Framing the Margins of Japanese American Life and Politics

Doing the history of an ethnic or racial minority group involves the difficult task of using a "lens" that makes the historical experiences of a given racial and ethnic minority relevant to readers. Like many before him, Greg Robinson uses civil rights and racism as his way of understanding and communicating the historical experiences of Japanese Americans to an audience beyond that ethnic community. With civil rights, Robinson is able to link their historical experiences into the larger "story" of the American struggle for civil rights, and with racism, to connect their struggle with other minorities to illustrate the depth of the oppression Japanese Americans faced. All of these are admirable goals, but framing the post-World War II experience of Japanese Americans solely along these lines also creates problems, as his recent book After Camp makes clear.

Robinson examines the three decades after Japanese Americans were released from the internment camps and asks "What happened afterwards?" He believes "the mid-century Japanese American experience" to be "a central but unexplored area of American history" that set the course for "mainland Japanese American life." To map out this terrain, Robinson undertook "a series of case studies, in the form of essays," believing they would illuminate "various developments relating to Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their wartime confinement, including resettlement nationwide, the mental and physical readjustment of the former inmates, and their political engagement, most notably in concert with other racialized and ethnic minority groups" (p. 1). His aim, therefore, is not to write a definitive or comprehensive study, but rather to present "a new departure" and something with which to stimulate further study and discussion of the post-World War II Japanese American experience. He writes: "It is my fervent hope that the volume will help move scholars in history, political science, law, ethnic studies, and other fields to engage the primary material available on postwar Japanese Americans and fill the sizable gaps that exist in the literature" (p. 2).

In the first part, Robinson sketches the wider context for the postwar Japanese American resettlement. He finds in "Political Science?" that their resettlement was linked to the Roosevelt Administration's plans to relocate Japanese Americans with the anticipated hundreds of thousands of postwar European refugees. Through an analysis of Project M (M for Migration), Robinson uncovers "eugenicist" thinking and a "political science" that believed mass dispersion was the means to peace, stability, and economic growth and was the common link between the planned resettlement of Japanese Americans and European Jews. This social science approach, Robinson reveals, was present in the thinking of Ales Hrdlicka, Isaiah Bowman, and others. He further shows evidence of support for Roosevelt's approach in "semi-official circles" as expressed by sociologist Forrest LaViolette, champion of the rights of Japanese Americans against their wholesale removal and internment. However, LaViolette's belief that assimilation would result in equality and protection of civil rights caused him to support the Roosevelt Administration's mass dispersal program even though FDR evidently did not have the same idealistic motivation. Robinson then shifts his focus, in "Japantown Born and Reborn," to Japanese American settlers to examine how well the mass dispersion and integration approach actually worked. He finds that the mass dispersal program was not successful for those Japanese Americans who settled in Los Angeles, where they faced greater difficulty in securing housing and employment than those who moved east to Detroit or New York City. But Japanese Americans who settled in Detroit faced difficulties of their own, finding themselves caught between growing racial tensions among Euro Americans and African Americans in the Motor City. In contrast, those who went to New York City, Robinson observes, found a city government equipped with social welfare agencies to assist their settlement and a welcoming atmosphere created by the "cosmopolitan spirit" among its "intellectual-minded and artistic group of Nisei," and this allowed Japanese Americans to achieve "a more rapid and...