Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was ...Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy.
Jim and Jap Crowfollows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia.
Jim and Jap Crowlooks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.
Cartographies of violence Oikawa, Mona
Cartographies of violence,
2012, 20121108, 2012-11-08, 2012-09-10, 20120101, Letnik:
36, 36.
eBook
"In 1942, the federal government expelled more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. From 1942 to 1949, they were dispossessed, sent to incarceration sites, and ...dispersed across Canada. Over 4,000 were deported to Japan. Cartographies of Violence analyses the effects of these processes for some Japanese Canadian women. Using critical race, feminist, anti-colonial, and cultural geographic theory, Mona Oikawa deconstructs prevalent images, stereotypes, and language used to describe the 'Internment' in ways that masks its inherent violence. Through interviews with women survivors and their daughters, Oikawa analyses recurring themes of racism and resistance, as well as the struggle to communicate what happened. Disturbing and provocative, Cartographies of Violence explores women's memories in order to map the effects of forced displacements, incarcerations, and the separations of family, friends, and communities."--Publisher's website.
During World War II some 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and detained in concentration camps in several states. These Japanese Americans lost millions of dollars in ...property and were forced to live in so-called "assembly centers" surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed sentries.
In this insightful and groundbreaking work, Brian Hayashi reevaluates the three-year ordeal of interred Japanese Americans. Using previously undiscovered documents, he examines the forces behind the U.S. government's decision to establish internment camps. His conclusion: the motives of government officials and top military brass likely transcended the standard explanations of racism, wartime hysteria, and leadership failure. Among the other surprising factors that played into the decision, Hayashi writes, were land development in the American West and plans for the American occupation of Japan.
What was the long-term impact of America's actions? While many historians have explored that question, Hayashi takes a fresh look at how U.S. concentration camps affected not only their victims and American civil liberties, but also people living in locations as diverse as American Indian reservations and northeast Thailand.
American Sutra Williams, Duncan Ryūken
2019, 2019-02-22
eBook
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller "Raises timely and important questions about what religious freedom in America truly means."—Ruth Ozeki"A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for ...civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging."—George TakeiOn December 7, 1941, as the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the first person detained was the leader of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist sect in Hawai'i. Nearly all Japanese Americans were subject to accusations of disloyalty, but Buddhists aroused particular suspicion. From the White House to the local town council, many believed that Buddhism was incompatible with American values. Intelligence agencies targeted the Buddhist community, and Buddhist priests were deemed a threat to national security.In this pathbreaking account, based on personal accounts and extensive research in untapped archives, Duncan Ry?ken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American."A searingly instructive story…from which all Americans might learn."— Smithsonian "Williams' moving account shows how Japanese Americans transformed Buddhism into an American religion, and, through that struggle, changed the United States for the better."—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer "Reading this book, one cannot help but think of the current racial and religious tensions that have gripped this nation—and shudder."—Reza Aslan, author of Zealot
Recent decades have drawn more attention to the United States'
treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Few people
realize, however, the extent of the country's relocation,
internment, ...and repatriation of German and Italian Americans, who
were interned in greater numbers than Japanese Americans. The
United States also assisted other countries, especially in Latin
America, in expelling "dangerous" aliens, primarily Germans. In
Enemies among Us John E. Schmitz examines the causes,
conditions, and consequences of America's selective relocation and
internment of its own citizens and enemy aliens, as well as the
effects of internment on those who experienced it. Looking at
German, Italian, and Japanese Americans, Schmitz analyzes the
similarities in the U.S. government's procedures for those they
perceived to be domestic and hemispheric threats, revealing the
consistencies in the government's treatment of these groups,
regardless of race. Reframing wartime relocation and internment
through a broader chronological perspective and considering
policies in the wider Western Hemisphere, Enemies among Us
provides new conclusions as to why the United States relocated,
interned, and repatriated both aliens and citizens considered
enemies.
A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson's attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather's lifelong struggle. A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson's attempt to ...reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather's lifelong struggle. Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life—child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen—mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting. Praise for The Grave on the Wall: "Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. … It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle … In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."— Booklist, starred review "In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."— Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory "Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."— Myriam Gurba, author of Mean "Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief—its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence—a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."— Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems "It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From T he Grave on the Wall."— Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War "Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa's FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."— Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future "Shimoda is a mystic writer … He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. … he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."— Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue " The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along."— Trisha Low, The Believer
After camp Robinson, Greg
2012., 20120108, 2012, c2012., 2012-02-07
eBook
This book illuminates various aspects of a central but unexplored area of American history: the midcentury Japanese American experience. A vast and ever-growing literature exists, first on the entry ...and settlement of Japanese immigrants in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, then on the experience of the immigrants and their American-born children during World War II. Yet the essential question, "What happened afterwards?" remains all but unanswered in historical literature. Excluded from the wartime economic boom and scarred psychologically by their wartime ordeal, the former camp inmates struggled to remake their lives in the years that followed. This volume consists of a series of case studies that shed light on various developments relating to Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their wartime confinement, including resettlement nationwide, the mental and physical readjustment of the former inmates, and their political engagement, most notably in concert with other racialized and ethnic minority groups.
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.
