Azalia Emma Peet
A young white woman with a bouffant hairstyle
Azalia Emma Peet, from the 1910 yearbook of Smith College
BornSeptember 3, 1887
Webster, New York
DiedSeptember 21, 1973
Asheville, North Carolina
Occupation(s)Educator, missionary

Azalia Emma Peet (September 3, 1887 – September 21, 1973) was an American missionary educator in Japan. During World War II, she was a "lone dissenter", "one of the very few white Americans" to speak out against the incarceration of Japanese Americans.[1][2] She taught students are internment camps in Idaho and Oregon.

Early life and education

Peet was born in Webster, New York,[3] the daughter of James Clinton Peet and Marion Keeler Green Peet.[4] She graduated from Smith College in 1910; during college she was a member of the "Oriental Society" with Smith's first Asian student, Tei Ninomiya.[5] She took graduate courses at Boston University during a furlough in the early 1920s, and earned a master's degree in 1923.[6] Her master's thesis title was "The application of certain American labor legislation to the industrial life of Japanese women and children" (1923).[7]

Career

Peet became a missionary in 1916,[8] after her widowed father remarried, and sailed for Tokyo under the auspices of the Genesee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.[9] She worked in schools from kindergarten to high school level in Kagoshima, from 1917 to 1921.[10] From 1923 to 1927, she taught women and girls at a hostel in Fukuoka, preparing them for higher education. The Woman's Foreign Missionary Society bought and shipped a piano to Peet in Fukuoka.[11] In 1927 she supervised two kindergartens in Hakodate. She had a furlough in the United States for health reasons from 1928 to 1929. From 1929 to 1935 and from 1936 to 1941, she was back to teaching in Japan, until World War II, when she was evacuated along with other American citizens.[6][12]

In the United States, she worked with Japanese immigrant families and students in Oregon. She testified before the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration,[13] voicing her opposition to the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese-American residents of the West Coast.[14] “What is it that makes it necessary for them to evacuate?" she asked the committee. "Have they done anything? Is there anything in their history in this area to justify such a fear of them developing overnight?”[15][16] "Progressive Christians like Peet were among the few dissenting voices," noted Buddhist scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams.[17] Historian Ellen Eisenberg observed that, unlike clergymen in other cities, "Peet spoke as an individual, without any organizational support."[18]

Like some other former missionaries with useful language, pedagogical and cultural skills, Peet worked at internment camps in Nyssa, Oregon[19] and Minidoka, Idaho, mostly supporting teen students in their preparations for college.[20] She returned to Japan from 1946 to 1953, to help with postwar reconstruction.[6] She was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure (5th Class) by the Japanese government in 1953, for her lifetime of service.[3][6]

Publications

  • "Pinafores and the King's Daughters" (1919)[21]
  • "Fragments from a Devotional Diary" (1935)[22]

Personal life

Peet lived in Rochester, New York after she retired from the mission field.[23] She moved to a retirement home in Asheville, North Carolina in 1961. She died there in 1973, at the age of 86. Her papers, including photographs, diaries,[24] and correspondence, are at Smith College.[6]

References

  1. ↑ Tamura, Linda (2012-12-15). Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River. University of Washington Press. pp. 44–45. ISBN 978-0-295-80446-0.
  2. ↑ Park, John; Gleeson, Shannon (2014-02-03). The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants. Routledge. p. 61. ISBN 978-1-135-10369-9.
  3. 1 2 "Well Known Websterites". The Webster Museum. Retrieved 2022-11-06.
  4. ↑ "J. C. Peet Dies in Homestead Near Webster". Democrat and Chronicle. 1940-06-10. p. 12. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  5. ↑ Smith College (1910). Class of 1910 Classbook. p. 91.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 "Collection: Azalia Emma Peet papers". Smith College Finding Aids. Retrieved 2022-11-06.
  7. ↑ Peet, Azalia Emma (1923). The application of certain American labor legislation to the industrial life of Japanese women and children (Thesis). Boston University.
  8. ↑ "Going to Japan to Teach in Mission". The Oregon Daily Journal. 1916-09-04. p. 15. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. ↑ "To Address Women". Star-Gazette. 1936-04-30. p. 15. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  10. ↑ "Newark Young Woman Stars for Japan to Aid Factory Workers". Democrat and Chronicle. 1923-08-03. p. 23. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ "Mehlin Piano Shipped to Japan". Music Trades. 65: 11. June 30, 1923.
  12. ↑ Crowley, Mark J.; Dawson, Sandra Trudgen (2021). Women's Experiences of the Second World War: Exile, Occupation and Everyday Life. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-1-78327-587-8.
  13. ↑ United States Congress House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (1941). National Defense Migration: Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Seventy-seventh Congress, First[-second] Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 113, a Resolution to Inquire Further Into the Interstate Migration of Citizens, Emphasizing the Present and Potential Consequences of the Migration Caused by the National Defense Program. Pt. 11-[34]. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. 11386–11387.
  14. ↑ Shaffer, Robert (1999). "Opposition to Internment: Defending Japanese American Rights during World War II". The Historian. 61 (3): 597–619. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1999.tb01039.x. ISSN 0018-2370. JSTOR 24449883.
  15. ↑ Eisenberg, Ellen (2003). ""As Truly American as Your Son": Voicing Opposition to Internment in Three West Coast Cities". Oregon Historical Quarterly. 104 (4): 542–565. doi:10.1353/ohq.2003.0012. ISSN 2329-3780. S2CID 159603857.
  16. ↑ "World War II - The "Japanese Question" Confronts the State". State of Oregon. Retrieved 2022-11-06.
  17. ↑ Williams, Duncan Ryuken (2019). American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Harvard University Press. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-674-98653-4.
  18. ↑ Eisenberg, Ellen (2008). The First to Cry Down Injustice: Western Jews and Japanese Removal During WWII. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1382-0.
  19. ↑ Fowler, Mary (1944-06-07). "Women in the Church". The Lamar Democrat. p. 1. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  20. ↑ Hessel, Beth Shalom. "Exiles Serving Exiles on the Homefront: Protestant Missionary Workers and Japanese Americans." Women's Experiences of the Second World War: Exile, Occupation and Everyday Life (2021): 11.
  21. ↑ Peet, Azalia Emma (September 1919). "Pinafores and the King's Daughters". Woman's Missionary Friend: 312–315.
  22. ↑ Peet, Azalia E. (March 1935). "Fragments of a Devotional Diary". Woman's Missionary Friend. 68 (3): 90–92 – via Internet Archive.
  23. ↑ "Smith Alumnae Map Picnic". Democrat and Chronicle. 1954-05-30. p. 55. Retrieved 2022-11-06 – via Newspapers.com.
  24. ↑ Rosenzweig, Linda W. (1999). Another Self: Middle-class American Women and Their Friends in the Twentieth Century. NYU Press. pp. 58–59. ISBN 978-0-8147-7486-1.
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