Japanese American Internees Return, 1945 to 1955: Readjustment and Social Amnesia

Abstract

T HE YEARS 1945 to 1955 usually are designated as the resettlement era for Japanese Americans. The three years preceding 1945 found those persons of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes in the Pacific Coast states and sequestered in ten relocation or concentration camps.1 On the near side of this period, from 1955, arose the use of superlatives imposed upon the Japanese Americans as Superior Citizens (1962), the Model Minority (1960), and the Successful Minority (1971) -all captured in the phrase out-whiting the whites.2 This middle ten-year period, from 1945 to 1955, is often seen as a transition period from the terrible past to the triumphant present. To view these years as a transition period is from one perspective appropriate. Since scholarly attention has been focused mainly on the cataclysmic war-time occurrences and the miraculous adjustment in the 1960s and after, these quiescent ten years appear to be a transition from the one to the other. However, to dismiss this period so lightly heightens the