PROCESS PAPER
JAPANESE-AMERICAN RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN WORLD WAR II
How We Chose Our Topic
Our topic for National History Day this year is Japanese-American Rights and Responsibilities in World War II. We
chose this topic because it seemed interesting to the both of us. Another reason why we chose our topic is
because it involved a little of what we know from our personal experiences. During our history class, the Japanese-American
culture or involvement in World War II was never really mentioned when our class was talking about World War II. To the
both of us, this topic seemed intriguing, so we decided to look more into it. That's essentially how we chose our
National History Day project topic for this year.
How We Conducted Our Research
The way that we conducted our research for the first two weeks of school is by going to the library every day and looking
for and reading many books, encyclopedias, and websites on World War II and the Japanese-American involvement in World
War II. While reading each source, we took an abundance of notes so that later on we could take the information that we
gathered and form it all together to make our website. When we were researching, we included some other information
about World War II itself. This allowed us to have a better understanding not only about World War II, but how the Japanese-
Americans were involved in World War II. While looking at the resources that we found, we came across many things that
the both of us had no prior knowledge of. We thought that this website would take countless hours to perfect since this
topic was barely ever talked about in class, but to our surprise, there was a lot more information in books
and websites than we thought there was going to be.
How We Selected Our Presentation Category and Created Our Project
The presentation category that we chose for our project was a website. We chose this presentation type because it fit well
with our interests since we are both very into technology and it's an interesting way to present it not only to the class,
but to other people outside the classroom. We created our project by looking through many different sources and taking
lots of notes on each one so we could put it all together as information on our website. Seeing so many books filled to the
brim on a topic we barely covered in class was quite astonishing.
How our project relates to the NHD theme
The topic that we chose for this year’s National History Day project is Japanese-American Rights and Responsibility in
World War II. This topic falls in this year's National History Day theme, Rights and Responsibilities, because the topic talks
about the responsibilities that Japan had for bombing Pearl Harbor, a naval base in Hawaii. It is also about how the people
living in Japan at the time had to take the responsibility for their actions and how the Japanese-Americans had to gain their
rights back after they lost them because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.