Review: Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II, by Stephanie D. Hinnershitz

Abstract

Stephanie Hinnershitz’s groundbreaking account investigates how the prison labor system was imposed on Japanese Americans and permanent resident non-citizens of Japanese ancestry who were confined in War Relocation Authority (WRA) incarceration camps (formerly “internment” camps) during World War II. The actual internment camps (for non-citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry, run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the Justice Department) are not included in this book.The temporary detention centers (formerly the euphemistic “assembly centers”) that first housed the incarcerees established Work Corps in which prisoners signed up to work in the skilled and unskilled jobs needed to operate the facilities. Wages could not exceed the minimum wage of an American soldier, $21 a month (pp. 42–43). Employing the prisoners meant that costs to operate the detention centers, and later the WRA incarceration camps, were much less than if the workers were Euroamericans hired at prevailing rates. The government established four rationales to explain the purpose and goals of incarceration: Japanese American labor was essential for self-sufficiency, community building, and the “pioneer spirit”; the prisoners needed to prove their loyalty and patriotism; working would build morale; and work was voluntary (pp. 18–19). Some 40 to 60 percent were employed, but unfortunately, and especially for work outside the camps, contracts with the incarcerees were often violated or manipulated, and poor working conditions led to protests, work stoppages, and even strikes. If the incarcerees did not work, they risked being labeled “disloyal or suspect” (p. 60).By 1944, some 33,000 Japanese Americans had signed contracts to work for farmers, especially in the sugar beet fields of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, and elsewhere (pp. 85–86). The opportunity to leave the camps, even for hard work and poor working conditions, was a big motivator in getting people to sign up for this employment. However, many of the imprisoned Japanese Americans truly wished to contribute to the war effort and would have resisted being characterized, even by implication, as exploited dupes of the U.S. government.The Poston, Arizona, incarceration camp, discussed in detail, was built on land belonging to the Colorado River Indian Reservation. There, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) had lost the funding that hired Native Americans to work on reservation infrastructure projects such as clearing and cultivating land and installing irrigation systems. The OIA thus saw the Japanese Americans as the answer to their labor shortage; Poston was therefore unique in that much of the incarcerees’ labor involved the completion of “infrastructure for another colonized and subjugated people” (p. 161).The book’s notes are excellent and comprehensive, but a longer bibliography would have been more helpful than the single page of “Published Primary Sources” (p. 296). Additionally, more rigorous proofreading could have eliminated some regrettable typographical errors, e.g., “payed” (for paid, p. 177), “Minori Yusui” (for Minoru Yasui, pp. 249, 309), and Sue “Kunitoi” (for Kunitomi, p. 275). Still, these and other imperfections do little to detract from this significant contribution to the literature of Japanese American incarceration.