The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in time: 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.