Double Cross

Double Cross
Author: Jacalyn D. Harden
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2003
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 9781452905969

Concentration Camps on the Home Front

Concentration Camps on the Home Front
Author: John Howard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226354776

Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, Concentration Camps on the Home Front is an eye-opening account of the inmates’ experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria. While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard’s extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government’s aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves. Howard’s re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. Concentration Camps on the Home Front rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.

Free to Die for Their Country

Free to Die for Their Country
Author: Eric L. Muller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2003-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226548234

One of the Washington Post's Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001 In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.

Achieving the Impossible Dream

Achieving the Impossible Dream
Author: Mitchell Takeshi Maki
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1999
Genre: Japanese Americans
ISBN: 9780252067648

The Redress Movement refers to efforts to obtain the restitution of civil rights, an apology, and/or monetary compensation from the U.S. government during the six decades that followed the World War II mass removal and confinement of Japanese Americans. Early campaigns emphasized the violation of constitutional rights, lost property, and the repeal of anti-Japanese legislation. 1960s activists linked the wartime detention camps to contemporary racist and colonial policies. In the late 1970s three organizations pursued redress in court and in Congress, culminating in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing a national apology and individual payments of $20,000 to surviving detainees.

The Gateway to the Pacific

The Gateway to the Pacific
Author: Meredith Oda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 022659274X

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

Growing Up Nisei

Growing Up Nisei
Author: David K. Yoo
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1999-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780252068225

The place occupied by Japanese Americans within the annals of United States history often begins and ends with their cameo appearance as victims of incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In this provocative work, David K. Yoo broadens the scope of Japanese American history to examine how the second generation—the Nisei—shaped its identity and negotiated its place within American society. Tracing the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture, Yoo shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps. Schools, racial-ethnic churches, and the immigrant press served not merely as waystations to assimilation but as tools by which Nisei affirmed their identity in connection with both Japanese and American culture. The Nisei who came of age during World War II formed identities while negotiating complexities of race, gender, class, generation, economics, politics, and international relations. A thoughtful consideration of the gray area between accommodation and resistance, Growing Up Nisei reveals the struggles and humanity of a forgotten generation of Japanese Americans.

Japanese American Midwives

Japanese American Midwives
Author: Susan L. Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252092430

In the late nineteenth century, Japan's modernizing quest for empire transformed midwifery into a new woman's profession. With the rise of Japanese immigration to the United States, Japanese midwives (sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants for Issei women. They actively participated in the creation of Japanese American community and culture as preservers of Japanese birthing customs and agents of cultural change. Japanese American Midwives reveals the dynamic relationship between this welfare state and the history of women and health. Susan L. Smith blends midwives' individual stories with astute analysis to demonstrate the impossibility of clearly separating domestic policy from foreign policy, public health from racial politics, medical care from women's caregiving, and the history of women and health from national and international politics. By setting the history of Japanese American midwives in this larger context, Smith reveals little-known ethnic, racial, and regional aspects of women's history and the history of medicine.

Japanese Americans in Chicago

Japanese Americans in Chicago
Author: Alice K. Murata
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738519524

More than two hundred vintage images from family archives, museums, and university collections capture the cultural and economic history of Chicago's Japanese communities.

Aging in the United States and Japan

Aging in the United States and Japan
Author: Yukio Noguchi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226590216

Japanese and American economists assess the present economic status of the elderly in the United States and Japan, and consider the impact of an aging population on the economies of the two countries. With essays on labor force participation and retirement, housing equity and the economic status of the elderly, budget implications of an aging population, and financing social security and health care in the 1990s, this volume covers a broad spectrum of issues related to the economics of aging. Among the book's findings are that workers are retiring at an increasingly earlier age in both countries and that, as the populations age, baby boomers in the United States will face diminishing financial resources as the ratio of retirees to workers sharply increases. The result of a joint venture between the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Japan Center for Economic Research, this book complements Housing Markets in the United States and Japan (1994) by integrating research on housing markets with economic issues of the aged in the United States and Japan.

Japanese-Americans in Chicago, Il

Japanese-Americans in Chicago, Il
Author: Alice Kishiye Murata
Publisher: Arcadia Library Editions
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2002-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781531613235

Japanese Americans who choose to reside in Chicago consider it to be the best city in the world. The first Japanese arrived in the city to prepare for the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the building of the Ho-o-den Pavilion. Prior to World War II, only a few hundred Japanese Americans lived in Chicago; however, during the War many were brought from concentration camps to help with the war effort. The number of Japanese-American residents peaked at more than 20,000 by 1945, with half of them returning to their west coast homes when permitted. For those who remained, the acceptance and employment opportunities found in Chicago offered a chance to begin new lives in a more ethnically-diverse city. These recollections, told through the medium of historic photographs, expose what is at the heart of Chicago's Japanese-American community-a deep commitment to patriotism and a devotion to country and civil rights. This book of more than 200 vintage images reveals for the first time aspects of Japanese-American life in Chicago over four generations, through the eyes of those who lived it.