Customer Reviews

Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow

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Confession no 1: I'm an avid reader (professionally and personally) of books, and like most people I rank academic studies as my least favourite. Who in his right mind wants to slug through another tome of dry, tedious academese? Now that you know my bias, here's Confession no 2: recently I read John Howards Concentration Camps in on the Home Front in (almost) one sitting, and am still reeling from the pleasure. The prose is brimming with a procession of astounding and gripping facts, the "mots" are "justes", the style is as graceful as an albatross in flight. Most of all, as far as I'm concerned, the author tells a damn good story. Make no mistake, this is an extraordinarily detailed study of the biggest federal incarceration drive in American history--the forceful wartime suspension of liberties and civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans (who happened to be of Japanese extraction). Yet it reads like a cross between a biography of a remarkable individual (Earl Finch), a journalistic account of the zeiteist of a nation at war with Japan (and with itself), a political expose of national and Congressional bigotry and racism (what else is new), and a detective story with the scholar-as-sleuth on the tail of the elusive historical clue.

The interested reader will find here a welter of data (some of it never seen before), judicious (and when appropriate, acerbic) commentary, narrative passages written by a wordsmith in total control of his medium, and a great number of photographs which put a human face on the "internees" and relieve the flow of pages (set in a rather small font). All in all, Concentration Camps is historical, polemical, critical, ironical, veridical, and topical. It is also well worth reading.

Howard does us a great service by providing insight into two of the least mentioned WWII War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps, Jerome and Rohwer. He argues that, contrary to the popular myth, Japanese and Japanese Americans in these camps (and others) were resisting their imprisonment through explicit actions such as protests, strikes and work slowdowns and less overt means such as mocking their captors, cartoons and comedy. The people imprisoned were not heterogeneous in their submissiveness. Some that actively courted the favor of authorities were branded as inu (dogs) by others less accepting of the imprisonment. Some who originally bought the government's logic of "internment" later realized their error. The government's motives were not just to prevent sabotage of West Coast military facilities, but to disperse concentrations of Japanese and Japanese Americans, to promote Christianity over Buddhism and to use the "industriousness" of the prisoners to create productive land. Overt and implicit racism by government officials and business interests were also driving force.

For me, Howard digresses a bit too much in his interest in Earl Finch's sexual orientation. A Mississippian, Finch became a supporter of Japanese Americans acting as a "Santa Claus" and facilitator to those in the Arkansas camps, a promoter of a segregated USO for Japanese American soldiers and, finally, an advocate for Hawaiian statehood. According to Howard, Finch's original motivation for all this was his homosexual interest in some Japanese American soldiers. The last chapter is devoted to Finch's life after the War, of his interest in young Japanese men and Hawaiian statehood. The whole last chapter is not needed.

So, get this book for the documentation of the Japanese American experience, not for the prurient interest in Earl Finch's life.