Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Social Disaster. The George and Sakaye Aratani Nikkei in the Americas Series. By Arthur A. Hansen. Foreword by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

Abstract

Resistance, whether it is recognized at the time as principled dissent or as irrational disruption, is dependent on context. This is the decades-long focus of Arthur A. Hansen, whose meticulously researched work on the complexity of Japanese American wartime incarceration is a timely read for today’s political climate. Once viewed as “trouble-makers” disrupting the polished narrative pushed by the federal government, Hansen continues to unearth the silenced history of the resisters. Incidents once characterized as “riots” at Manzanar, California, or Poston, Arizona—justifying use of force or further isolation in a stockade inside an American concentration camp—are, in truth, revolts by Americans against the loss of civil rights, poor food, inadequate facilities, or bureaucratic failures by camp administrators. The arrests in December 1942 at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, by military police of thirty-two persons for security violations were, in fact, all children under the age of eleven sledding in the snow. Hansen puts to rest the notion of Japanese Americans holding a monolithic view of society, politics, and citizenship. Of the approximately 120,000 forcibly removed from rural and urban communities in the West, there are 120,000 views of the world. The federal administrators were unprepared for the political dynamics that would unfold and mostly clueless about the cultural context. In a riveting account of a banquet held by incarcerees with camp administrators at Gila River, Arizona, the details of speeches in the Japanese language and the serving of “Japanese tea” (bourbon with water)—despite the prohibition against alcohol due to the camp being on Native American land—are understood as performative resistance meant to send a message. The tension overlaying the banquet is felt. These acts were a show of power over the War Relocation Authority for other incarcerees.