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Cited by 8Asian American and Pacific HistoriesMemory, Trauma, and CommemorationMemory, History, Trauma, Identity

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Surviving Democracy's “Mistake”: Japanese Americans & the Enduring Legacy of Executive Order 9066

Nakanishi, Don T.·1993·Amerasia Journal
DOI 10.17953/amer.19.1.xu217p1k01521170
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Abstract

This discussion provides an alternative to the customary manner of treating the Internment as past history, as a voluminous body of literature has done, and instead examines the interaction of structural and psychological factors that led Japanese Americans to engage in an arduous, controversial, and largely unexpected process of resurrecting and coming to grips with the Internment. Like other events in the group histories of American racial minorities, the Internment is usually viewed as a distant and past tragedy, which will probably never happen again, and which has no enduring impact on or significance for the group or its members. It is largely considered to be a topic for historiographic investigation or a classroom discussion on American history. It serves as another benchmark for illustrating the severity of America's past racial oppression, or in a more optimistic vein as a frame of reference for assessing the progress which the society has made in improving its racial conditions.

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  1. Portions of this article were originally presented at the “Political Identities in American Thought” conference Yale University April 1991.
  2. “Future of the Nikkei Community” conference program October 10 1992 Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles California. At UCLA activities funded in part by a $100 000 UCLA Chancellor's Challenge Grant in the Arts and Humanities consisted of fourteen different events beginning on February 22 1992 with an opening ceremony at Royce Hall—which featured Congressman Norman Mineta Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley UCLA Chancellor Charles Young and UCLA Professor Harry Kitano Nikkei Student Union President Claire Kohatsu among others—and culiminated with a special performance by the jazz fusion group Hiroshima in the same auditorium on February 21 1993. A major civil rights conference two highly successful exhibitions of paintings and photography on the camps a literature symposium a theater performance film festival the Manzanar pilgrimage and a curriculum integration seminar on the Internment were also organized with both campus departments and regional Japanese American and Asian American institutions. Several books including this special issue of Amerasia Journal resulted from this year-long project. A large number of documents and other materials which relate to these commemorative activities at UCLA and in the Southern California area generally will be placed in the Japanese American Research Project Collection of the Special Collections Department of the UCLA University Research Library.
  3. For a general overview of the Japanese internment experience, see Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976); Alan P. Bosworth, America's Concentration Camps (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976); Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and World War II (Hinsdale, Illinois: The Dryden Press, 1971); Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal (New York: The Macmillan Company). For legal analysis of major internment-related cases, see Jacobus tenBroek, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd Matson, Prejudice War, and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Eugene Rostow, The Sovereign Perogative (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1962); Peter Irons, Justice At War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Robert Takasugi, “Legal Analysis of Title II,” Amerasia Journal, 2: 2 (1974), 95–104. For reviews of the literature, see, Raymond Okamura “The Concentration Camp Experience from a Japanese American Perspective and Review of Michi Weglyn's Years of Infamy,” in Emma Gee, ed. Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1978), 27–30.
  4. This study is based on in-depth interviews archival materials analysis and participant observation of Japanese American community organizations which are similar to methodologies that are more fully described in my dissertation “Can It Happen Again? The Enduring Impact of the Holocaust and Evacuation on the Political Thinking of American Jewish and Japanese American leaders.” Ph.D. dissertation Harvard University 1978.
  5. 10.2307/3638493 · DOI
  6. See William Petersen, “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1966; Julian Makaroff, “America's Other Racial Minority: Japanese Americans,” Contemporary Review 210 (1967), 310–314; Barbara Varon, “The Japanese Americans: Comparative Occupational Status, 1960 and 1950,” Demography 4 (1967), 809–819; and David A. Bell, “The Triumph of Asian Americans,” The New Republic (July 15–22, 1985), 24–31.
  7. Ki-Taek Chun, “The Myth of Asian American Success and Its Educational Ramifications,” IRCD Bulletin 15 (1980), 1–12.
  8. 10.17953/amer.4.2.x203l74863857108 · DOI
  9. 10.1007/BF02701609 · DOI
  10. Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).
  11. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (San Francisco: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 170.
  12. See for example, William G. Niederland, “Psychiatric Consequences of Persecution,” American Journal of Psychotheraphy 26 (1962), 191–203, and “Clinical Observations on the Survivor Syndrome,” in Rolland S. Parker, ed. The Emotional Stress of War, Violence, and Peace (Pittsburgh: Stanwix House, 1972), 284–288; Robert Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 485; Kai Erickson, Everything in Its Path (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Martha Wolfenstein, Disaster: A Psychological Essay (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957); and Irving Janis, Stress and Frustration (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1971).
  13. Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet American (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1969); Frank Chuman, The Bamboo People: Japanese Americans and the Law (Del Mar: Publisher's, Inc., 1976).
  14. In Arthur Hansen and Betty Mitson, eds., Voices Long Silent (Fullerton: California State University Fullerton: Japanese American Oral History Project, 1974), 14.
  15. See previous citations of Robert Lifton, William G. Niederland, and Martha Wolfenstein. Also, Milton Himmelfarb, “Never Again,” Commentary 52 (1971), 73–76.
  16. Norbert Muhlen, The Survivors: A Report on the Jews in Germany Today (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1962), 189–190.
  17. 10.17953/amer.2.2.01457t03763w71w0 · DOI · Paper page
  18. See Raymond Okamura, “The Concentration Camp Experience from a Japanese American Perspective.” One of the few works on the internment written by a Japanese American before the mid-1960s was John Okada's novel, No-No Boy (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1957). The novel was long considered taboo by the Japanese American establishment. See William Yeh's review of No-No Boy in this issue of Amerasia, and Michi Weglyn's Years of Infamy for a fuller discussion.
  19. Harold Isaacs, Images of Asia (New York: Capricorn, 1958) and Idols of the Tribe (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 20–21.
  20. Amy Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” in Amy Tachiki, ed., Roots (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971), 9–13.
  21. Don T. Nakanishi, “Asian American Politics: An Agenda for Research,” Amerasia journal 2: 2 (1986), 1–27.
  22. See Helen Epstein, “Heirs of the Holocaust,” New York Times Magazine (June 19, 1977), 12–15; Martin S. Bergman and Milton E. Jucovy, ed., Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and, Donna Nagata, “The Japanese American Internment: Transgenerational Consequences of Traumatic Stress,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 3 (1990), 47–69.
  23. H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! (New York: The Dial Press, 1969), and Okamura, “Campaign to Repeal the Emergency Detention Act.”
  24. 10.17953/amer.2.2.882561412x518qx0 · DOI
  25. 10.17953/amer.2.2.g207k5028t52861m · DOI · Paper page
  26. In 1982, for example, the East-West Players Theatre Company, the oldest Asian American theatrical organization, dedicated its entire season to dramatic works on the Internment. See also Amerasia Journal 8: 2 (1981), which devotes over fifty pages to testimonies which were given at the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.
  27. See Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), and Justice Delayed (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), and Dale Minami, “Coram Nobis and Redress,” in Roger Daniels, et. al., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press,1991), 200–02.
  28. In May 1988, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed the class action lawsuit, Hohri v. United States, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Later that year, the Supreme Court refused to review the decision. See William Hohri, Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1988).
  29. Stephan Fugita and David O'Brien, “Economics, Ideology, and Ethnicity,” in Russell Endo, et. al., eds., Asian Americans 2 (Palo Alto: Science and Behavior, 1980), 260–274.
  30. Leonard Broom and John Kitsuse, The Managed Casualty: The Japanese American Family in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and, Harry Kitano, Japanese Americans (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976). · DOI
  31. See William Hohri, Repairing America and John Tateishi, “The Japanese American Citizens League and the Struggle for Redress,” in Roger Daniels, et. al., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1991), 191–195.
  32. Don T. Nakanishi, “Asian American Politics: An Agenda for Research,” Amerasia Journal 12: 2 (1986), 1–27, and “The Next Swing Vote? Asian Pacific Americans and California Politics,” in Byran O. Jackson and Michael Preston, eds., Racial and Ethnic Politics in California (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1991), 25–54.
  33. 10.17953/amer.5.2.n663q7233601v387 · DOI
  34. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
  35. See previously cited works of Martha Wolfenstein, William G. Niederland; Robert Lifton, and Helen Epstein. Also, Martin S. Bergman and Milton E. Jucovy, eds., Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

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Metadata

Authors
Nakanishi, D. T.
Affiliations
University of California, Los Angeles (US)
Corresponding author
Nakanishi, Don T.
Venue
Amerasia Journal
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
1993-01
Volume
19
Issue
1
Pages
7-36
ISSN
0044-7471 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.17953/amer.19.1.xu217p1k01521170
OpenAlex
W1922793655
Cited by
8
References
0
Citations by year
2021: 2 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Amerasia Journal (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Asian American and Pacific Histories
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Memory, History, Trauma, Identity
Keywords
Japanese American incarceration, Executive Order 9066, Japanese Americans, collective memory, coming to terms with the past, racial oppression, racial minorities, psychological factors, structural factors

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