Resources at the Harry S. Truman Library on western issues and programs

(1974). Looking Back in Anguish: Oral History and Japanese-American Evacuation. The Oral History Review: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 24-52.

The internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War neutralized the “enemy” abroad by controlling them at home. The rhetoric of Second World War exclusion characterized “Japanese” in opposition to “American” along “racial strains,” forcing polarized notions of identity onto the minority Japanese Americans in dividing loyal from disloyal, alien from citizen. In this chapter, I analyze John Okada’s No No Boy (1957), a novel about the residual effects of Japanese internment in the United States after the Second World War, and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a novel about retrospective recollections of the Japanese evacuation in Canada. These works complicate any unified representation of the Japanese American internment experience. The contradictions within and between each artistic narrative encourage readers to define their own meanings or closures, positioning Japanese Americans not as a unitary alien body inassimilable to the nation, but as citizens with whom to engage and understand. The lack of resolution in the internment texts I analyze suggests that the project of narrating Japanese Americans from national exclusion to inclusion recurs in a discursive process. The experience of internment symbolizes the continued shuttling between national exclusion and inclusion that influences the formation of Japanese American identity.

Past studies on the physical environment of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II have argued that internees were able to express their agency and identity despite the dehumanization of the camps. However, studies on the newspapers circulated in the camps have argued that internees had no agency as they worked on newspapers. In a preliminary reading, it was clear that these newspapers evidenced internee agency in their language. Utilizing de Certeau's theoretical framework of tactics, this study addressed the following questions: What tactics did Japanese-American internees use to take agency when writing and editing camp newspapers? How did the tactics relate to their Japanese-American identities? What discursive techniques were represented in the tactics? This study utilized a corpus-based approach to Critical Applied Linguistics. The corpus was assembled from Manzanar Free Press issues. Using Key Words in Context searches, the terms allegiance, loyalty, and justice were analyzed qualitatively in context. Japanese-American staff of the Manzanar Free Press included the discursive techniques like selective quoting patterns, hedging, and emotional distancing and included content complicating notions of an essentialized Japanese-American identity. Using these discursive strategies, they engaged in this tactic of storytelling successfully, seizing agency and maintaining their identities. Otherwise voiceless, Japanese-American internees used the space of the Manzanar Free Press to engage in complex narrative development. Internees used not just the built environment, but also language to maintain agency and identity. This maintenance shows the marginalized can use narrative development to claim power.

This paper analyzes the US internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans, Indigenous peoples, and prisoners of war across Hawai‘i, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands during World War II. Decentering the focus on Japanese American internment as a domestic project of racialized exclusion, it analyzes internment as embedded in a transnational project of US settler militarism. Internment and prisoner of war camps utilized varying logics of racialized military detention, Indigenous displacement, and liberal governance in order to rationalize the evacuation and internment of Asian and Indigenous peoples from lands that the US military wished to use as bases, battlegrounds, and bomb testing areas.

When Native Americans are arrested for felonies on most reservations, they are under the legal authority of the federal government and federal sentencing laws. They are subject to a convoluted system of jurisdiction in which they are held and tried off-reservation in federal courts. We ask how federal criminal justice policies have contributed to voting disenfranchisement of Native Americans in Western states. We document the role of federal government policies in the sentencing of Native Americans in Western states with felon disenfranchisement laws. We show that the path to disenfranchisement in these states flows through the federal government, which imposes longer sentences than most states for equivalent crimes. Federal felons are not eligible for parole, a key point when voting rights are restored in most states. The jurisdictional challenges, legal ambiguities, and concerns with voting violations strongly discourage Native felons from voting after their sentences.

Piling Up, or Floating Away Vivian L. Huang (bio) The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy by David L. Eng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. 198. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper. David L. Eng's latest book project urges readers to ask what it means to be accounted for. In the company of Eng's previous publications, including Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001) and the anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), the latter co-edited with David Kazanjian, The Feeling of Kinship curates a space in which the shared and perhaps disavowed investments of disciplines such as Asian American studies, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, and queer theory meet in provocative tension. For Eng, psychic, historical, and political arrangements condition the affective terms of belonging. And so it is that The Feeling of Kinship lingers on the effects of a repressed national psyche with renewed concern for affective responsibility. Eng's book critiques the costly legacies of historical amnesia operative in the United States. The Feeling of Kinship engages with the remaining uses of the nation by reinvesting in the transnational foundations and buttresses of the United States as we know it. Moreover, what Eng argues so astutely is that how we know history informs notions of self and nation. Eng reads queer migrant labor, transnational adoption, Japanese and Japanese American internment, and sexual regulation to demonstrate how reiterated acts of forgetting cannot fully negate or account for psyches resplendent with intensities of [End Page 317] feeling. Eng argues that membership too often requires forgetting and disavowal, resulting in the affective and psychic haunting of the nation. Throughout The Feeling of Kinship, Eng demonstrates how holding on to one's losses is critical to an ethical historiography. In these terms, Eng's is an investigation into which and whose histories count, and which are neglected, lost by being made lost. Eng's prose, both sharp and patient, grounds his analysis in the political salience of everyday life. An early anecdote of students "coming out" to Eng as adoptees, for example, grounds Eng's pedagogical need to account for transnational adoption. Eng theorizes the national haunting of race and racism as endemic to the racialization of intimacy, a phrase he uses to describe the purchase of bourgeois intimacy and privacy under the rubric of multiculturalism and color blindness. In the spirit of scholars like José Esteban Muñoz and Jasbir K. Puar, Eng casts suspicion on the "disappearing act of race" alongside the assimilation of gays and lesbians (11). Eng remarks upon the desirable enfolding of lesbian and gay individuals into a dominant United States and terms this phenomenon queer liberalism. Queer liberalism reinforces the neoliberal mythos that queer politics is the next leg of the freedom relay race, with sexual minorities picking up where racial minorities leave off. For Eng, to subscribe to such a telos is to risk denying the continued currency of race and racism in the American political arena, not to mention the historical entanglements between race and sexuality in the United States throughout time. Eng argues that, under queer liberalism, race and racism appear only as always already disappearing. This "spectrality of race" in public discourse renders race and racism as obsolete concerns uncomplicatedly retired to the "dustbin of history" (11, 40). Instead, race and racism are everywhere felt but no longer publicly grappled with. Eng proposes queer diaspora as a critical methodology and reading practice that challenges queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy by shifting the frames of "race" (14). As Eng writes, the doing of queer diaspora allows an exploration of "contemporary Asian movements and migrations in the global system not through a conventional focus on racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability, but through the lens of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency" (13). And so it is that Eng calls for a post-structuralist account of kinship, one that indexes affinities coagulated by racialized feelings that problematize an Oedipal model. The racialization of intimacy, and the question of accountability, are edified by the book's epigraph from William Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven," in which the speaker [End Page 318] persistently asks for...

Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war.From early on, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often surprising history, Transpacific Field of Dreams shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.

The article focuses on incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is often misunderstood in the U.S. by Americans who conflate Japanese Americans with Imperial Japan.

Gender history, examining as it does the ways in which societies have defined femaleness and maleness, involves the study of stereotypes used to define and perpetuate notions of gender. While evidence of these stereotypes can be found in many parts of a culture, one especially useful area for study is that of illustration. Earlier in this issue of the OAH Magazine of History , historian Kimberley Phillips discusses the importance of Mine Okubo's use of words and images to tell the story of the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (see pages 20–24). Though Okubo used illustrations out of necessity, since cameras were not allowed in the camps, many artists either knowingly or unintentionally express their social and political views in their work. As Phillips also observes, even “early cartoons and comic strips had encoded ethnic and racial stereotypes” (page 22). Indeed, cartoons and comic strips...

<i>Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination</i>, by W. Anthony Sheppard

In 2011, the United States memorialized the seventieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the tenth anniversary of the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Elaborate ceremonies, films, and television specials helped to mark the dates, encouraging Americans to empathize with the casualties of the historic attacks. In the months after December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the state produced victims who would become justifications for war, but it also constructed enemies, resulting in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the detention of Muslim men since 9/11. In Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law, Rajini Srikanth considers literary and legal representations of both the Japanese American internment and the detention of Muslim men in order to negotiate and complicate the function of empathy in the United States. Uncritical empathetic gestures can, she contends, foreclose other, more radical forms of engagement and facilitate the production of antipathies from Tule Lake to Guantanamo Bay. Antipathy is the noxious underside to empathy, and affect is not, Srikanth insists, apolitical. Constructing the Enemy presents a lucid argument against monolithic understandings of empathy. Whereas Jurgen Habermas describes empathy as a coming together of “learning processes,” Srikanth is quick to point out that this definition rests on a careless assumption: that empathizer and empathizee encounter one another symmetrically (6). Instead, she promotes an empathy that depends on the constant interrogation of power relations and, following Slavoj Žižek, the cognizance of one’s “nontransparency” to oneself as constituted in relation to the other (171). Srikanth, emphasizing the intricacies of empathetic engagement, demarcates three intersecting categories of empathy: compassionate, strategic, and ethical. Compassionate empathy occurs when one is able to react to someone else’s hardship or loss as if it were one’s own. It is free of self-interest and “egotistical drift,” in which one loses sight of the actual situation amid one’s own feelings, and it occurs most readily among members of the same socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and religious groups (30). Strategic empathy is empathetic action carried out under the assumption that it will ultimately benefit the empathizer. Ethical empathy occurs when one comes to the aid of the other in order to uphold a principle or belief. Empathy is not, she stresses, pure or immaterial. It must be scrutinized and acted upon in context. Srikanth makes her case through a careful consideration of American literature and the legal work surrounding the histories of internment and detainment in the United States. Chapter

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?

Anne M. Blankenship's study of Christianity in the infamous camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II yields insights both far-reaching and timely. While most Japanese Americans maintained their traditional identities as Buddhists, a sizeable minority identified as Christian, and a number of church leaders sought to minister to them in the camps. Blankenship shows how church leaders were forced to assess the ethics and pragmatism of fighting against or acquiescing to what they clearly perceived, even in the midst of a national crisis, as an unjust social system. These religious activists became acutely aware of the impact of government, as well as church, policies that targeted ordinary Americans of diverse ethnicities. Going through the doors of the camp churches and delving deeply into the religious experiences of the incarcerated and the faithful who aided them, Blankenship argues that the incarceration period introduced new social and legal approaches for Christians of all stripes to challenge the constitutionality of government policies on race and civil rights. She also shows how the camp experience nourished the roots of an Asian American liberation theology that sprouted in the sixties and seventies.

Democracy on Trial: Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II.

The Japanese American internment during World War II remains a popular topic for researchers. In the last decade, a spate of books appeared on the market, sparked by the discovery of relevant documents from many local and national government agencies, including the Japanese Foreign Ministry. But instead of developing new frameworks for understanding this tragic event of six decades ago, many rely on the old wineskin of the civil rights era to hold this new wine. Tetsuden Kashima, a University of Washington sociologist, typifies this approach in his Judgment without Trial. Kashima's aim is to grasp the big picture. He looks at “the totality of the decision-making process by which persons of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned during World War II” (p. 5), which began decades prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and covered not just the West Coast but Alaska, Hawaii, and Latin America. Rather than why, Kashima asks how “the selective and the later mass incarcerations” took place and “who was involved” (p. 8). He seeks to clarify this “complex imprisonment process” (p. 213) through a division of his findings into two parts, with the former half highlighting the prewar preparations for selective imprisonment by the army, navy, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi). His second part focuses on the “mass imprisonment” right after the Pearl Harbor attack when the prewar plans of “a loosely coordinated imprisonment organization…in incipient form” transformed into “a meta-organization” that “engaged in cooperative activities for a common purpose” of interning and suppressing Japanese Americans (p. 5).