Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember their World War II Incarceration (review)

In the early pages of Altered Lives, Enduring Community, Fugita and Fernandez note that the vast majority of Issei (members of the immigrant generation of Japanese Americans who were, in the authors' words "forcibly removed from their Pacific Coast homes and incarcerated in desolate camps in the interior of the country" where they were held for an average of two to three years) have died. But the Issei made up only about one-third of the incarcerees. The other two thirds were the second-generation, American-born Nisei, who are, for the most part, now in their 70s, 80s, or 90s (3). Fugita and Fernandez argue, rightly, that there is an "imperative to preserve the experiences" of this population, and that the Nisei's advanced age lends urgency to the task. The authors note that, while there is an expansive literature describing the process of explusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, and documenting the conditions of the internment camps, there have been remarkably few efforts to collect "detailed information from a representative group of former incarcerees" (4). The timeliness of this volume is therefore beyond question, and in a post-9/11 climate the need for thoughtful reconsiderations of histories of U.S. civil liberty violations directed towards recent immigrants and their communities only makes this book even more welcome.

Altered Lives, Enduring Community is not another historical account of the internment years (though it does provide complex and nuanced historical context), but is instead primarily an attempt to assess the role that policies of exclusion and incarceration during World War II had for Japanese Americans during the postwar years, as they tried to "reestablish themselves in American society" (6). Fugita and Fernandez draw upon a remarkably rich resource for their analysis: the Denshō project (the full title is "Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project"). The Denshō project was founded in Seattle in 1996 to document oral histories of Japanese Americans who had faced internment during World War II. The oral histories (which were videotaped) were supplemented in 1997 with a representative sample survey of Japanese Americans living in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle. Fugita was one of the people involved in designing and directing the survey (6). Fernandez and Fugita rely most extensively upon the survey data, though they draw upon the oral histories to illustrate and contextualize key points in often heartbreaking ways. One especially poignant example: Frank Fujii, a Nisei, and a child in 1941, is quoted describing his memories of the knock on his door after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He opened the door to find two white men identifying themselves as FBI agents, asking for his father. "And I say, 'Oh Dad's here somewhere.' And I get him and they took him. I didn't see him after that for three-and-a-half years" (49). One minor frustration of the book is that the authors chose not to have tapped into the oral histories as often as they might have. The excerpts that are included are invariably powerful, and including more could only have added resonance and emotional depth to the major claims of the book. The authors do, however, direct us to the Denshō project website (www.densho.org) where more of this material is available.

The book includes chapters on Japanese American life before World War II, during incarceration, and during and after resettlement. The authors provide excellent literature reviews in every section, and make good use of the Denshō survey data to shed light upon aspects of incarceration that have not received much popular or scholarly attention. The discussions of the difficulties during the resettlement period are most effective, as the authors address not only widely noted problems of economic deprivation and discrimination, but also the geographic dispersal of formal internees (many of whom were initially not permitted to return to the Pacific Coast), and...