Japanese American Incarceration

Most summaries taken from Goodreads

For more resources on the incarceration of Japanese Americans, visit the Digital Library of Japanese American Incarceration.

 

Poets Behind Barbed Wire

Written by Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, and Muin Ozaki
Translated and edited by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano
Published by Elepaio Press
Can be accessed for free here

Poetry. Edited and translated from the Japanese by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano. This anthology of tanka poems, translated from Japanese into English, paints a deeply personal profile of life in the Wartime Relocation Camps during WWII. The short (31 syllable) traditional Japanese poetry form, tanka, offers an economical account of the inner lives of four internees, whose work was originally published in camp magazines and later in anthologies and Japanese newspapers in Hawai'i. The collection includes illustrations by camp artist George Hoshida and the featured poets--Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, and Muin Ozaki. Winner of the 1985 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

 

The Art of Gaman: Artwork and Crafts from Japanese Internment Sites 1942-1946

Written by Delphine Hirasuna
Published by Ten Speed Press

In 1942, Executive Order 9066 mandated the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans, including men, women, children, the elderly, and the infirm, for the duration of the war. Allowed only what they could carry, they were given just a few days to settle their affairs and report to assembly centers. Businesses were lost, personal property was stolen or vandalized, and lives were shattered. The Japanese word gaman means "enduring what seems unbearable with dignity and grace." Imprisoned in remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with machine guns, the internees sought courage and solace in art. Using found materials at first and later what they could order by catalog, they whittled and carved, painted and etched, stitched and crocheted. What they created is a celebration of the nobility of the human spirit under adversity. THE ART OF GAMAN presents more than 150 examples of art created by internees, along with a history of the camps.

 

Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During WWII

Written by Tetsuden Kashima
Published by University of Washington Press

 

Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, a Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II

Written by Andrea Warren
Published by Margaret Ferguson Books

Although Norman grew up thinking of himself as an American, when the Pacific War began he was called a "Jap" and an "enemy" and met with hostility, leading a harsh life in an internment camp. Norman later became a politician and passed a law that established an official apology for the forced internment of Japanese Americans. When the September 11 attacks occurred in 2001, Norman was Secretary of Transportation and, drawing on his own experience, banned the refusal of boarding planes for reasons of religion or appearance. A record of history that you should know now.

 

Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese American Internment Cases

Edited by Peter Irons
Published by Wesleyan University Press

Details the case of Fred Koremsatsu, a Japanese American arrested in 1942 because of his Japanese ancestry, who in 1982 launched a legal battle to clear his record.

 

Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Written by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams
Published by CityFiles Press

In the spring of 1942, the United States rounded up 120,000 residents of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast and sent them to internment camps for the duration of World War II. Many abandoned their land. Many gave up their personal property. Each one of them lost a part of their lives.

Amazingly, the government hired famed photographers Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and others to document the expulsion—from assembling Japanese Americans at racetracks to confining them in ten camps spread across the country. Their photographs, exactly seventy-five years after the evacuation began, give an emotional, unflinching portrait of a nation concerned more about security than human rights. These photographs are more important than ever.

Authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams—noted photo historians—took a slow, careful look at each of these images as they put together a powerful history of one of America’s defining moments. Their book consists of photographs that have never been seen, many of them impounded by the U.S. Army. It also uses primary source government documents to explain and place the pictures in context. And it relies on firsthand recollections of Japanese Americans survivors to offer a complete perspective.

The result is one of the first visual looks at the Japanese-American internment. The story is told with brilliant pictures that help us better understand this important chapter in U.S. history.

 

Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II

Written by Richard Reeves
Published by Henry Holt and Co.

Less than three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and inflamed the nation, President Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring parts of four western states to be a war zone operating under military rule. The U.S. Army immediately began rounding up thousands of Japanese-Americans, sometimes giving them less than 24 hours to vacate their houses and farms. For the rest of the war, these victims of war hysteria were imprisoned in primitive camps.

In Infamy, the story of this appalling chapter in American history is told more powerfully than ever before. Acclaimed historian Richard Reeves has interviewed survivors, read numerous private letters and memoirs, and combed through archives to deliver a sweeping narrative of this atrocity. Men we usually consider heroes-FDR, Earl Warren, Edward R. Murrow-were in this case villains, but we also learn of many Americans who took great risks to defend the rights of the internees. Most especially, we hear the poignant stories of those who spent years in "war relocation camps," many of whom suffered this terrible injustice with remarkable grace.

Racism, greed, xenophobia, and a thirst for revenge: a dark strand in the American character underlies this story of one of the most shameful episodes in our history. But by recovering the past, Infamy has given voice to those who ultimately helped the nation better understand the true meaning of patriotism.

 

Behind Barbed Wire: Searching for Japanese Americans Incarcerated During World War II

Written by Paul Kitagaki Jr.
Published by CityFiles Press

For more than a decade, Paul Kitagaki Jr. has been reliving the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. More than 110,000 ethnic Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes at the start of World War II and transported to desolate detention centers after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in early 1942. Paul Kitagaki’s parents and grandparents were part of that group, but they never talked about their experience. To better understand, Kitagaki tracked down the subjects of more than sixty photographs taken by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and other photographers. This book is a result of that work, which took Kitagaki on a ten-year pilgrimage around the country photographing survivors of camps. Using black-and-white film and a large-format camera similar to the equipment of photographers in the 1940s, Kitagaki sought to mirror and complement photographs taken during World War II―while revealing the strength and perseverance of the subjects. He photographed and interviewed the subjects or their children to discover who was in the pictures. Some wanted to forget; some wanted to remember. Some lost everything; some found new direction. He heard stories about heroic soldiers and those unwilling to fight for a country that put them behind barbed wire. Each person has something to say. Each adds their unique personal history. They all are determined to make sure it never happens again.

 

Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites

Written by Jeffrey Burton, Mary Farrell, Florence Lord, and Richard Lord
Published by University of Washington Press

Confinement and Ethnicity documents in unprecedented detail the various facilities in which persons of Japanese descent living in the western United States were confined during World War the fifteen “assembly centers” run by the U.S. Army’s Wartime Civil Control Administration, the ten “relocation centers” created by the War Relocation Authority, and the internment camps, penitentiaries, and other sites under the jurisdiction of the Justice and War Departments. Originally published as a report of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center of the National Park Service, it is now reissued in a corrected edition, with a new Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington.

Based on archival research, field visits, and interviews with former residents, Confinement and Ethnicity provides an overview of the architectural remnants, archeological features, and artifacts remaining at the various sites. Included are numerous maps, diagrams, charts, and photographs. Historic images of the sites and their inhabitants -- including several by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams -- are combined with photographs of present-day settings, showing concrete foundations, fence posts, inmate-constructed drainage ditches, and foundations and parts of buildings, as well as inscriptions in Japanese and English written or scratched on walls and rocks. The result is a unique and poignant treasure house of information for former residents and their descendants, for Asian American and World War II historians, and for anyone interested in the facts about what the authors call these “sites of shame.”

 

Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience

Edited by Lawson Fusao Inada
Published by Heyday

The definitive anthology of Japanese American internment. "In these stories are lifted up our humanity, our indomitable spirit and dignity, an implacable quest for justice"— Janice Mirikitani Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States government uprooted 120,000 people of Japanese descent from their homes and banished them to remote internment camps. This collection of reminiscences, stories, poems, photographs, and graphic art expresses the range of powerful and sometimes conflicting emotions that arose from the internment experience. Also included are propaganda, government documents, and stories of those outside the camps whose lives were interwoven with those of the internees.

 

Setsuko's Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration

Written by Shirley Ann Higuchi
Published by University of Wisconsin Press

As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066.

Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirley's mother, Setsuko, share her vision for a museum at the site of the former camp, where she had been donating funds and volunteering in secret for many years. After Setsuko's death, Shirley skeptically accepted an invitation to visit the site, a journey that would forever change her life and introduce her to a part of her mother she never knew.

Navigating the complicated terrain of the Japanese American experience, Shirley patched together Setsuko's story and came to understand the forces and generational trauma that shaped her own life. Moving seamlessly between family and communal history, Setsuko's Secret offers a clear window into the "camp life" that was rarely revealed to the children of the incarcerated. This volume powerfully insists that we reckon with the pain in our collective American past.

 

Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

Written by Yoshiko Uchida
Published by University of Washington Press

In the spring of 1942, shortly after the United States entered into war with Japan, the federal government initiated a policy whereby 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and herded into camps. They were incarcerated without indictment, trial, or counsel - not because they had committed a crime, but simply because they resembled the enemy. There was never any evidence of disloyalty or sabotage among them, and the majority were American citizens. The government's explanation for this massive injustice was military necessity.

Desert Exile tells the story of one family who lived through these sad years. It is a moving personal account by a woman who grew up in Berkeley and was attending the University of California when the war began.

To better understand how such a gross violation of human rights could have occurred in America, and how the Japanese reacted to it, the author takes a backward look at her parents' early years in this country and her own experiences as a Nisei growing up in California. She evokes the strong anti-Asian climate of the years preceding the war, and provides an intimate glimpse of life in one Japanese American household.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changed in Yoshiko Uchida's life. She tells of her father's abrupt seizure by the FBI; one of the family's frantic efforts to vacate their home on ten days notice; of being forced to live in a horsestall, deprived of every human privacy; and of being sent on to a bleak camp in the Utah desert, ringed by barbed wire and armed guards and plagued by terrifying dust storms.

But this is not simply an account of the day-to-day life in the Tanforan and Topaz concentration camps where the author lived; it is also the story of the courage and strength displayed by the incarcerated Japanese. In particular, it is about the Issei (first generation immigrants) who, having already endured so much in a hostile society, still retained a remarkable resiliency of spirit as they established a sense of community, saw to the education of their children, and tried to live productive lives even behind barbed wire.

This is a beautifully crafted book, written with clarity, conviction, and insight. It should be read by all Americans so they will know and never forget what once happened in this country, and through that knowledge will never allow such a travesty of justice to happen again.

 

The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II

Written by Jan Jarboe Russell
Published by Scribner

The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families - many US citizens - were incarcerated. From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered more than 10,000 civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries - behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families; subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told. Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, "The Train to Crystal City" reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.

 

Displacement

Written by Kiku Hughes
Published by First Second

Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II.

These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.

 

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

Written by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura
Published by Chin Music Press, Inc.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice.

The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight.

In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet:

-- JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien;

-- HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and

-- MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

 

The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung
Published by Penguin Classics

This anthology presents a new vision that recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by the actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to deny Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. From nearly seventy selections of fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters emerges a shared story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization – all anchored by the key government documents that incite the action.The selections favor the pointed over the poignant, and the unknown over the familiar, with several new translations among previously unseen works that have been long overlooked on the shelf, buried in the archives, or languished unread in the Japanese language. The writings are presented chronologically so that readers can trace the continuum of events as the incarcerees experienced it.The contributors span incarcerees, their children born in or soon after the camps, and their descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences of mass incarceration for themselves and the nation. Many of the voices are those of protest. Some are those of accommodation. All are authentic. Together they form an epic narrative with a singular vision of America’s past, one with disturbing resonances with the American present.

 

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans

Written by Greg Robinson
Published by Harvard University Press

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why.

Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy.

By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.

 

Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds

Written by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
Published by Harper Perennial

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Midnight in Broad Daylight is the true story of a Japanese American family that found itself on opposite sides during World War II. An epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption, Pamela Rotner Sakamoto’s history is a riveting chronicle of U.S.-Japan relations and of the Japanese experience in America.

After their father’s death, the Fukuhara children—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved with their mother to Hiroshima, their parents’ ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry and his sister, Mary, returned there in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry and Mary were sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators, and Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, their brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army.

As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy—and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face one another in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of the Fukuhara family.

Alternating between American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight captures the uncertainty and intensity of those charged with the fighting, as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—never depicted before in English—and provides a fresh look at the events surrounding the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, here is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.

 

Citizen 13660

Written by Mine Okubo
Published by University of Washington Press

Miné Okubo was one of more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens - who were forced into "protective custody" shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's illustrated memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, illuminates this experience with poignant drawings and witty, candid text. This classic in Asian American literature and American history, with a new introduction by Christine Hong, is available for the first time in both a traditional paperback format and an artist's edition, oversize and in hardcover to better illustrate the innovative artwork as originally envisioned by Okubo.

 

ハワイ日系人の強制収容史 (History of the Incarceration of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i)

Written by Kaori Akiyama

１９４１年１２月の太平洋戦争開戦を受けて、ハワイで行なわれた日系人戦時強制収容。抑留所の開設から終戦後の閉所まで、強制収容の全期間にわたり、抑留対象者がどのように変化したか、並びに、オアフ島に設営されたサンドアイランド抑留所、また、その後身となったホノウリウリ抑留所の「抑留所機能」がいかに変容したかを論じる。未だ総括的な研究が十分ではない、ハワイの日系人強制収容史を、陸軍資料を中心とした一次資料、回顧録、オーラルヒストリー、地図、写真等、多様な資料を組み合わせて検証する。

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans took place in Hawai‘i. This book examines how the internment subjects changed throughout the entire period of the internment, from the opening of the internment camps to their closure after the war, as well as how the "internment camp function" of the Sand Island Internment Camp established on O‘ahu and its successor, the Honouliuli Internment Camp, changed. The history of the internment of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i, which has yet to be fully studied, is examined by combining a variety of materials, including primary sources, primarily army documents, memoirs, oral histories, maps, and photographs.