So this is a NW specific answer - I graduated with a history bachelors to become a teacher, and that included Washington State history in the context of, “how do we teach about these things.”

Https://densho.org aims to be the single-stop repository for all items internment related. They’ve been systematically collecting video interviews with survivors, and digitizing artifacts and photographs. It was presented to me as an example of how to teach using the internet in the year 1999.

It seemed at the time that Densho was really increasing in visibility at the beginning of the internet, being one of the first major histories online repositories. In the year 2004 Seattle Public Schools engaged in a million dollar district wide student and staff professional/community development called, “Courageous Conversations.” These were conversations among educators at different levels about the racial disparities in Seattle, specifically.

Snow Falling on Cedars was on all the high school reading lists from 1994, when it came out, till about 13 years later. Japanese internment and the Chinese Riots and a number of other acts of state sponsored white supremacy were part of the conversation going in, and what came out was a really eye opening conversation about who the population really was in the district. Those conversations really overshadowed Japanese internment as a historical Event because it was being viewed in the context of a tapestry of white supremacy.

Total side note - about a year later an ‘accounting mistake’ to the tune of $1,000,000 was found from straddling two systems, and it turned out all the money from the Courageous Conversations hadn’t really existed, but by then a huge district wide conversation had been started.

So that actually might give an actual answer about Japanese internment - in the culture war we’re in, either there’s a million of these examples or people don’t want to talk about any, and so they cram them in as quickly as possible.

Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.

Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.

Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experiences but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.

Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" The latter question is often closer to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.

Thank you!