Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

“It’s the story of everyday people making history,” she said—from camp inmates who maintained their dignity in face of degrading conditions, to former prisoners and relatives who increasingly spoke out against the racist treatment of Japanese by the U.S. government.

Ishizuka was speaking February 28 at a well-attended presentation and slide show here on her book, Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration. It was sponsored by the Asia/Pacific/American Studies Institute at New York University, and chaired by Jack Tchen, director of the APA Institute and author of the preface.

Lost and Found tells the story of an exhibition, “America’s Concentration Camps,” that opened at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1994 and traveled throughout the United States over a decade. Ishizuka, whose parents and other relatives were among those detained, was the exhibit’s curator. Many former prisoners, wearing badges with their photos while in the camps, served as volunteer guides at the exhibit, which drew throngs of people.

When the display was taken to the immigration museum on New York’s Ellis Island, Ishizuka said, National Park Service officials at first demanded that “the word ‘Concentration’ be removed from the title.” Japanese Americans and other supporters stood their ground, and the authorities backed down.

When Washington declared war on Japan in December 1941, seizing on Tokyo’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. rulers cranked up their chauvinist anti-Japanese campaign. In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

A total of 120,000 Japanese on the West Coast were forced out of their homes and businesses and shipped to remote prison camps in seven states. Two-thirds were native-born U.S. citizens, and others were legal residents barred from citizenship (until 1952) by previous laws. Most lost their jobs, land, and businesses. Only in Hawaii, where Japanese were 35 percent of the population, were there no mass detentions; instead, Hawaii as a whole was put under martial law.

In the name of “national security,” Japanese Americans were locked up “without charges, trials, or convictions,” Ishizuka said, just for being Japanese.

At the time, U.S. officials—from white-supremacist senator John Rankin to liberal attorney general Francis Biddle—openly called these centers concentration camps. But they soon “shrouded the term in euphemisms,” Ishizuka said.

Detention facilities were termed “assembly centers.” Concentration camps became “relocation centers”—and even more grotesquely, “pioneer communities.” Forced removal was called “evacuation.” U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were branded “nonaliens” and legal residents “aliens.”

Ishizuka presented slides from the book’s photos depicting people in the camps. Their dignity under adverse conditions is manifest, from the photo of her grandmother as a young girl practicing her violin in an Arkansas camp, to her grandfather in his silk top hat and suit. After Pearl Harbor, her grandfather suddenly became an “alien enemy” in official records.

The exhibition includes the testimony of two Black women who worked at the Topaz, Utah, camp, one as dietician and the other as a nurse, and who learned some Japanese and made friends with some inmates. As part of the government policy of discouraging fraternization with the Japanese, all staff was classified as “Caucasian”—including themselves. The racist administrators, of course, “didn’t accept Negroes hardly better than they did the Japanese,” said the nurse, Emma Perkins.

The book documents instances of protests by inmates, like the 85 men in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, convicted of draft resistance in 1944. It reprints a Feb. 27, 1944, article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined: “Eleven Demands Presented to WRA: Nisei Ask Right to Go Anywhere in U.S.” The article reports that detainees in Granada, Colorado, presented a letter to the War Relocation Authority demanding restoration of their rights as U.S. citizens, including an end to the segregation of Japanese Americans in the U.S. military into separate units.

Ishizuka described the rise in the early 1970s of the movement demanding redress for the incarceration of Japanese Americans. “No redress would have happened without a vigorous protest movement,” she noted. Finally, President Ronald Reagan signed a 1988 bill providing for an official government apology and $20,000 each for surviving inmates.

The lessons of this history are relevant today, Ishizuka concluded. “Today, the same rhetoric has been used for the misuse of power and racial profiling in the name of national security,” she said.

“A lot of our history still needs to be reclaimed,” she said. “History is not a done deal. It’s not always written, and it’s not always written right.”

Lost and Found is a real contribution to reclaiming this history and telling it right.  
 
 
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