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Foreword
- University of Washington Press
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FOREWORD I FIRST "MET" Iwao Matsushita some fifteen years ago when I read his papers-mostly letters and documents from the World War II erain the University of Washington archives. Impressed by their richness and the humanity they displayed I used excerpts from them in my book Asian America and intended to publish a small edition of his letters at some time in the future. Some years later, Karyl Winn, the uw curator of manuscripts, wrote me that a younger scholar, Louis Fiset, was interested in doing something with the letters. He and I corresponded, met, and became friends. At some point in this process I decided to waive my own interest in the Matsushita letters in favor of Fiset. My project had never gotten offthe ground, and Fiset was on the spot and ready to go ahead. It is now clear that this was a wise decision. Fiset devoted years to this book and has gone far beyond anything that I would have done. He has skillfully given us a rare glimpse of two Japanese American immigrant lives. Iwao and Hanaye Matsushita were Japanese nationals and, like all Asians in 1941-42, ineligible for naturalization. Unlike most Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in camps under the authority of Executive Order 9066, Iwao was subjected to internment by the Immigration and Naturalization Service as an enemy alien. There had xi been more than 90,000Japanese nationals in the continental United States and Hawaii in 1940, and perhaps 8,000 ofthem-fewer than 10 percent- were interned during the war. Iwao was snatched up shordy after Pearl Harbor and sent to an INs-run facility at Fort Missoula, Montana, while Hanaye remained in Seatde for months, alone, and then was transported first to the fairgrounds at Puyallup, Washington, and then to the camp at Minidoka, Idaho. Their understated letters show us the pain of the separation inflicted on them. It is because of this wrenching experience-the separate government confinement of a couple who had never been parted since their 1919 marriage-that we have this wartime correspondence. Imprisoned Apart is both a moving human interest story and a significant addition to our knowledge ofsome ofthe circumstances ofwartime internment. The INS camps have been litde written about and are thus largely unknown. Few of the other Japanese internees were as acculturated as Iwao Matsushita, and his physical environment at Fort Missoula was superior to that of most other internees. Iwao and Hanaye, both Christians and of middleclass economic status, were far from typical oftheir generation ofJapanese immigrants. Fiset has blazed a trail which, one hopes, others will soon follow by giving us accounts of other prisoners and other camps. The litde-known internment story is a small but significant aspect ofthe wartime ordeal of more than 125,000Japanese Americans, citizen and alien. Fiset has shown us new aspects of that ordeal. Unlike the incarceration of most Japanese Americans-two-thirds of them native-born United States citizens-the internment, after all, did conform to the usages ofnations. American internment practices generally observed the forms of law, and the record of the United States was significandy better than those of its sister democracies, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. But, while there were undoubtedly some enemy aliens who should have been interned, Iwao Matsushita and the majority of the other internees were in no way a threat to the public safety. They were detained in part to satisfy public opinion, for the public had been frightened by fears ofan imaginary "fifth column." Both the internment of a small percentage ofJapanese Americans and the incarceration ofalmost xii all the rest ofthose living in the continental United States were the result of what a recent Presidential Commissionjudged to be "a failure ofpolitical leadership." Only when we keep in mind the attitudes engendered by a [3.146.34.191] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 02:18 GMT) devastating war for survival, and understand that the officials concerned with national security in times ofcrisis tend to become what one scholar investigating internment in Great Britain has called "professional witchfinders ," can we even begin to imagine either why so many were interned or why so many federal officials and the public-spirited citizens who assisted them expended time and scarce resources keeping such persons under guard. The World War II internment policies constitute a relatively dark page in the history ofcivil liberty in America. Not the least virtue ofImprisoned Apart is that Fiset shows us, at the human...