The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

by Frank Abe (Introduction), Floyd Cheung (Editor)

The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy.

A Penguin Classic

Bowing to popular fear after Imperial Japanese Navy planes bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress issued Executive Order 9066 and denied Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process before registering and numbering them by family to enable their mass removal and imprisonment. Government officials then subjected the captive people to a series of administrative orders, including a second registration and a segregation based upon a questionnaire, the compulsory conscription of young men from camp, and a program of voluntary renunciation. By its own latter-day admission, the government had no military need for the mass incarceration – that it was driven by a mixture of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership – rendering everything that followed just as unnecessary and wrong.
This anthology recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by these actions. Through over sixty selections of prose, poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, and letters these voices share a story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization. The anthology is anchored by the key government documents that incite the action. The span of contributors include incarcerees, the children of the camps, and third and fourth generation descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences for themselves and the nation. This collection reflects the evolution of politics around this history, unearths archival documents, newly translates texts, addresses how attitudes around incarceration have been debated and changed, and highlights resistance literature by Japanese Americans.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Poetry, Essays, Classics, United States, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2024

About the author

FRANK ABE is lead author of a graphic novel, WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press, 2021), named a Finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Washington State Book Award. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2018), in which he authored the first-ever biography of Okada and traced the origins of his novel. He is co-editor of a new anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, from Penguin Classics.

Abe wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution on the largest organized resistance in the camps, and with writer Frank Chin helped organize the first-ever “Day of Remembrance” in Seattle in 1978. He was an original member of Chin’s Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco and studied at the American Conservatory Theater.

Reviews

[Nanako Water · Rating 5 out of 5]

The incarceration of an entire community of Americans during WWII based solely on race is both unbelievable and frightening. Imagine how it would feel to have the FBI pound on your door to suddenly take away your husband? He's just an ordinary man who owns a shoe store. You and the children have no idea why and how long he's going to be imprisoned. Your bank account is suddenly frozen. The government gives you two weeks to sell the shoe store, take the children out of school, leave your home, and take only what you can carry. You and your family are forced at gun point to move to a barbed wired "camp" in the desert for God knows how long.

Your teenaged son is required to fill out a loyalty questionnaire. If he answers "no" to a question, he is thrown into another prison a thousand miles away, encouraged to give up his American citizenship and threatened to be sent to a country he's never seen. If he answers "yes", he'll be drafted.

How could this have happened in a democracy where we believe "...that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness ..."? This collection of essays, poems, stories, letters and documents help you understand what happened.These people were forced into an untenable situation.

A translated short story by Joji Nozawa describes one man's reaction to a newspaper article praising him for his polite behavior despite losing all three of his sons to the war:"These were the words that Mr. Saeki had said to the journalist the day before, but reading them now, he wanted to vomit. These people had cursed him and stomped on him, taken all that he treasured, stripped him and left him naked and still he was trying to flatter them. He could no longer stand the sight of himself. ... He looked at the picture of himself in the newspaper and saw a perfect specimen of village idiot. Like tongues of flame, a violent anger flickered, caught, and burst within him."

The character of Mr Saeki reminded me of my Nisei relative Henry Uyeda who was living in San Francisco at the time. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, he wrote a letter to the editor of the SF Chronicle which appeared on December 19, 1941 under the title Without Hyphens

 Sir: 

The American citizens of Japanese ancestry who have lived in San Francisco all their lives are grateful to the good people of the Bay Region and San Francisco for the kind, considerate treatment given them during the past week.

It is a veritable nightmare to us that such an effrontery has been attempted against the United States by Japan. We are ready to co-operate in every possible manner with our country, which is the United States of America, in all phases of emergency activities.

We are true Americans (no hyphens!) among Americans all.

Japanese American Citizens’ League of San Francisco.

HENRY UYEDA

Even after he and his family were forced out of their homes, he was one of the first to volunteer for the Military Intelligence Service out of the Manzanar camp. He survived the war but returned a broken man and died a few years later. I suspect suicide. Maybe books like this will give voice to him.

[k · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary and seminal work; I hope it is included in American curricula. It is impossible to fully capture all the threads that are tied to incarceration but this anthology is a truly remarkable collection — not only of beautiful poetry, fiction, and memoir, but of contemporary official texts. These last are poignant in themselves with no additional commentary; for example, the heartfelt letter from the mothers of Nisei soldiers to FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt (and the hastily dictated, unsigned reply of Mrs. Roosevelt). I am grateful that this book exists.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taken as a whole, these sixty-eight (mostly very short) essays, memoirs, petitions, stories and poems yield a vivid picture of a shameful and tragic American episode as experienced by Japanese Americans. Frank Abe's editing takes us through the initial roundup orders, into the daily experience of the camps, and into the controversies over whether or not to serve in the military, and in an amazing episode ("The Emergence of the Headband Group") portrays those who decide their loyalty lies with Japan. Finally the pieces cover resettlement (pretty cursorily), the fight to get the US government to acknowledge its wrongdoing, and later generation voices that wish to ensure this never happens again.

Many readers might stay away because the vicarious experience of such trauma could be depressing. That's definitely a legitimate reaction, but I was more inspired than depressed because of the valiant efforts of the incarcerated to maintain their dignity, agency and voice in the face of this egregious denial of their human rights (an aside: Beverly Gage in her J. Edgar Hoover biography said that Hoover opposed incarceration based on its violation of constitutional rights, but he helped carry it out once the decision was made).

Often an anthology like this is meant to be dipped in and out of, depending on the reader's particular interests. College professors may choose to assign excerpts from the book this way, but I believe the power of this book comes from reading it straight through; at just over 300 pages and with very short chapters that's not a particularly daunting task.

Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for providing an electronic copy for early review.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I already knew this was going to be an emotional read, especially as many were stories that had never been published in English before. I was excited and nervous to begin reading, as this is a part of US history that is often glossed over, where many people would rather remain oblivious to it. I made it to "Those Airplanes Outside Aren't Ours" and then I spent the rest of my time sniffling as I read.

Abe and Cheung did a wonderful job compiling these stories. The organization of them, right up until, "We Have Been Here Before" was executed flawlessly. I could definitely see this becoming required reading in my undergraduate program in East Asian Studies.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the arc. The above is my honest take on Abe and Cheung's work.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The silence in which he passed suggested, to me, that the price of citizenship was forgetting, and that forgetting was annihilative. from 'We Have Been Here Before', Brandon Shimonda - which is extract 66 in this book. Shimonda is talking about his grandfather.

This is a recently published collection of texts - and I'm using 'texts' because this includes official documents, anime, poetry, short stories, extracts from novels, letters, and more - that seek to illustrate and explain the experience of Japanese American Incarceration during World War Two. A moment when a post-Pearl Harbour panic the American government threw overboard all its sacred constitution for reasons that were basically racist. It didn't just happen in America. In the UK German and Italian citizens were sent to camps too.

Here’s the truth: I am now called a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. [Kiyo Sato, I Am a Prisoner in A Concentration Camp on My Own Country, 23]

It was a reminder that civil rights in wartime are conditional, which effectively makes civil rights conditional full stop. It was an injustice. It didn't matter if you were Japanese born (Issei) or US born (Nisei). You were rounded up, your property sold at knock down rates, and moved to camps scattered across the USA if you were on the West Coast.

Then the US had the gall to ask for volunteers or to draft young men for the war in Europe. I don't know if any Japanese-American soldiers fought against Japan. They were, of course, sent to segregated units led by white officers, which included the most decorated unit in the US Army: the 100th Infantry Battalion.

The book covers into three sections - Before the Camps, The Camps, and After the Camps. It talks about the debates amongst the Japanese-American community about how to respond whether to co-operate or confront. It also covers the appeal of organisations that wanted to get some of the inmates to return to Japan and be more involved in Japanese culture.

It is a fine illustration of three things. That the veneer of democracy is thinner than we would like, that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere', and that resistance and suffering go on far longer than you think. As Brandon Shimoda says, at the end of 'We Have Been Here Before' when talking about how Japanese-American incarceration influence their responses to the modern creation of concentration camps for immigrants or the anti-Muslim feeling that followed 9/11:

I am led to believe that Japanese American incarceration, as one example, one blueprint, in an unremitting and interminable system, has not ended. It has entered a new phase.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to score this higher, but I didn't enjoy it (which is what the stars are for: enjoyment, not quality) and I'm mad about it. This could have been so much more useful, enlightening, and readable with better editing choices.

Specifically, the preface specifies that the selections are a mix of fiction and various types of nonfiction. However, the pieces aren't marked as such individually. They are indicated as F/NF/poetry/etc. in the introduction to each section ("part") but these intros list all the works in order, with little to keep them separate. The reader must refer back to the correct paragraph in the intro before each work. The Parts intros could also have been used more effectively to help connect the reader to the works and to the background; they are unfortunately dry and difficult to attach to the rest of the content.

Author bios should accompany each selection. They are instead all at the back, in alphabetical order, whereas the selections are in chronological order.

This could have been excellent. It's still a suggestion for public and academic libraries based on content, but the editing missteps limit readership.

Program topics: pair with They Called Us Enemy or We Are Not Strangers: A Graphic Novel; local (if available, or general, if needed) news source, as instruction or as asynchronous activity; display or socials series highlighting contemporary reports from local news sources

Discussion prompts: "Is citizenship such a light and transient thing that that which is our inalienable right in normal times can be torn from us" (p 49), as well as previous selections, remind readers that Japanese-Americans were refused due process before and while incarcerated. Those who forget history...

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

“They never asked / suspicious or not– / just put us away.”

“We had lost our homes, our savings, our properties. We had been stripped bare, separated from our families and without knowing where our friends were. With the chaos that the war had brought, we were thrown into such confusion and anxiety that we didn’t have any idea of what we were doing anymore. With the tags dangling from our collars, like lost children, arms holding as much hurriedly packed luggage as possible, feeling the eerie glimmer of the bayonet, held by soldiers, who were supposedly protecting us, we were crammed into buses and trains in the rain, and sent to far, unknown places, which turned out to be in the middle of the desert, where we had nothing of ourselves to hold onto.”

Continually surprised by this collection, in the best way, the best-worst way of learning so much I thought I already knew & it’s all terribly true, this collection of voices creating a narrative that, sadly, shamefully, is not an event-of-the-past safely contained in pages of books & documents. Newer versions of its cruelty keep happening & are happening right now to one group of people, then another, then... (“Do We Really Need To Relearn The Lessons Of Japanese American Internment?” asks one chapter title. What did we learn the first time?)

Sadness, rage & grief are here, of course. But it’s not a miserable read. All the writing – memoir, prose, poetry, legal documents – creates a chronicle both vast & intimate. A collective history is told, but each writer’s reckoning with their own ravaged realities is distinctive. Whether in the cold reality of the moment, or the salvaging, seeking, remembering/forgetting years later, each person’s words, no matter how brief, is a truth in a shared story. Though the editors said poignancy was not the aim here, pointed matter-of-factness is, it’s often very moving. Some of the writing is excellent, wonderfully written. Some of it is just solid, the strength of raw, honest feeling. All of it is good & important.
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[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting and elegant, full of grief and rage.

Small glimpses into the life in and around the concentration camps we built when America forced more than a 100,000 people to leave almost everything behind and live in concentration camps based on their race.

Each piece is short and each one packs a punch. The book carries the reader from Japanese folks coming to American through Pearl Harbor, registration, incarceration, internment, the draft, resistance, resettlement, the court cases and legal action that acknowledged the wrong, Michelle Malkin's horrible revisionist history, to the repeat of history we are teetering on the edge of.

The last lines of the book make me ache.

To be an American is a privilege I appreciate . . . and if there's one thing I've learned, its that American needs to unburden itself too.

The government was wrong to single us out for exclusion based solely on our race. It was wrong then, and it would be wrong now.

And whenever we see America turn against a people because of their race, or their religion, or their whatever, we won't just stand by. We won't just go along.

I will speak up.

I will see that every person gets a fair hearing.

Stop repeating history.

Never again is now.

I will be the friend we didn't have when we needed one the most.

It happened to us. We refuse to let it happen again. (287)

A timely and heartbreaking book.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an anthology of Japanese writing, poetry, and graphic pictures by people who were incarcerated in the US during WWII. It did not matter if they were American or not. If they lived on the west coast they were sent to a 'relocation' camp.

The writing are broken down into three sections: Before Camp, The Camps, After Camps. The begin of each section there is a narrative of what is written in that section. The last section is the one I found most interesting (and the reason for 5 stars) is that it warns of history repeating itself, both in the narrative and the personnel writing.

In The Joplin Globe Geoff Caldwell wrote an article: How long will history have to repeat before we learn?, (Jun 21, 2020) stating:
"The writer-philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet here we are, repeating that of just 52 years ago. Let us pray that come 2072, Americans then have at last heeded Santayana's warning and Dr. King’s dream is no longer words in a speech but reality being lived."
Let me amend that to 'Those erasing/changing the past are condemned to repeat it.'

[Diane S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Members of my family were interned in Canada, so I've read literature on this topic before, but I appreciated being able to read an updated collection of literature sharing the American point of view. Each section, from before the war, to during, to after, is prefaced with an introduction that weaves together all of the various pieces of writing in the book from that particular time. Certainly my own family never really shared the true difficulties of the time and it's through literature like this that I'm able to piece together more what life was really like. The different pieces of writing in this collection helped immensely with this: from first person recollections, to stories, poems, government documents, etc, it really gives a wide perspective of the time. Thank you to the editors for putting this collection together. An important read for anyone to understand this history.

[Jerry Edward Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

The original stain on American democracy is the enslavement of Africans beginning in 1619. This period of enslavement for most lasted until 1865. It was followed by a second cruel period of assault generally referred to as "the Jim Crow era" lasting well into the 1970s. Many of us believe that the effects of the more than 300 years of such degradation remains around affecting our nation still. Less well appreciated is the period of concentration camp treatment applied to people of Japanese ancestry and heritage in the early 1940s. The majority of the people were, in fact, full American citizens. Yet fear following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack led the Roosevelt administration to remove these people from their West coast homes to concentration camps in other parts of America. It was only some fifty years later that America finally apologized for this cruel public action. Frank Abe has compiled an impressive collection of letters, articles, and other writing focusing on three separate periods of time: that before the camps, that during the camps, and that after the camps. The author terms this literature "the collective voice" of the more than 125,000 people incarcerated. History shows that there were no acts of terrorism perpetrated on America by those of Japanese heritage during the Second World War. This small book should stand as a reminder how easy it is for our vaunted democracy to fail its people in such dramatic and cruel ways.

[Michelle McQuien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was promoted to read this after reading the historical fiction book “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,” which caused me to wonder more about that vague piece of American history I remember reading a paragraph about in my childhood history book.

Eye opening, sad, horrific (not graphic) accounts of what Japanese Americans were robbed of during WWII - namely, their constitutional rights and civil liberties.

While perhaps not the most riveting read, I finished the whole thing, compelled to by the reality of the stories that I was reading.

[Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a good collection, it seems particularly well suited for teaching about the era - I found myself stopping a few times and wishing I had someone to discuss the contents with in person.

In general, the works are rather short (which works well for covering the whole time period), although it did mean it took longer to read than I expected because I needed to stop and think a bit after reading them.

The editors also do a very nice job with providing context before each section/era of internment and suggesting further reading.

[K.C. Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this is horrifyingly relevant to 2025.

I’ve read about Order 9066 before, but with the exception of George Takei’s graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy,” most of what I’ve read has been more academic. This is a collection of poetry, essays, letters, and legal documents regarding various aspects of Order 9066 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s.

Never Again is Now. It would be cool if America stopped wallowing in the same cycles of racial bigotry and learned a single thing from our collective history.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this title, due to be released in May 2024.
And for publishing this important collection.
Over 300 pp of outstanding, and necessary, original source material regarding this blemish on American history.
Required reading as a textbook, but worth a read outside of a class as well.

[Nexusjio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic and poignant collection of short stories, essays and poetry of the Japanese American experience prior and during their unlawful incarceration in WWII.

[Cymiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of short pieces from Japanese who were interned during WWII.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief, intense, and informative look at the incarceration and its aftermath. Readings include short stories, memoir, poetry, letters, cartoons, and official government edicts. Recommended.

[Charlie Charm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really beautiful texts from a tough time in history

[Ian Martyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed watching Frank Abe's talks over the past few years, and I preordered this collection right when it became available. The importance of the work that he and Floyd Cheung put into the editing and publishing of these writings cannot be overstated.

In terms of the collection as a whole, there is a certain flow here that they have succeeded at here that is difficult to pull off. The progression of writings just makes sense, and I felt as though I was being pulled into the next work from the previous even though they were written by multiple different authors across the 20th and 21st centuries.

While I, as a descendant of the camps, know that it is very important to keep the conversation about this atrocity alive in the present day, the authors here remove any doubt that this is a conversation worth having. Abe and Cheung have done the important work of preserving these writings for future generations so that we may keep the memory of the camps alive, especially for future generations of Japanese Americans.

[Louiza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful collection of fictional stories, nonfiction narratives, and historical documents that explore the experiences of Japanese Americans in the US during their forced relocation to internment camps from 1942 to 1945, ordered by President Roosevelt. A must-read!

[Buddy Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent 8/10