program on human rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

She said that human rights is typically pigeonholed as a "soft subject" in the social sciences or humanities, but such funneling "misses engineering students and IT students and math students."

For example, she said, students of computer science or statistics could be engaged in mapping human trafficking or drug smuggling. Young economists could study the supply-and-demand dynamics of crime.

The effort "to speak a language that speaks to all of the disciplines" could result in a human rights curriculum that extends into the high school and even the elementary school level, Stacy said. Moreover, the planned website with an online curriculum could help educators the world over – even an isolated educator sitting in Uzbekistan, she said.

For the Stanford faculty and staff who created the course, the beginnings go back a long way and are the fruition of years of experience, research and thought.

Gary Mukai's experience of human rights violations was firsthand: the director of 91�Թ� recalls a childhood as a farm worker whose Japanese-American parents, also farm workers, had been detained by their country during World War II. "I grew up puzzled about many of their stories, and their stories certainly influenced my interest in developing educational materials about civil and human rights for young students," he said.

For instance, he recalled uncles and other relatives who volunteered or were drafted by the U.S. Army from behind barbed wire. Or stories about his relatives who received posthumous medals for their sons' service while they still lived behind barbed wire.

Richard Roberts, a Stanford professor of history, remembered reading William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, years ago. The questions it raised fascinated him: "Who will teach the teacher? Where do we learn? Who do we learn from? Who has the power to teach?"

He said universities typically teach an "isolated, really small segment" of the general population. Roberts, who studies domestic violence and human trafficking in Africa, said that when it comes to human rights, "That's not enough. We have to go beyond the rarefied segment."

One of the people on this frontline of teaching is Enrique Luna, a history instructor at Gilroy's Gavilan College. For him, Stanford represents something of a return: his father had been a cook at the university's dorms. Now Luna is an educator who looks for opportunities for students to participate with direct aid in their local communities and also with groups such as the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Tarahumara of northern Mexico.

To reach his students, he said, he creates loops "back and forth between reading and doing." When students are doing, they have a reason to read, and when they read, they are able to fix their understandings through application. "They do their best work when they're doing something. That's where the other disciplines pour in," he said.

A lunchtime session last summer was popping with ideas: Hanson was enthusiastic about possibly broadcasting Stanford lectures on human rights on his college's television station.

Another human rights fellow, Sadie Reynolds from Cabrillo College in Aptos, was just happy for the time to think and reflect. "It's hard to articulate hopes this early in the planning. I have a selfish hope of learning about this model so I can apply it in the classroom." She said she will present what she's learned at Stanford to a workshop at Cabrillo.

Those on the frontline of teaching don't get such opportunities very often:  "It's difficult to find time to develop this at community colleges," she said.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (91�Թ�) honored two of the top students of the 2011 at a Japan Day event at 91�Թ� on August 19, 2011. The RSP, an online course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors across the United States, recognized the students based on their coursework and exceptional research essays.

Japan Day featured welcoming comments by Professor Coit D. Blacker, FSI Director; an overview of the RSP by Naomi Funahashi, RSP Coordinator and Instructor; opening remarks on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations by Consul General Hiroshi Inomata, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco; and a lecture on post-earthquake Japan by Professor Emeritus Nisuke Ando, Kyoto University and Doshisha University. The program was highlighted by presentations by student honorees Lindsey Henderson and Mathieu Rolfo, who wrote research essays on Japan’s use of stories to construct a national identity, and on Okinawa’s role post-World War II, respectively. Professor Emeritus and Professor Phillip Lipscy commented on the students’ essays. Gary Mukai, 91�Թ� Director, facilitated the event.

Named in honor of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, a leading educator and noted scholar of Japanese history and culture, the RSP annually selects 25–30 exceptional high school students from throughout the United States to engage in intensive study of Japan. Through Internet-based lectures and discussions, the program provides students with a broad overview of Japan, with a special focus on the U.S.–Japan relationship. Prominent scholars affiliated with 91�Թ�, the University of Tokyo, the University of Hawaii, and other institutions provide lectures and engage students in online dialogue. The RSP received funding for the first three years (2004–06) of the program from the United States-Japan Foundation. Funding for 2007 and 2008 was provided by the Center for Global Partnership, the Japan Foundation. Funding since 2009 has been provided by the Japan Fund, FSI, 91�Թ�.

The RSP is currently accepting applications for the 2012 program. For more information about the RSP, visit or contact Gary Mukai, RSP Coordinator and Instructor, at nfunahashi@stanford.edu.

On June 4, 2011, 91�Թ� co-sponsored a conference, “Teaching Human Rights in a Global Context,” with the Program on Human Rights (Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, FSI), the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA), and the Stanford Humanities Center. Fifty community college and high school faculty attended a full day of lectures, panel discussions, and small-group work. Dr. Helen Stacy, Director of the Program on Human Rights, set the context for the conference, and her remarks were followed by a lecture on “The Globalization of Human Rights Education” by Professor Francisco Ramirez, Stanford School of Education. 

Educators discussed, shared, and learned about each other’s experiences of teaching human rights in a wide range of world areas, academic disciplines, and classroom settings. The rudiments of syllabus construction, methods of incorporating a human rights component into traditional courses, sample lesson plans, best ways to make use of interdisciplinary pedagogic resources and materials, and strategies for reaching diverse student populations were topics of discussion. One panel, “Incorporating Human Rights into Your Syllabus,” was facilitated by 91�Թ�’s Jonas Edman. Jonas, Michael Lopez of the Program on Human Rights, and Dr. Robert Wessling, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, ICA, served as the primary organizers of the conference, and Dr. Laura Hubbard, Center for African Studies, ICA, served as the emcee. Megan Gorman, Center for Latin American Studies, ICA, and John Groschwitz, Center for East Asian Studies, ICA, also contributed to the organization and promotion of the conference.

As a follow-up to the conference, ICA and the Program on Human Rights will sponsor a limited number of year-long Human Rights Curricular Fellows in the coming 2011–12 academic year. Fellows must teach at an accredited California community college. Also, Jonas will be developing curricular lessons in consultation with some of the educators who attended the conference.

The conference was funded primarily by the Department of Education (Title VI) and ICA. 

China today is in the midst of sweeping changes. The economy is roaring ahead. Millions of rural families are uprooting themselves in search of better lives in the city. Traditional ways of living, working, and playing are transforming. This image of China often gives an impression of instability, confusion, extreme inequality, and despair, but in fact, every country that has developed—including the United States—has undergone a similar process.

China in Transition, 91�Թ�’s latest curriculum-in-development, introduces high school students to modern China as a case study of economic development. What are the characteristics of the development process, and why does it occur? How is development experienced by the people who live through it, and how are their lives impacted? How do traditional cultural values—such as China’s emphasis on education—contribute to and/or evolve as a result of modernization? Students examine these questions and others as they investigate the roles that urbanization, migration, wealth, poverty, and education play in a country in transition.

This curriculum project represents a new and unique joint venture between 91�Թ� and the Rural Education Action Project (REAP) to bring modern China alive in U.S. high school classrooms. It is the first project of its kind for 91�Թ� and an exciting new intramural collaboration for FSI. “When I first heard about the work of REAP from Professor Scott Rozelle and his staff, I was immediately struck by the significance of REAP’s efforts to help students from poor rural households in China overcome obstacles and harvest their educational dreams,” says 91�Թ� Director Gary Mukai. “This grew into a REAP-91�Թ� collaborative, which has the goal of making REAP’s efforts and its many important lessons accessible to U.S. high school students through interactive, interdisciplinary activities.”

The partnership capitalizes on the strengths of both organizations, pairing REAP’s rigorous scholarship and field research in China with 91�Թ�’s expertise in curriculum development. The resulting synergies are helping to refine China in Transition into a rich and dynamic resource for high school classrooms. 

Much of the research for China in Transition was gathered in Fall 2010 by an international team of students who participated in REAP’s “Across the Pacific” program (ATP). The “Across the Pacific” team—which comprised students from 91�Թ� and Chinese universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Renmin University—conducted academic and field research to investigate key topics in modern China (e.g., its shifting economy, urbanization, migration trends, education system) and produced a collection of original multimedia content that will be incorporated into the final publication. These teaching resources, created by U.S. and Chinese college students, will soon be used to build cross-cultural understanding among high school students. 

REAP and 91�Թ� have worked in close consultation with each other throughout the curriculum development process, and they continue to work together to produce the final curriculum unit, due to be published in Fall 2011.