Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember Their World War II Incarceration (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)

Rating:
Summary: The Past is not Just the Past
Review: I grew up in Seattle hearing bits and pieces of the stories of the Japanese Americans who had been rounded up from their homes nearby in the months after Pearl Harbor and sent to inhospitable concentration camps in the interior West, and am always curious for more information. This book, written by a professor of psychology and ethnic studies and a professor of sociology, is, predictably, a scholarly study. This is the first scientific, representative study of the American-born generation who lived through the experience. Time was running out, given the advancing age of the Nisei. So a random study was done in 1997 of 183 current residents of King County, Washington (Seattle) who had been what they call "incarcerated" in the camps. I found this a powerful term to express the injustice of what was done to the Japanese Americans without having to go through diatribes. It got the point across. They chose this location partly because research was already going on, and partly because of the high concentration of Japanese Americans there.

The book follows a chronological order, first describing what prewar life was like, for various age groups, then the act of incarceration, what life was like in the camps, resettlement after the war, and present day life. Two formats are used, first, quotations from the open ended responses people made. These tend to be all too brief; I wanted more. The other is charts and statistics. I've taken statistics classes so am not intimidated by this, but it might feel like a bit much to someone who just wants to know what life was like. But the narrative tells you, and you can let your eyes pass right over the numbers and pay attention to the words.

Among the interesting findings I'll just pick some. Even before the war, a generation gap was looming. The Issei, the immigrant generation, were terribly discriminated against, and thus clustered in "Japantowns." They lived either by farming or in businesses that catered to their own community. Thus, they tended not to learn English. Their children, the Nisei, learned English and American ways in school. They became their parents' interface to the American world. This is probably a universal immigrant experience. But it became even more problematic in the camps, where the structure of life was controlled by the US Army and the parents had little or no control over their children, and the family structure so important to the Japanese started to collapse.

Sixty years later, those who had been the youngest when they entered the camps had the least-negative memories, while those who had been young adults had the worst memories. Young adult women's memories were worse than men's. The book didn't talk about this, but I wondered if it wasn't related to the difficulty of raising young children with minimal resources.

Women who were not married when they entered the camps married two years later, on average, than their age-mates in the population at large--at a time when women were marrying earlier than they had during the depression years. And they had fewer children, spaced farther apart, again at a time when the general birth rate rose.

The Japanese American Issei generation had a low level of education, due to lack of opportunity, and they had high expectations for their children. Their children had high expectations for themselves. Almost half the young men and a quarter of the young women expected to go to college. And they actually exceeded those expectations, though many waited years to fulfill them. The same was true of occupational status. Issei fathers were very limited in the occupations available to them, but their children were ambitious. And as a group, they exceeded their ambitions.

One of the most interesting chapters was on resettlement. It clearly surprised the authors that the incarcerees had so much difficulty reestablishing themselves after the war. Part of this was caused by the government's policy of encouraging them to "spread themselves thin" across the country to be less conspicuous and "more American." Their strong community and church ties were thus destroyed and took years to rebuild in new ways. Before 1945, they were still not allowed to return to the Pacific coast, and some of these people who ended up in the Seattle area moved as many as eight or nine times before landing there. Discrimination made finding jobs very difficult, and many had lost all economic assets.

If you are interested in knowing more on what happened to the Japanese Americans during and after World War II, I would highly recommend this book. If you need to ignore the statistics, do so, but get the gist of the overview of the story. Then look in the long bibliography, or do a Google search, and find one of the many good autobiographies written by someone who lived through it, for an up close and personal view of what it was like. You'll benefit from both vantage points.