Redress Movement Research Articles

"The Potential That Was in All of Us": Carceral Disability and the Japanese American Redress Movement

The mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II has usually been assessed in terms of devastating economic and property losses, racist profiling, and the abrogation of constitutional rights. However, survivors also claimed incarceration as an experience of individual and collective disablement. In a break from decorum, survivors testified about a range of mental and physical disabilities at the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Hearings (CWRIC) held across the United States in 1981. This article discusses how a grassroots redress movement for government restitution brought the experiences of disabled, chronically ill, and mad people into the Commission hearings. Informed by 1960s-1970s Asian American and Third World Women's movements, intergenerational redress organizing transmitted and amplified the subjugated knowledge of disabled survivors. These efforts to involve ordinary people in redress produced an unanticipated yet profound record of what I call carceral disability: the aggregate disabling effects of mass incarceration and state violence. I further deliberate on the unresolvable ambiguities and ongoing anticarceral legacies of the Redress Movement.

Introduction

Introduction Dayo F. Gore (bio) and Christina B. Hanhardt (bio) In 2020 the Movement for Black Lives, drawing on what it describes as an "ecosystem of over 170 organizations," relaunched its 2016 Vision for Black Lives platform to build "political will and power" (Movement for Black Lives 2020). Two aspects of the platform stand out to us: first, that an intersectional analysis is at the center of all demands; and second, that "the state" is theorized as a source of punishment that activists reject and as a set of resources that activists might make claims upon. Given our respective research on twentieth-century U.S. social movements (Christina on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activism, and Dayo on Black women's radicalism and the U.S. Left) and investments in contemporary left movements, these issues have long preoccupied our work on and engagement with political organizing. In the last three years the stakes have only intensified. Social and economic conditions in the United States and around the globe demonstrate the necessity of addressing categories of difference while confronting state power, its resources, and institutional reach. From abolitionist demands to "defund the police and invest in communities" to calls for protecting rights such as access to abortion and health care, these years of pandemic, protests, and legal mandates have laid bare the power of the state to shape everyday life and survival. This is especially the case in the context of the recalibration of neoliberalism and white nationalism. Counter to claims on the left and right that identity politics stand in contrast to class politics, or that movements named by single-identity frames are necessarily delimited, many activist responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and leadership during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of the [End Page 11] summer of 2020 treated race, gender, sexuality, and class as tightly interwoven social categories that are essential to building justice movements and radical change. In addition, many of these movements have directly engaged the state, be that in supporting socialist- and progressive-identified political candidates or demanding economic resources for state health infrastructure, even as they have also participated in local mutual aid networks and called for the end of carceral systems, borders, and even the U.S. nation-state itself. We have been struck by how these organizing efforts speak to histories that we have studied of political movements that center identity and economic politics and also urge a revisiting of the ways states mobilize power and belonging through interconnected systems of benefits, discipline, and violence. In considering this special issue we were inspired by important debates about the state that have long animated social movement organizing as well as left and feminist scholarship, such as the place of liberal reforms in radical strategy, the value or limits of centralization and seeding electoral power from below, the challenges of forging new visions on an international scale while sustaining local engagement, and how to recognize the state's co-optation of radical terms without ceding discursive and political ground. We also sought to highlight scholarship and activism emerging from feminists of color that have long made visible the capitalist state's use of social locations beyond class to structure resource distribution. We seek in this issue on State/Power to provide productive insights and provoke further conversation. The articles that follow reroute expected histories and dominant discourses about state power and track how people, particularly Black and other racialized communities, have organized in response. They also take up some precise issues from recent years that have been at the forefront of discussions about the state, such as practices of mutual aid and collective care, the expansion of state punishment alongside the retraction of public resources, and the relationship between local, federal, and global power. Throughout, they explore what directly engaging the state might offer and restrict, and they do so with an attentiveness to identity and difference. The first two articles approach these issues through an analysis of the place of bodily regulation in the operation of the carceral state. In "'The Potential That Was in All of Us': Carceral Disability and the Japanese American Redress Movement," Adria L. Imada looks at how...

“The Quiet Garden Where Spring Is Forever”: Toyo Suyemoto and the Japanese American Redress Movement

Previous articleNext article No AccessForum“The Quiet Garden Where Spring Is Forever”: Toyo Suyemoto and the Japanese American Redress MovementConnie Y. ChiangConnie Y. ChiangBowdoin College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 28, Number 1January 2023 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 32Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722574 Views: 32Total views on this site © 2023 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in <i>The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories</i>

Transnational Advocacy, Norm Regress, and Foreign Compliance Constituencies: The Case of the “Comfort Women” Redress Movement

Abstract The literature at the intersection of global norms and transnational advocacy typically equates target states’ foreign constituencies with those exerting normative pressure on the states in question on behalf of their domestic constituencies. Another type of foreign constituency remains undertheorized: foreign nationals as rights claimants who make normative claims against target states, such as victims of colonization seeking redress or refugees demanding their rights protection. I argue that states, including robust democracies otherwise well socialized into global norms, respond differently to compliance pressures from these two types of foreign compliance constituencies. In what I call dual norm dynamics, states may regress in their norm practices when it comes to foreign claimants while at the same time deepening their normative commitments to the international community as a whole. In an unintended consequence of norm diffusion, norm regress in target states for foreign claimants may occur as a result of successful transnational norm advocacy on their behalf. To demonstrate the empirical utility of dual norm dynamics, I look at the transnational redress movement for Korean “comfort women.”

Korean “Comfort Women”: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

Korean “Comfort Women”: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

Tadaima 2021: A Community Virtual Pilgrimage, Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages (JAMP) in partnership with the National Park Service

<i>Tadaima 2021: A Community Virtual Pilgrimage</i>, Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages (JAMP) in partnership with the National Park Service

An Unforgettable Ordeal: Chinese ‘Comfort Women’ in World War II

Using methods including analyzing firsthand testimonies, images, and secondary sources, this paper explores the multiple factors that resulted in the silence of Chinese comfort women survivors in both wartime and the postwar period: shame culture, patrichy, and lack of political and cultural support for comfort women. Due to both patriarchy and related shame culture and a lack of political, cultural, and international support for survivors, few Chinese women spoke up about their experience within the comfort women system prior to the redress movement beginning in 1991; in the 1990s, societal and government support for comfort women increased, leading many comfort women to not only share their experiences but seek justice in the process. To begin, this paper provides an overview of essential historical context, including Japanese colonialism, the establishment of “comfort women” systems, Chinese comfort womens’ suffering, and the post-war struggles and ongoing plight of victims and survivors. Next, this paper argues that due to shame, culture and patriarchy; the lack of political, cultural, and international support for comfort women; and the mental and physical trauma that they experienced, comfort women survivors refused to speak up or seek justice for decades during and after World War II. Finally, this paper investigates key differences between the Cultural Revolution and redress movement, analyzing why comfort women spoke out during the latter period but largely remained silent during the postwar period from 1945 to 1990.

Lessons from a Different Shore: Portrayals of Japanese American Incarceration and the Redress Movement by Western European Newspapers

The history of Japanese American incarceration is traditionally framed as one of the bleakest chapters in twentieth-century US history. Yet interest in the story of Japanese Americans and the lessons of the incarceration are not limited to the United States or the Japanese diaspora. This article examines media reactions to the story of the Japanese American incarceration and the redress movement of the 1980s in four Western European countries—the Netherlands, United Kingdom, West Germany, and France. In each country, media outlets discussed the redress movement and the Japanese American experience, larger issues of racism within the United States, and financial compensation for war victims. In doing so, these media accounts both dramatize the nature of public opinion on the subject of reparations and touch on larger debates on the collective memory of the Holocaust and colonialism that were emerging in Western Europe.&nbsp;

Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China

Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the ‘conspicuous silence’ of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalised sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.

Challenging the Global Human Rights Regime: Transnational Significance of the "Comfort Women" Redress Movement

Challenging the Global Human Rights Regime: Transnational Significance of the "Comfort Women" Redress Movement

“Untold Stories of Issei Women: Collective Images and Individual Experiences in Japanese American Oral History”

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the Japanese American redress movement and the oral interviews of two Japanese immigrant women, known as Issei women. Focusing on the shared images of Issei women in the Japanese American community and the perspectives and self-representations of the interviewees in the oral interviews, it explores how cultural consensus produced stereotypical, collective images of Issei women as submissive, persevering, and quiet persons. As the redress movement progressed in the 1960s to the 1980s, the Japanese American community conducted oral history projects to preserve memories and legacies of their wartime experiences. There are dissimilarities between the original audio recordings and the published transcripts regarding the perspectives of Issei women. This article shows how the community’s desire to preserve idealized images of Issei men and women reduced the accuracy and nuances in the women’s self-representations and the complexities of family relations. Also, contrary to the collective images, Issei women demonstrated how they were independent, assertive, and open individuals expressing their perspectives, complicated emotions, and importance in the family.

The Japanese American Citizens League, Los Angeles Politics, and the Thomas Noguchi Case

This article examines the political mobilization of Japanese Americans by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) against the 1969 firing of Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. By challenging the racism in the Noguchi case, the JACL opened a public discussion of the racism behind wartime incarceration, rejecting the quiescence that had marked Japanese Americans as the “model minority.” Activism in the Noguchi case proved the potential of grassroots organizing and built experience in forming cross-racial political alliances, effectively shaping political narrative in the media, and exercising clout in city politics. For Japanese Americans and the JACL, these experiences shaped a new political sensibility that underscored civil rights and served as a precursor to the later redress movement.

Transpacific Acts of Memory: The Afterlives of Hanako

In producing Chungmi Kim's eponymous Hanako (1999), the first Asian American play on the topic of “comfort women,” East West Players (EWP) provided a critical space for addressing this devastating chapter of Asian history and showing its relevance to communities in the United States. It also inadvertently launched the play on a ten-year transpacific journey as Comfort Women (2004) in New York and as Nabi (2005–9) throughout South Korea and Canada. Hanako dramatizes the intergenerational bonds between a Korean American university student, her grandmother, and Korean “comfort women” survivors who travel to New York to give their public testimonies. As the play develops, one learns that the grandmother has been repressing her own memories of enslavement as one of an estimated two hundred thousand young girls and women euphemistically called “comfort women” whom the Japanese Imperial military forced into sexually servicing its troops in the years leading up to and during World War II. Survivors kept their wartime experiences a secret from the public until the early 1990s, when a social movement for redress emerged in Asia. Over the past two and a half decades, activists and artists from around the world have joined survivors in their quest for justice. The recent agreement in 2015 between South Korea and Japan to “resolve” the “comfort women” issue sparked outcry from survivors and their supporters for its insincerity and inadequacy, further galvanizing the movement. Hanako and its afterlives as Comfort Women and Nabi are part of the transpacific culture of political activism and artistic expression that contends with the ongoing struggle over the history of “comfort women.”

Chinese comfort women: testimonies from imperial Japan's sex slaves

Introduction Part 1 - The War Remembered 1 Japan's Aggressive War and the Military Comfort System 2 The Mass Abduction of Chinese Women 3 Different Types of Military Comfort Stations in China 4 Crimes Fostered by the Comfort System Part 2 - The Survivors' Voices 5 Eastern Coastal Region 6 Warzones in Central and Northern China 7 Southern China Frontlines Part 3 - The Postwar Struggles 8 Wounds That Do Not Heal 9 The Redress Movement 10 Litigation on the Part of Chinese Survivors 11 International Support Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Eternal Present: Retroactive Diplomas in Canada and the US

Through an examination of recent events—specifically retroactive graduation ceremonies and related legislative and educational policies in the United States and Canada—this essay concerns the most recent incarnation of wartime incarceration. It explores how and why this 1940s moment continues to shape public policy despite the redress movement and the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

Post-Redress Memory: A Personal Reflection on Manzanar Murakami

This is a revised version of a talk whose original objective was to reflect on my past work in the area of Japanese American internment narratives, in particular on one essay entitled ”The Transpacific Gaze in Tropic of Orange,” in which I show how the character named Manzanar Murakami, through an arduous process of voluntary homelessness, traumatic amnesia, and spectacular performance art, transforms his Japanese American subjectivity from being an absent presence in U.S. society to one that can consciously carry an ineradicable painful memory of internment while retaining a vital sense of being at home in America. In reflecting on this paper, I recalled the long process of my coming to recognize a new mode of internment memory which, emerging after the Redress movement had concluded victoriously, pointed to what was missing in extant literary narratives of internment memory. I gave the name ”post-Redress internment memory” to this new mode of remembering. My talk on ”The Transpacific Gaze in Tropic of Orange,” expanded and amended, is incorporated here as the second and third sections of the present paper. A first section was added in order to situate post-Redress memory within the rubric of ”phantom Asian America,” and a fourth section was added to recapitulate my argument in a different context-the necessity of a fully engaged and pleasurable sensory apparatus for the work of literary criticism and the teaching of critical war memory.

Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II by Martin W. Sandler (review)

Reviewed by: Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II by Martin W. Sandler Elizabeth Bush Sandler, Martin W. Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II. Walker, 2013. [176p]. illus. with photographs ISBN 978-0-8027-2277-5 $22.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-9. Racial prejudice, nativist resentment over immigrant business success, and wartime panic—each was a poisonous element in itself, and combined they led to Executive Order 9066, which mandated the relocation and virtual incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese residents loyal to the United States. Rapid announcement and enforcement of the order impelled the internees to liquidate personal and business assets at stupefying financial loss and to pack their few remaining possessions in preparation for relocation to unknown destinations. While many settled stoically into crude, makeshift accommodations in the relocation camps, others eager to prove their dedication to their adopted country would take up arms for the national defense. Although this shameful episode in American history receives considerable attention in both fiction and information books for youth, Sandler probes into aspects of the story less often covered in work that focuses narrowly on the camps themselves. Here readers learn about Quaker protests against Japanese internment, similar camps in Central and South America, Nisei WACs and interpreters working for the American Armed Forces, generational differences regarding the redress movement, and current Japanese-American collaborations with the Muslim community in support of a group too often viewed [End Page 531] as suspect. Cogently organized and heavily illustrated with photographs, with an index, source notes, and lists for "further reading and surfing," this will be a valuable title in the American History collection. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Who is the Strongest in Washington, D.C.?: A Comparative Study on the Korean- American Comfort Women Movement and the Japanese-American Redress Movement

Washington, D.C. is not only the national capital of the United States, but it is also an international arena in which world political issues are substantially dealt with. Immigrants in the United States represent influence in world politics, exerting their leverage on policy makers in Washington, D.C. The Korean-American Comfort Women Movement in 2007 and the Japanese-American Redress Movement from 1970 to 1992 share common ground in terms of their norms and strategies for success. This article conducts comparative analysis on the two grassroots movements based on Resource Mobilization Theory, and suggests their realistic implications to political dynamics in Washington, D.C.

Who is the Strongest in Washington, D.C.?: A Comparative Study on the Korean-American Comfort Women Movement and the Japanese-American Redress Movement

Washington, D.C. is not only the national capital of the United States, but it is also an international arena in which world political issues are substantially dealt with. Immigrants in the United States represent influence in world politics, exerting their leverage on policy makers in Washington, D.C. The Korean-American Comfort Women Movement in 2007 and the Japanese-American Redress Movement from 1970 to 1992 share common ground in terms of their norms and strategies for success. This article conducts comparative analysis on the two grassroots movements based on Resource Mobilization Theory, and suggests their realistic implications to political dynamics in Washington, D.C.