Chapter 16 - Japanese Incarceration, Settler Colonialism

Summary

Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 depicts the US government’s attempt to manage and eliminate a problem population, first through incarceration, then through ethnic dispersal. This chapter argues that this book should be read within its immediate historical context: that of US Indian termination, the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, when the US government worked to dismantle tribal sovereignty and force indigenous peoples to assimilate and live “as Americans.” Reading Okubo’s work within this historical context makes her indictment of American democracy clear: this chapter shows that Citizen 13660 riffs on tropes of European immigration and settlement in order to establish a counterpoint between Euro-American and ethnically Japanese populations. Okubo reveals how systematically and how variously Japanese Americans are excluded from the promises of freedom, prosperity, and inclusion made to white settlers, emphasizing how the forms of inclusion that followed incarceration extend rather than mitigate the state’s attempt to eliminate the Japanese American community. The settler colonial analytic through which I approach Citizen 13660 reveals that processes of removal, incarceration, and dispersal constitute a pattern that can be traced across time and across racialized populations. Japanese incarceration exemplifies how settler states use inclusion and assimilation to manage and eradicate populations deemed undesirable.