[May 3rd marks the 80th anniversary of the infamous broadside through which the Roosevelt administration ordered Japanese Americans to surrender themselves to the internment policy (or incarceration—I’m convinced of the need for that term change, but most folks still know it as internment so I’m using that in my series title). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy images of that horrific history, leading up to a special weekend post on scholars helping us remember it.]
On two cultural
works that together help us remember a particularly complex side of the story.
As with any collective
histories, those of Japanese internment and incarceration are multi-layered,
featuring distinct experiences and issues that can at times seem contradictory but
that ultimately reflect how the stories played out for the hundreds of
thousands of individuals, families, and communities affected by them. Some of
the most complex such experiences were those around the question of “loyalty,” and
specifically the “loyalty questionnaire”
that the War
Relocation Authority (WRA) administered in 1943 to all Japanese American
adults held in the camps. The questions therein were confusing, poorly worded,
ambiguous, and frankly insulting, all of which led to a variety of answers that
tell us far more about the questionnaire, the WRA, and white supremacist
attitudes towards Japanese Americans than about that community. But they
nonetheless created a hierarchy within the community and camps, one based at
least in part on differing notions of whether and how Japanese Americans were “loyal”
to the United States.
On this
blog, in We
the People, and elsewhere
I’ve tended to focus on a community who more than demonstrated their loyalty,
and really revealed these prejudices for the un-American garbage they are: the Japanese
American soldiers who served in the U.S. armed forces during WWII. But those
who were deemed “disloyal” (whether due to their answers or non-answers to the
questionnaire or for other equally discriminatory reasons) experienced
something far different: the Tule
Lake Segregation Center, the most aggressively prison-like of the
internment camps. That was the case, for example, with George Takei’s parents,
and so Takei and
his family ended up at Tule Lake, an experience on which much of the musical
Allegiance (2012) was directly based.
As I wrote in that hyperlinked post, I find the somewhat stereotypically
musical-theater-like songs and tone of Allegiance
a complicated fit for the musical’s themes and contexts, but it certainly
offers audiences a glimpse into this particular and under-remembered layer of
internment settings and experiences (as, in its own way, does Takei’s
co-authored and -illustrated graphic novel memoir They
Called Us Enemy [2019]).
Bringing
audiences into such complex histories through accessible pop culture texts is a
good goal, but at some point it’s also important for us to engage more fully
with the most fraught and painful layers to those histories. I don’t know of
any cultural work that does so for these histories more powerfully than John
Okada’s dense, demanding, and stunning 1957
novel No-No Boy (for a lot more
on that book and all these questions, check out my friend Matthew
Teutsch’s post on it in conversation with Takei’s memoir). The “No-No” in
Okada’s title refers to those who answered “no” to the questionnaire’s two most
fraught and significant questions: whether one was willing to serve in the armed
forces; and whether one would swear unqualified allegiance to the U.S. and “forswear
any form of allegiance or obedience” to Japan. The novel is in no way
autobiographical, as
Okada himself served in the U.S. military during the war; which makes his
careful, thoughtful, powerful examination of his no-no boy protagonist Ichiro
Yamada that much more impressive and important. There’s far more to these
histories and stories than this brief post can include, so I’ll just say that
while all of these works are worth our time and attention, I believe No-No Boy in particular is on the short
list of books that every American should read.
Last internment
image tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Stories or histories you’d highlight?
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