Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember Their World War II Incarceration (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)

By Stephen S. Fugita and Marilyn Fernandez

Book Overview

Altered Lives, Enduring Community examines the long-term effects on Japanese Americans of their World War II experiences: forced removal from their Pacific Coast homes, incarceration in desolate government camps, and ultimate resettlement. As part of Seattle's Densho: Japanese American Legacy Project, the authors collected interviews and survey data from Japanese Americans now living in King County, Washington, who were imprisoned during World War II. Their clear-eyed, often poignant account presents the contemporary, post-redress perspectives of former incarcerees on their experiences and the consequences for their life course.

Using descriptive material that personalizes and contextualizes the data, the authors show how prewar socioeconomic networks and the specific characteristics of the incarceration experience affected Japanese American readjustment in the postwar era. Topics explored include the effects of incarceration and resettlement on social relationships and community structure, educational and occupational trajectories, marriage and childbearing, and military service and draft resistance. The consequences of initial resettlement location and religious orientation are also examined.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295983817
• ISBN13: 9780295983813
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Past is not Just the Past

I grew up in Seattle hearing bits and pieces of the stories of the Japanese Americans who had been rounded up from their homes nearby in the months after Pearl Harbor and sent to inhospitable concentration camps in the interior West, and am always curious for more information. This book, written by a professor of psychology and ethnic studies and a professor of sociology, is, predictably, a scholarly study. This is the first scientific, representative study of the American-born generation who lived through the experience. Time was running out, given the advancing age of the Nisei. So a random study was done in 1997 of 183 current residents of King County, Washington (Seattle) who had been what they call "incarcerated" in the camps. I found this a powerful term to express the injustice of what was done to the Japanese Americans without having to go through diatribes. It got the point across. They chose this location partly because research was already going on, and partly because of the high concentration of Japanese Americans there. The book follows a chronological order, first describing what prewar life was like, for various age groups, then the act of incarceration, what life was like in the camps, resettlement after the war, and present day life. Two formats are used, first, quotations from the open ended responses people made. These tend to be all too brief; I wanted more. The other is charts and statistics. I've taken statistics classes so am not intimidated by this, but it might feel like a bit much to someone who just wants to know what life was like. But the narrative tells you, and you can let your eyes pass right over the numbers and pay attention to the words. Among the interesting findings I'll just pick some. Even before the war, a generation gap was looming. The Issei, the immigrant generation, were terribly discriminated against, and thus clustered in "Japantowns." They lived either by farming or in businesses that catered to their own community. Thus, they tended not to learn English. Their children, the Nisei, learned English and American ways in school. They became their parents' interface to the American world. This is probably a universal immigrant experience. But it became even more problematic in the camps, where the structure of life was controlled by the US Army and the parents had little or no control over their children, and the family structure so important to the Japanese started to collapse. Sixty years later, those who had been the youngest when they entered the camps had the least-negative memories, while those who had been young adults had the worst memories. Young adult women's memories were worse than men's. The book didn't talk about this, but I wondered if it wasn't related to the difficulty of raising young children with minimal resources. Women who were not married when they entered the camps married two years later, on average, than their age-mates in the population at large--at a t