I found Valerie Matsumoto’s article “Japanese American Women during World War II” to be very interesting and thought provoking. I think it gave a lot of useful information on the lives of Japanese Americans during WWII including all of the struggles they had to endure within Japanese internment camps. That being said, I found this article a little more difficult to read than some of the others we have read, and I have several reasons for this. I think the introduction was a little confusing and I had a little bit of trouble getting into the article. She kind of just throws us into the middle of the action by beginning with a quote. I do not know very much about the subject, so for me, it was a little bit difficult to really focus on what was happening. Generally speaking, although I do think the article was good, I think that it tackles so many different areas of Japanese life that each section could be its own individual paper. While reading the article, I felt a little rushed and a slightly overwhelmed by all of the information that I was getting at one time. Personally, I wanted to know more about everything in this article because I have such little knowledge about it. For example, I would love to learn more about the wartime labor shortage and the Japanese American labor force or the relocation of young Japanese Americans. Again, due to my lack of knowledge of the subject matter, I feel as if images would have helped. The format of the article is very uniform and again, a little bit intimidating to me. I know I can just look up images on the internet of Japanese internment camps, but I think that putting images in an article, especially one like this that tackles such a huge topic, helps the reader to better identify with the ideas that are being presented. Matsumoto’s sources seem very well done. The main problem I faced with her sources was that some of them were so detailed that I lost track of what I was reading about in the article. I think it would have worked out better to add some of the citation details into the paper in order to make it a little bit easier to follow and to understand.

-Nicole Thomas