Fort Minor’s “Kenji” is an absolutely amazing song, covering viewpoints of two particular people, Mike Shinoda’s aunt and father, about their time in the internment camps during WWII.

Mike, the singer, is Japanese-American, being well-known as one of the singers in “Linkin Park”.

In this song, Mike sings about the life of a man named “Kenji”, and how he lived a happy life prior to the Pearl Harbor bombings. However, after the president’s announcement about detaining all the Japanese-Americans, his life takes a turn for the worst. From having to worry about being shot over very simple actions, to describing the terrible conditions him and his family lived in, he tried to make the best of it by doing thinks like making his own garden and fruits/vegetables. However, once the war ended, they returned to a trashed and vandalized home, and realization hit them that the war had only just begun.

I had planned on introducing this song on the first week of class, but I am presenting it now since our reading from this week was practically the same situation. A family is living a normal “American” life, and soon are taken away under suspicion of being spies. The conditions the central characters lived in was terrible, residing in the desert with little water. Once returning home, they saw that items were stolen inside the house, as well as a vandalized wall that had imprinted into their minds. They were also treated very differently by those around them; once previous friends no longer spoke to them (if they did, it would be very brief), it was impossible to find work since jobs excluded Japanese-Americans, and overall, the paradise that they had dreamed of for 3 1/2 years, the place they called home, could no longer be called that.

In the end, it makes you wonder if the Japanese-Americans were truly “freed” in the end.