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1 Introduction Staging the Trauma of Japanese American Internment VICTOR: When I was in ’Nam? You know when I was hit by some Viet Cong mortar fire? They wouldn’t pick me up, the medics. I was lying there, bleeding all over, they were picking everyone else up. I kept screaming, “I’m an American, I’m a Japanese American, I’m not VC.” But they wouldn’t pick me up. They walked right past me. —Philip Kan Gotanda, Fish Head Soup and Other Plays1 The traumatic reexperiencing of the event thus carries with it what Dori Laub calls the “collapse of witnessing,” the impossibility of knowing that first constituted it. —Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory2 After the closure of the World War II internment camps and the “relocation” of former internees to new postwar homes, many observed the remarkable silence and stoic rebounding with which most first- and second-generation Japanese Americans (Issei and Nisei) closed that chapter of their lives. It was this silence and stoicism that contributed in large part to their designation, along with other Asian Americans, as the “model minority.”3 Conservative critics claimed this apparent lack of bitterness as proof that the internment camps were not unjust after all, that even their former inmates tacitly approved the “military necessity” that stripped them of civil liberties and segregated them from their fellow Americans after the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor. Liberal scholars have mostly chalked up this stoic silence to a diasporic retention of the Japanese cultural logic of shikata ga nai, or “it can’t be helped”—a fatalistic philosophy that negates the efficacy of resistance or other political action. Although silence has been used to justify and minimize the impact of the internment, outside this context the concept of silence circulates widely as a telltale symptom of trauma. Shoshana Felman resurrects Walter Benjamin’s 2 Introduction term “expressionless” (das Ausdruckslose) in order to describe “the silence of the persecuted, the unspeakability of the trauma of oppression” experienced by “those whom violence has deprived of expression; those who, on the one hand, have been historically reduced to silence, and who, on the other hand, have been historically made faceless, deprived of their human face.”4 This seems an apt judgment of how historical events left Japanese Americans silent and then the historiography of these events rendered this silence expressionless and inhuman, as epitomized in the stereotype of the automaton-like “model minority.” Americans have allowed the symptoms of wartime injustice to stand as apology for the injuries themselves. So what if—instead—we reinterpret former internees’ silence not as a culturally conditioned response to adversity but rather as the structural outgrowth of the particular trauma of this particular internment? I emphasize the structure of the internees’ silence because the recent wave of trauma scholarship makes clear that traumatized responses cannot be wholly explained by the catalyzing event or by “a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it.” Rather than some inherent atrociousness adhering to the event or some inherent psychosocial predisposition causing an individual or group to react in a certain way, trauma should be understood in structural terms. The pathology of trauma, Cathy Caruth insists, consists “solely in the structure of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”5 I emphasize the particularity of the Japanese American internment because those who have written on the trauma of this experience have, by and large, bypassed these structural aspects, instead comparing the internment event with other more widely recognized atrocities such as the Nazi genocide of Jews and other minorities, the experiences of U.S. soldiers during and after the Vietnam War, and generalized sexual abuse against women. By accessing Japanese American trauma through these other atrocities—none of which directly implicates the racist domestic policies of the U.S. government as the internment does—these “American concentration camps” inevitably find themselves subordinated once again in hierarchies of suffering that always privilege the point of comparison .6 Such strategies of comparative analysis end up posing the internment as a debased mimicry of unquestioned traumatic events. No genocide occurred against the Japanese American “evacuees” imprisoned in the “assembly centers” and “relocation centers,” euphemistically named and controlled by the U.S...

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