Book Review: Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People

Abstract

Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People is a single-volume comprehensive resource that addresses many aspects of Japanese American history and culture, and “reveals the long, hard, and aching struggling of Japanese Americans to be treated as Americans” (xiii–xiv). Editor Jonathan H. X. Lee begins the preface with a brief overview of Executive Order 9066 authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, which enforced a mass incarceration and relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Lee compares this to the modern-day Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” issued by President Donald Trump, which is the travel ban that prevents seven Muslim-majority countries from entry into the United States.