Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (review)

The incarceration of approximately one hundred twenty thousand Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II presents an uncomfortable challenge to American collective memory of the "Good War." Yet, despite a growing body of literature about this subject, for many Americans it remains a half-buried history. In Concentration Camps on the Home Front, John Howard, head of the American Studies Department at King's College, London, argues that incarceration has been presented from a "persistently skewed perspective" (3) in public forums and historical scholarship alike. Howard's work, the first book-length examination of the Jerome and Rohwer camps in Arkansas, provides a corrective to scholarship that overemphasizes Western concentration camps, the efforts of prominent Japanese American men, and the "Americanness" of Nisei (second-generation) citizens. Howard challenges portrayals of incarceration that perpetuate "the falsehood of inevitable historical progress—one injustice after another, patiently, ploddingly, overcome" (22). Instead, these camps in the Jim Crow South illustrate Americans' seemingly "infinite capacity to create difference" and perpetuate inequality and injustice at home and abroad (22). Ultimately, Howard provides a rebuke to champions of American exceptionalism by underscoring the limitations of cherished American values and American historical consciousness.

The history of incarceration cannot be understood apart from American racism and imperialism "at minimum . . . in pre- and post-statehood Hawaii and pre- and post-occupation Japan" (14). Howard therefore begins his narrative far away from Arkansas, with the childhood of Violet Matsuda (later de Cristoforo). Relying on oral history interviews as well as Matsuda's poetry and other writings, Howard traces the early years of her life. Born in Hawaii, Matsuda was the daughter of Japanese immigrants who lived and worked on the Hakalau Plantation. Her parents returned to Japan in the wake of the 1924 Immigration Act, and a wealthy white family offered to raise young Violet in California. Matsuda's childhood exemplifies the ways in which American racism and expansionism shaped the lives of Japanese Americans well before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Similarly, her later imprisonment in Jerome and Tule Lake and ultimate forced expatriation from the U.S. suggest the impact of these forces long after the war's conclusion as well. Matsuda's narrative is one of many examples Howard utilizes to demonstrate the "multiple affiliations" (21) of Nisei citizens. Expanding the incarceration narrative temporally and geographically illuminates these complexities.

The experiences of Jerome and Rohwer inmates further reveal a plurality of loyalties, place attachments, and reactions to incarceration. Howard examines this diversity of responses through a broad range of topics, including Japanese Americans' reactions to the South's biracial color line, camp inmates' challenges to traditional gender and sexual norms, and the government's "Americanization and Christianization" (150) efforts. These experiences suggest that incarceration is more than just "an American story," and Japanese Americans, including those who resisted or challenged the U.S. government, embody more than "American heroism" (13). Such oversimplifications preclude the examination of experiences that do not fit a patriotic narrative. Howard focuses instead on "the failed, the exploited, the abject . . . those whose deprivation enables the abundance" (265). He offers a moving account of resistance, from the labor activism of Jerome workers to the underreported suicides of detainees. Here the commemorative impulse behind Howard's narrative is most apparent: "After colossal efforts . . . to erase the suicides from collective memory, these deaths should be lamented but also honored, as the ultimate assertion of the right to self-determination" (197).

Howard utilizes a variety of sources, including camp records, memoirs, photographs, comic strips, and haiku, to tell the history of these camps and their inhabitants. Although issues of memory and commemoration are woven throughout the book, oral histories represent only a fragment of the rich documentary record that he draws from. Howard does not describe or elaborate on his use of oral history interviews. In a footnote about his interview with Violet de Cristoforo (formerly...