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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 102-110



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From Civil Rights to Human Rights:

Reinterpreting the Japanese American Internment in an International Context

Brian Masaru Hayashi. Democratizing The Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xviii + 319 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Brian Hayashi's Democratizing The Enemy is a truly important contribution to scholarship on the Japanese Americans internment. The monograph not only challenges accepted interpretations, but it expands the bounds of our historical knowledge beyond established paradigms and formulations in the internment studies. Consulting a wide range of government documents, personal papers, and other archival materials—many never consulted before—Hayashi's research is thorough and extensive, culminating in a work that dwarfs other studies in the field.

The book delves into multifaceted aspects of politics in and around the wartime internment camps. First, the author attempts to unveil the mechanisms of managing and reforming the "enemy race" into democratized minority Americans with a focus on "the governors"—Washington officials, military brass, camp administrators, and hired social scientists. Political entanglements between white governors and governed Japanese form another problematic in the book. Hayashi further probes the complexity of intra-ethnic relations by looking at conflicts and struggles among various factions of Japanese Americans in the camps. In contrast to most existing studies, Democratizing The Enemy gives life to historical agents on both sides of the internment, elucidating disparate agendas and convoluted intensions behind their policies and adaptive strategies, and their actions and reactions. This individual-based approach takes readers beyond the polarized, essentialist categories of "loyal" versus "disloyal," "American" versus "Japanese," and "good" versus "evil"—the categories that have shaped our understanding in a rather simplistic way for the past several decades.

Hayashi organizes his narrative chronologically. Concentrating on their prewar experiences and politico-cultural baggage, the first two chapters provide in-depth analyses of key personalities and groups, who were involved [End Page 102] in removal and internment as the governors and the governed. The author suggests continuities between the prewar and war years in terms of how the whites and Japanese thought and acted. The first chapter examines a thread of paternalistic liberalism, which bound many Navy and Justice Department officials, camp administrators, and social scientists in terms of their attitudes toward the "Japanese problem." Separating "race" from national "loyalty," these liberals defined "culture" as determining one's allegiance to the country, a position that compelled them to treat acculturated citizens of Japanese descent (Nisei) and Americanized immigrants (Issei) as no less patriotic than others. On the contrary, reluctant to distinguish citizens from aliens and the Americanized from the unassimilated,top leaders of the War Department and army commanders "presumed loyalty was a logical outgrowth of [race]" (p. 34). They "suspected all Japanese Americans" to be potential spies and saboteurs when deciding whom to intern for the defense of the West Coast (p. 34). These differing ideological backgrounds among the governors, as Hayashi meticulously traces, preconditioned their mindsets and behaviors. While racialists implemented mass removal of 120,000 Japanese—citizens and aliens alike—from the West Coast in the name of "military necessity," culturalists willingly inherited the task of democratizing them as a part of the larger liberal assimilation project.

Divorcing culture from race, chapters one and two present powerful revisionism to existing scholarship that has not only valorized race but also dwelt on discontinuities between the standard paths of American experience and the wartime episode—its anomalism—in line with American exceptionalism. Ever since legal scholar Eugene Rostow defined the internment as "our worst wartime mistake" in 1945, scholars have been obsessed with a single question, "Why could such a gross violation of civil rights happen in modern America?" The search for a plausible explanation characterizes a central orientation of academic analyses, which have striven to pinpoint major culprits—individuals and the ideas that they represented—who allegedly tarnished the United States Constitution. While a small minority dismiss the charges of racism and government wrongdoings, citing...

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