Executive Disorder

In November 2002, Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who 60 years earlier had been sent with her family to the Japanese American concentration camp at Manzanar, near Lone Pine, California, gave an interview to the Densho Digital Repository. The entire conversation is illuminating, not least because of how it illustrates the effects of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” but I remain struck by a more prosaic recollection, involving Embrey’s mother’s response to being interned. “When my mother got into the room,” Embrey remembered of their first moment in the barracks that would house them, “she sat down on one of the mattresses and she said, ‘My, what a place,’ and she never talked about that for many, many years afterwards.”

Silence as a survival strategy, a method of building a boundary, of bearing what might not otherwise be borne.

Embrey’s interview does not appear in Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung’s The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, although I wish it did; it’s the sort of archival material on which much of the anthology relies. This is both a literary collection and a historical one, interweaving poems and stories, as well as manga and even a scene from a radio play, with official documents including the 28-question loyalty questionnaire distributed to incarcerees in 1943 and the infamous Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, which granted forced deportations of Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast to Manzanar and nine other such facilities.

“In place of familiar selections readily found elsewhere,” Abe and Cheung tell us, “this volume recovers pieces that have been long overlooked on the shelf, buried in the archives, or languished unread in the Japanese language.” A reclamation project, in other words, meant to redress “the loss of language and culture due to regulation, suppression, and the ongoing stigma of acknowledging any affinity to Japan.” Such a focus is, I think, the right one, although I do regret certain omissions: not only Embrey’s interview, but also Miné Okubo’s 1946 graphic memoir, Citizen 13660; the work of Hisaye Yamamoto, especially her story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” which takes place at the camp in Poston, Arizona; and Karen Tei Yamashita’s extraordinary memoir about her family’s wartime experiences, Letters to Memory.

At the same time, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration operates as a complement to such efforts, offering a panoramic overview. Beginning just prior to the war—Toshio Mori’s “Lil’ Yokohama” recalls an afternoon at the ballpark, watching two California Japanese baseball teams—it seeks to establish a sense of context, which quickly shifts after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, depicted in Shelley Ayame Nishimura Ota’s “Those Airplanes Outside Aren’t Ours.” There, a resident of Honolulu named Taro watches as squadrons of airplanes, each bearing “the emblem of the Rising Sun,” begin to fill the sky. “We’re at war!” he yells to his wife. “Those airplanes outside aren’t ours. They’re from Japan.”

Ota’s story illustrates, among other issues, the conundrum of identity or, more accurately, how it can be misconstrued. Taro may be Issei, Japanese by birth, but he is responding to the attack as an American. That this was so difficult for so many to understand highlights the depth of our national hysteria. Then, as now, non-white Americans were regarded as other, which is to say a threat. “They never asked / suspicious or not— / just put us away,” reads a senryu by the Portland, Oregon, poet Sen Taro. Kiyo Sato, a young woman imprisoned at Poston who would later become a captain in the U.S. Air Force, puts it more bluntly: “I am now called a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life’s belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook and pencil.

“Why?”

That why is a question that lingers throughout The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, which traces not just the prewar and camp experience, but also the aftermath. “Home at last / At the dinner table / My husband calls my name, / But lapses into silence. / His heart, too, is full,” remembers Shizue Iwatsuki in her poem “Returning Home,” capturing precisely the dislocation of reconciliation when the very notion of place or self or home has been destroyed. Even the question of redress becomes unaddressable; what, after four years of gratuitous imprisonment, can such a concept mean? “No museum // no monument // no poem / no song / can house / the spirit / of a passed soul,” insists traci kato-kiriyama. What she’s saying is that no reparation can ever be enough. It’s a perspective echoed by Brandon Shimoda, whose grandfather was at Fort Missoula; in “We Have Been Here Before,” he scoffs at the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered the paltry sum of $20,000 per person to more than 82,000 “Japanese American citizens and legal residents…as recompense for what they had lost.”

“Or,” Shimoda continues, “because ‘loss’ is, in this case, a euphemism for ‘theft,’ they received restitution for a fraction of what had been stolen. My grandmother (Nisei, or second generation, who lived, during the war, in Utah, and therefore avoided incarceration) used my grandfather’s reparations to pay for one year’s rent at the nursing home where he spent the last years of his life. The check came with a boilerplate apology from President George H.W. Bush: ‘You and your family have our best wishes for the future,’ it said. Five years later, my grandfather was dead.”

If there is a more fitting epitaph for this disgraceful epoch in our history, I haven’t encountered it.

And yet, Shimoda understands, epitaph is not the proper word. These concentration camps were hardly anomalies. Rather, they were way stations between past and present, between the American Indian residential schools created in the 19th century and the detention centers that now occupy the southern border. Shimoda’s essay opens at Oklahoma’s Fort Sill, where in 2019, a group of Japanese Americans (including some who had been held there in 1941 and 1942) protested plans “to use the base to incarcerate approximately 1,600 asylum-seeking migrant children from Central America.” Fort Sill was also the site of a residential school, and between 1894 and 1914, “approximately 340 Chiricahua Apaches were incarcerated [there] as prisoners of war.” The sad and awful truth, Shimoda concludes, is that “concentration camps are basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it sees as unassimilable, incongruous with—and threatening to—its self-image.”

Here, we see why The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration is so essential, because it serves as a flashpoint of resistance, and of righteous rage. It does that by recentering the story of the camps through the lens of stories—testament and testimony, all these voices adding up to a narrative collage. “I bid farewell / To the faces of my sleeping children,” Otokichi Ozaki writes in a tanka recalling his own experience at Fort Sill. “As I am taken prisoner / Into the cold night rain.” Reading those lines, I can’t help but think of Sue Embrey’s mother, of the silence into which she retreated. I can’t help but think that Ozaki is writing not only for himself, but also for her. It is only in the telling, after all, that there is any hope of understanding. It is only in the telling that we confront our collective shame.•