Japanese American Internment: Books

"Brian Hayashi reevaluates the three-year ordeal of interred Japanese Americans. Using previously undiscovered documents, he examines the forces behind the U.S. government's decision to establish internment camps. His conclusion: the motives of government officials and top military brass likely transcended the standard explanations of racism, wartime hysteria, and leadership failure. Among the other surprising factors that played into the decision, Hayashi writes, were land development in the American West and plans for the American occupation of Japan."--publisher

The internment of Japanese Americans was a violation of the Constitution and its guarantee of equal protection under the law yet it was authorized by a presidential order, given substance by an act of Congress, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Japanese internment is a topic that we as Americans cannot afford to forget or be ignorant of. This work spotlights an important subject that is often only described in a cursory fashion in general textbooks. It provides a comprehensive, accessible treatment of the events of Japanese American internment that includes topical, event, and biographical entries; a chronology and comprehensive bibliography; and primary documents that help bring the event to life for readers and promote inquiry and critical thinking."

Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans.

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times). Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Provides a detailed account of the evacuation and internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans; describes living conditions in the camps; discusses the economic, emotional, and physical toll on interned Japanese-Americans; and ponders the legacy of internment on American society. Includes biographies, primary sources, and more.

This book relays the factual details of the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. The narrative provides multiple accounts of the event, and readers learn details through the point of view of a child at an internment camp, a Japanese-American soldier, and a worker at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The text offers opportunities to compare and contrast various perspectives in the text while gathering and analyzing information about a historical event.

Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was 80 years old when her first book was published in April 2005. With her memoir, "Looking Like the Enemy," Gruenewald has broken her silence as a Nisei (second generation Japanese American) who was imprisoned in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

With charm, humor, and deep understanding, a Japanese American woman tells how it was to grow up on Seattle's waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to ?relocation? dring World War II. Along with some 120,000 other persons of Japanese ancestry?77,000 of whom were U.S. citizens'she and her family were uprooted from their home and imprisoned in a camp. In this book, first published in 1952, she provides a unique personal account of these experiences. Replaced by ISBN 9780295993553

The first biography of Asian American activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki

An overview of Asian American history, written by an American with Japanese roots, this work of popular history gives voice to Asian Americans past and present. It reveals the aspirations and accomplishments of people who are often seen as foreigners in their own land.

"Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming "edge city" on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries...David Neiwert combines compelling story-telling with first-hand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war."--Amazon

"Thinking Orientals is a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. It reveals the influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of Asian American identity. It examines the unique role played by sociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the "Oriental Problem" before World War II and also analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and the subsequent "model minority" profile."--Amazon

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Drawing on newly discovered material, Greg Robinson reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights and redress struggles. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside martial law and the imposition of military tribunals in wartime Hawaii, as well as Canada's confinement of 22,000 ethnic Japanese from British Columbia. Approaching Japanese confinement as a transnational phenomenon, A Tragedy of Democracy offers a kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.

Joining the U.S.' war effort in 1942, Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho ordered the dislocation of Japanese Mexican communities and approved the creation of internment camps and zones of confinement. Under this relocation program, a new pro-American nationalism developed in Mexico that scripted Japanese Mexicans as an internal racial enemy. In spite of the broad resistance presented by the communities wherein they were valued members, Japanese Mexicans lost their freedom, property, and lives. In Uprooting Community, Selfa A. Chew examines the lived experience of Japanese Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during World War II. Studying the collaboration of Latin American nation-states with the U.S. government, Chew illuminates the efforts to detain, deport, and confine Japanese residents and Japanese-descent citizens of Latin American countries during World War II. These narratives challenge the notion that Japanese Mexicans enjoyed the protection of the Mexican government during the war and refute the mistaken idea that Japanese immigrants and their descendants were not subjected to internment in Mexico during this period. Through her research, Chew provides evidence that, despite the principles of racial democracy espoused by the Mexican elite, Japanese Mexicans were in fact victims of racial prejudice bolstered by the political alliances between the United States and Mexico. The treatment of the ethnic Japanese in Mexico was even harsher than what Japanese immigrants and their children in the United States endured during the war, according to Chew. She argues that the number of persons affected during World War II extended beyond the first-generation Japanese immigrants "handled" by the Mexican government during this period, noting instead that the entire multiethnic social fabric of the borderlands was reconfigured by the absence of Japanese Mexicans.

"With charm, humor, and deep understanding, a Japanese American woman tells how it was to grow up on Seattle's waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to "relocation" dring World War II. Along with some 120,000 other persons of Japanese ancestry--77,000 of whom were U.S. citizens--she and her family were uprooted from their home and imprisoned in a camp. In this book, first published in 1952, she provides a unique personal account of these experiences."--Amazon

"John Okada was born in Seattle, Washington in 1923. He attended the University of Washington and Columbia University. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, wrote one novel and was dead of a heart attack at the age of 47. John Okada died in obscurity believing that Asian America had rejected his work."--Amazon

Set on an island in the straits north of Puget Sound, in Washington, set in the 1950s, lingering memories of World War II, internment camps and racism helps fuel suspicion of a Japanese-American fisherman, a lifelong resident of the islands.

Tells one Japanese American family's story of internment in a Utah enemy alien camp during World War II. We never learn the names of the young boy and girl who were forced to leave their Berkeley home in 1942 and spend over three years in a dusty, barren desert camp with their mother.