Last witnesses : reflections on the wartime internment of Japanese Americans / edited by Erica Harth.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Harth, Erica.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Japanese Americans--Forced removal and internment, 1942-1945.

Japanese Americans.

Japanese Americans--Forced removal and internment, 1942-1945--Personal narratives.

Japanese Americans--Biography.

Genre:

Biographies.

Personal narratives.

Physical Description:

303 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave for St. Martin's Press, 2001.

Summary:

Surrounded by Barber Wire and Held in camps guarded by men with machine guns, over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent were detained in government-sanctioned camps like the one John Tateishi remembers. Sixty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent issuing of FDR's notorious Executive Order 9066 that made possible the incarceration of these citizens, one question remains unresolved: "Could it happen again?" Families were uprooted. Businesses were lost and lives were ruined by FDR's zeal to protect America from Japan. To the writers in this book -- novelists, memoirsts, poets, activists, scholars, students, professionals -- the World War ll internment of Japanese Americans in the detention camps is an unfinished chapter of American history that mars the nostalgic glow that often surrounds the World War ll home front years. Former internees, like John Tateishi and Robert Maeda, and children of detainees and of camp officials join with others in challenging readers to construct a better future by confronting this dark episode from America's World War ll scrapbook.

Contents:

Part I Parents and Children

Another Spring / Toyo Suyemoto, Susan Richardson 21

Legacy of Silence (I) / Mitsuye Yamada 35

Legacy of Silence (II) / Jeni Yamada 47

Echoes from Generation to Generation / Donna K. Nagata 61

Part II Family Secrets

Mixing Stories / Stewart David Ikeda 75

A Daughter's Need to Know / Marnie Mueller 99

Return to Gila River / George F. Brown 115

Part III What We Took from the Camps

Memories from Behind Barbed Wire / John Y. Tateishi 129

Pictures from Camp / Patrick S. Hayashi 139

"Isamu Noguchi: 5-7-A, Poston, Arizona" / Robert J. Maeda 153

From Manzanar to the Present: A Personal Fourney / Sue Kunitomi Embrey 167

Democracy for Beginners / Erica Harth 187

Part IV From the Past to the Future

Ethnic Expectations: The Politics of Staging the Internment Camps / Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro 205

The Life and Times of Rabbit in the Moon / Chizu Omori 215

The Legacy of the Battle of Bruyeres: Reflections of a Sansei Francophile / Valerie Nao Yoshimura 229

Loyalty and Concentration Camps in America: The Fapanese American Precedent and the Internal Security Act of 1950 / Allan Wesley Austin 253

Nineteen in '98: A Conversation on Studying the Internment / Jason Kohn, Cara Lemon 271.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [291]-293) and index.

ISBN:

0312221991

OCLC:

46364694