Chapter 4 - The Cultures of Japanese Internment

Summary

The cultures implicated in the government’s wartime displacement of Japanese Americans should be recognized as including many immigrant laborer communities, both Japanese and non-Japanese, both in the USA and beyond its southern border, as well as before, during and even long after World War II. The economic dispossession and social reformation of Japanese communities in the USA was, for example, coordinated with the wartime deportation and military strategy applied to Japanese laborers in South America, and both processes were in turn the beneficiaries of the government’s Depression-era removal of Mexican migrant laborers in the Southwest in an attempt to constrict that community’s economic opportunities. The internment was, thus, not a glitch in the steady protocols of democracy for immigrants in the USA, much less one that was un-anticipated, nor is it one whose violent logic has yet been exhausted. The study of the cultures of internment, thus extended, opens up a horizon of political and historical possibilities only just beginning to be accounted for in scholarly research and creative expression.