Fourth Grade Boys
Parents are not the only people who provide an environment of comfort that brings out the visceral reactions of children. Children, too, can inspire happy emotions in their peers. An example of the influence of child peers on children is the close-up photograph of four fourth grade boys in the Heart Mountain camp. This photograph shows four boys dressed in winter clothing, with one boy hugging another from behind (“Fourth Grade Boys”). In the background, there appear to be other children, suggesting that the boys in this photograph are with their classmates. One of these classmates notices the camera and smiles. The joy on these boys’ faces appears to result from the fact that they are with their friends. They are looking at the camera as if it is an opportunity to joke around as is common for young boys. Unlike in the carnival photo and the photo of a boy in front of his barracks, this photo shows children who appear to enjoy the fact that their photo is being taken. Once again, these boys are in internment camps, yet they manage to find situations where they are happy. When considering what causes these boys to smile, the most obvious answer is their companionship. They are genuinely happy to be around their friends, and the spectacle of the photographer seems welcomed.
An examination of these five photographs reveals that when it comes to photographs of Japanese American children, their reactions are often visceral and influenced by their presence of others, most notably their parents and other children. Children do not appear to possess a concern for media’s motives to depict them as criminals, nor do they seem to acquiesce to photographers in the way adults do. The fact that children respond to cues from their peers and parents is important in understanding how children react to internment as a whole. Just as children were not aware of their criminal image, they were likely also not wholly aware of what internment meant. In their navigation of the new world of internment, children would look to their parents and their peers to figure out how to digest internment. To say that children may not have fully understood internment is not in any way trivializing the harm that they could have experienced from internment or they grasp they had on it; rather, this suggestion is merely an insight gained from examining the photographs in this essay. The tendency of children to look for contextual cues helps to explain why they react the way they do in photographs, and a similar contextual approach to internment seems plausible and even likely.