Japanese American Internment Research Articles

“What’s Manzanar?”: Excavating Stories of Racism, of the Erased, and of Family

Background/Research Design: This ethnographic study explores how secondary students engaged with the history of Japanese American incarceration while participating in an archaeological dig at one of the prison camps used by the U.S. government during World War II, the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. Purpose/Research Question: Using two tenets from Asian(Crit), (re)constructive history, and story, theory, and praxis as a theoretical frame, this study explores the question: How does participation in an archeological dig at Manzanar prison camp reveal and shape how students perceive the history of Japanese American incarceration? Conclusions: Four findings emerged from this study. First, students’ dominant understanding justified incarceration as a wartime necessity. Second, students were exposed to narratives at Manzanar that emphasized racism, countering classroom curriculum. The third finding explores how the family history of one Japanese American student informed her conceptualization of the U.S. history curriculum as purposefully whitewashed. Finally, once they had returned to school, students of color doubted whether their work at Manzanar or their sharing of counterstories would impact their white classmates.

Beneath Heavy Pines in World War II Louisiana: The Japanese American Internment Experience at Camp Livingston by Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms (review)

Beneath Heavy Pines in World War II Louisiana: The Japanese American Internment Experience at Camp Livingston by Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms (review)

Disrupting the Reproductive Lives of Japanese American Families During Wartime: The Overlapping Histories of Removal, Incarceration, and Eugenic Sterilization, 1942–1946

The World War II mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans disrupted families, enacted intergenerational trauma, and characterized Japanese Americans as inherent racial threats. This federal exercise in biopolitical management intersected with state-sponsored eugenic sterilization in California institutions. Linking War Relocation Authority and California Department of Institutions records, we document 32 Japanese American sterilization survivors during the wartime incarceration period (1942–1946). We show how federal and state authority converged to deprive Japanese Americans of civil rights and reproductive liberty. We add original research and analysis to the intertwined histories of Japanese American incarceration, eugenics, and family in the United States.

The Japanese American incarceration and the origins of penology in California: A microhistory

AbstractThe history of academic criminology has been written at a macro‐scale from national and international perspectives. These histories rely on abstract concepts that overlook external events in the formation of criminology. Using a microhistory approach, this article explores the origins of the penology programme established at the Police School of San José State University. Willard Schmidt started the programme in 1946 based on his experience as director of security police at Tule Lake prison camp, a site for incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The discussion examines August Vollmer's role in founding the Police School and his opposition to the incarceration, Schmidt's activities at Tule Lake, and how this shaped the first penology programme in California.

Schooling in camp: Incarceration camps and the Japanese American school experience during World War II

AbstractObjectiveThis study aims to explore the school experiences of Japanese American children and teenagers who were incarcerated in camps during World War II following the issuance of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942.MethodsThe study examines video interviews available in Densho's online archive, focusing on the educational experiences of second‐generation Japanese Americans who resumed their education in the camps.ResultsThe analysis reveals that many interviewees reported positive experiences in camp schools, despite the poor conditions. A key factor contributing to these positive experiences was the dedication of teachers, who not only promoted academic success but also addressed the psychological and emotional needs of the incarcerated students.ConclusionWhile many interviewees highlighted the supportive role of teachers, the negative effects of incarceration on their school experiences cannot be overlooked, as a significant number recalled unpleasant aspects of their education in the camps. Moreover, the incarceration of Japanese Americans still has contemporary implications.

Demystifying oral history with natural language processing and data analytics: a case study of the Densho digital collection

PurposeThis study aims to explore the applications of natural language processing (NLP) and data analytics in understanding large-scale digital collections in oral history archives.Design/methodology/approachNLP and data analytics were used to analyse the oral interview transcripts of 904 survivors of the Japanese American incarceration camps collected from Densho Digital Repository, relying specifically on descriptive analysis, keyword extraction, topic modelling and sentiment analysis (SA).FindingsThe researchers found multiple geographic areas of large residential communities of ethnic Japanese people and the place names of the concentration camps. The keywords and topics extracted reflect the deplorable conditions and militaristic nature of the camps and the forced labour of the internees. When remembering history, the main focus for the narrators remains the redress and reparation movement to obtain the restitution of their civil rights. SA further found that the forcible removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during Second World War negatively impacted and brought deep trauma to the narrators.Originality/valueThis case study demonstrated how NLP and data analytics could be applied to analyse oral history archives and open avenues for discovery. Archival researchers and the general public may benefit from this type of analysis in making connections between temporal, spatial and emotional elements, which will contribute to a holistic understanding of individuals and communities in terms of their collective memory.

George Takei’s Allegiance: WWII Japanese American incarceration as a cautionary tale

ABSTRACT The musical Allegiance was inspired by the childhood of actor-activist George Takei, a Japanese American whose family was incarcerated by the United States government in ‘war relocation camps’ during World War II. Performed in both New York and London, the play is a rare popular depiction of Japanese detention – a chapter of American history that is simultaneously present and hidden in U.S. public imagination. The musical underscores the realities of racial discrimination that rendered Japanese Americans vulnerable to rights abuses and asks whether a citizen must prove one’s loyalty. Thinking through the ‘absent presence’ of Japanese American incarceration by viewing performances such as Allegiance is a vital step for acknowledging the precariousness of American citizenship and for preventing human rights abuses in the future. Today, this play serves as a cautionary tale for the United States as anti-Asian hatred spikes and citizenship stripping among naturalized American citizens increases.

Diaspora, war, Gaza

This guest editorial examines how diasporic communities influence modern wars amidst globalization and rising ethnonationalism. It discusses historical tensions between states and diasporas during conflicts, referencing world wars and recent issues involving Chinese Americans in the US. The editorial highlights the roles played by diasporas in various conflicts, including the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, scrutiny of Chinese Americans during Trump's presidency, and Irish expatriates’ involvement with the IRA. It focuses particularly on the Israel‐Gaza conflict, noting the active participation of Israeli and Palestinian diasporas in North America, often marked by internal disagreements. The piece argues that these diasporas, though physically distant from the conflicts, significantly influence global perspectives and the nature of warfare through public opinion and social media, thereby reshaping the contemporary understanding of war.

Conflict, Resistance, and Resolve: Uncovering Lost Narratives in Japanese-American Internment

By the end of 1942, the U.S. army and the national government had forcibly removed 120,000 Japanese descended individuals from their homes on the West Coast, confining them to ten internment camps across the nation. In an effort to construct a more accurate representation of the mindset of internees in the wartime era, my thesis hones in on conflict and division within camp life. I emphasize the heterogeneity of Japanese-American voices and push back against the oversimplification of the different internee subgroups: the Japan-born immigrants (“Issei”), U.S.-born citizens (“Nisei”), and Japan-educated Nisei who returned home before the war (“Kibei”). Throughout the course of the internment era, they have been characterized as “loyal” or “disloyal.” The continued use of these labels, both in the wartime period and in the subsequent scholarship on internment, minimizes the complexity of internees’ views. Their mindsets were shaped by the traumatic nature of removal, the treatment they received in the camps, and their fears about post-camp life. Depending on their individual experiences, internees chose to act in distinct ways. For example, some internees resisted governmental authority while others served as government informants. However, their choices were not necessarily indicative of undying loyalty to Japan or the United States. Through a case study of the Manzanar internment camp in California and the Poston internment camp in Arizona, I demonstrate that the “disloyal” and “loyal” labels provide an incomplete understanding of life in the camps. Deep disagreements shaped internees’ experiences, and the intricacies of the internment experience are silenced through racialized assumptions about people of Japanese ancestry. With conflict as a lens for viewing the internment experience, a much clearer picture wartime Japanese American experiences comes to the forefront.

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

The Implicated Reader: Second-Person Address in Novels of US Imperialism

ABSTRACT: This essay explores how literature can help reckon with past and present political violence by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with narrative theory and formalist criticism, the essay conceptualizes what I call an implicated reader , a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. In order to develop and demonstrate my theoretical framework of the implicated reader, I analyze three twenty-first-century novels depicting diferent legacies of US imperialism: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine (2002), representing the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), portraying post-9/11 racial violence; and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), depicting legacies of Indigenous genocide and dispossession. I examine how these novels use distinct forms of second-person address—either characterized or uncharacterized , and internal or external —to invite readers to identify with the narratee evoked as an implicated subject. The essay ultimately suggests that rather than facilitating the reader’s identification and empathy with victimized subjects, some works of literature challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than sufers from political violence.

Cripping the Archive: Analyzing Archival Disorder in the Yamashita Family Archives and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory

This article outlines a crip archival analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s creative family memoir Letters to Memory (2017) and the separate Yamashita Family Archives; the analysis revolves around the concept of disorder. The book and digital archives move the daily lived experience of incarceration out of chronological order, encouraging new connections across a massive collection of materials: letters, photographs, federal surveillance documents, paintings, sermons, and other ephemera surrounding World War II Japanese American incarceration. Their respective acts of assembling and retelling destabilize the dominant narrative of a resolved family or national trauma to reflect divergent embodied experiences of distress and disability effected by racial debilitation. Offering concentric analysis of textual and archival reordering via Asian American studies, disability studies, and digital humanities, this article adds alternative dimensions to the ongoing legacy of incarceration by inviting readers to create new constellations of meaning through examining temporal and embodied disorder. Reading the physical book and digital archives together also acts as a model for how literary studies scholars might complicate our attention to embodiment beyond narrative analysis, by thinking about disability and madness in the design and structure of texts and digital media. Through cripping the archive, the author calls for a reconceptualization of mad and disabled bodyminds as not only content to be examined, but also users and creators whose disorder animates alternative ways of knowing personal and state violence.

Art and the City Fiction in Japanese American Internment Camps: Sequels for Resiliency

This article delves into the creation a fictional city solely for the development of Japanese American internment camps and the way in which sustainable arts and crafts played a significant role in ensuring survival in such a hostile environment. To this aim, we searched the literature and reviewed archives, primarily from the American West Coast. We demonstrate that beyond adaptation to the circumstances, the visual representation of the new city’s settlement, founding, and daily activities, instead of adding to the typical panoptic or sombre prison imagery, remains inscribed in the images selected by the inmates, and that the use of such images precisely fostered the inmates’ resiliency. This leads us to deduce that such ’city fiction’ was necessary in this case for survival and endurance, and that its artistic representation was primarily incorporated into the State’s ideological apparatus. On the other hand, occasional fissures subtly seethed with the violence exerted in the camps. In this way, we conclude that the artistic activity itself justified the city fiction, among other situations, revealing the conditions of systemic violence and oppression faced by the internees. Within this framework, we deem that the artworks hereby generated constitute a paramount historical document for resiliency’s sake. The arguments contained herein are still relevant, because everywhere around the world, situations of exclusion and confinement of displaced immigrants, or simply those considered misfits, are repeated time and time again. Nor have we alleviated the issue in any way today, since we disregard the lessons learned from the past.

Acceptance for Admission: Administrations of Japanese American Relocation and the Midwestern University

Acceptance for Admission: Administrations of Japanese American Relocation and the Midwestern University

Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II

Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II

“Nothing but My Own Whole Body”: Revisiting Radical Haiku Through Violet Kazue de Cristoforo’s Life and Work

ABSTRACT This essay reflects upon the continuing significance of the freestyle Kaiko haiku movement documented by poet, editor, and translator Violet Kazue de Cristoforo in the anthology May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow (1997). A vivid, rule-breaking, highly social form that thrived in specialized clubs, Kaiko haiku began in Tokyo in the early 1900s and was brought by young emigrant writers to California, where it was transformed and almost erased by Japanese American incarceration. The essay revisits the poetic form and de Cristoforo’s literary work and activism in light of settler-colonialism, ecological change, and the essayist’s experience living in California’s Central Valley.

Hard History: Teaching the Japanese American Experience in American Concentration Camps

How should “hard history” be confronted to understand the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II? This article shares a way of teaching this topic that not only confronts directly the real experiences of Japanese Americans in concentration camps but also humanizes the story. Encouraging students to learn the history experientially, the author uses two different sets of historical primary sources, offering both an “outsider” and “insider” perspective. First, the author explains that he focuses on the biographies and objectives of different photographers who took photos at Manzanar, highlighting how this context helps illuminate students’ perceptions and understanding of these photographs, revealing a larger story about the experience of Japanese Americans. Second, he describes how he incorporates the diary of Stanley Hayami, a Japanese American teenager interned at Heart Mountain who used his diary to retain agency within an oppressive system. Through an analysis of the diary with students, the author demonstrates how this diary captures the complexity of the Japanese American experience in American concentration camps.

Back to the Future: Time Traveling to 1942

Abstract Japanese new media artist Masaki Fujihata's exhibition and groundbreaking accompanying public augmented reality (AR) installation “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” remind us that even after eighty years, the ghost life of World War II Japanese American internment continues to haunt us. “BeHere/1942” revisits the War Relocation Authority's photographic history of the Japanese American incarceration experience using digital technology, including AR, which allows contemporary spectators to immerse themselves in the events of “relocation day” in the spring of 1942. Fujihata provides a new way of seeing, remembering, and experiencing photographs of the Japanese American wartime past in the present—empowered with contemporary media tools that are distinctly from what he calls “our own time”: AR.

Social networks and community features: Identifying neighborhoods in a WWII Japanese American incarceration center

Socially defined neighborhoods develop through frequent face to face interactions among residents and their self-identification as neighbors. While archaeological evidence of neighborhoods is usually dependent on artifact frequencies, boundaries, or shared features, this paper explores how effectively communal features act as proxies for social interactions. Network data drawn from historic newspapers published by incarcerees at Amache, a WWII Japanese American Incarceration Center, is used to recreate networks of interaction between residents of a block – a spatial unit generally viewed as a neighborhood, that housed between 200 and 350 individuals. Within a sample of surveyed residential areas, these interpersonal networks of published social events are compared to the frequency of community landscape features to see how well archaeological remains correspond to historic network data in identifying socially defined neighborhoods archaeologically. All blocks exhibit neighborhood-like social interaction within one or the other dataset, but not always in both suggesting that archaeological research should test multiple datasets to make more robust interpretations about neighborhoods in the past.

Origami activism, inalienable collections, and crumbling concrete: Material engagements with Histories of violence

AbstractThe World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was a traumatic event that had lasting repercussions on multiple communities. Archaeologists have sought to productively pursue community‐based methodologies in studying this period, employing object‐based oral histories, outreach events, and community participation in fieldwork. However, less scholarly attention has looked to the ways in which materials have become central to understanding and mobilizing around the incarceration camp history. Acts of pilgrimage, memorialization, scholarly study, and activism constitute key arenas through which this heritage is participated with, each interacting with materials in different ways. This article discusses three cases of material engagements, from the politics of object ownership to origami activism and their importance in reckoning with this violent past. Materials in these cases are not passive objects but rather spur actions and create new publics. Furthermore, the physical qualities of materials shape both the ways in which they are engaged and the politics that surround their rhetorical deployment.