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.

Sandakan Brothel No.8

Sandakan Brothel No.8
Author: Tomoko Yamazaki
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-03-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317460251

This is a pioneering work on "karayuki-san", impoverished Japanese women sent abroad to work as prostitutes from the 1860s to the 1920s. The narrative follows the life of one such prostitute, Osaki, who is persuaded as a child of ten to accept cleaning work in Sandakan, North Borneo, and then forced to work as a prostitute in a Japanese brothel, one of the many such brothels that were established throughout Asia in conjunction with the expansion of Japanese business interests. Yamazaki views Osaki as the embodiment of the suffering experienced by all Japanese women, who have long been oppressed under the dual yoke of class and gender. This tale provides the historical and anthropological context for understanding the sexual exploitation of Asian women before and during the Pacific War and for the growing flesh trade in Southeast Asia and Japan today. Young women are being brought to Japan with the same false promises that enticed Osaki to Borneo 80 years ago. Yamazaki Tomoko, who herself endured many economic and social hardships during and after the war, has devoted her life to documenting the history of the exchange of women between Japan and other Asian countries since 1868. She has worked directly with "karayuki-san", military comfort women, war orphans, repatriates, women sent as picture brides to China and Manchuria, Asian women who have wed into Japanese farming communities, and Japanese women married to other Asians in Japan.

The House of Yamazaki

The House of Yamazaki
Author: Laurence Caillet
Publisher: Kodansha
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Here is a beautifully written first-person account of what it took to strike out and succeed as an independent woman in prewar Japan - and reap the rewards in the postwar era. The chronicle begins as the memoirs of Endo Nami, born some eighty years ago in a farm village in Japan's north country, and ends as the success story of Yamazaki Ikue, chief executive of a large chain of hairdressing and beauty salons. Opening on a childhood filled with dreams, ancestor cults, and the gods of nature, the story follows the heroine's attempts to break the mold of a rigidly paternalistic society and her eventual escape to Tokyo. Enduring a lengthy, frustrating, and often humiliating apprenticeship, then a series of near-failures in her business, she eventually finds herself on the road to material success. Both as a girl and as a woman, Yamazaki Ikue relied on geomancy, astrology, and the revelations of spirit mediums to interpret the past, present, and future. She relates her life with wonderment and lyricism, combining a devotion to magical folk traditions with the hardheadedness of a modern-day businesswoman.

Sandfuture

Sandfuture
Author: Justin Beal
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262367181

An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.

Two Homelands

Two Homelands
Author: Toyoko Yamasaki
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2007-10-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0824829441

Kenji, must grapple with what it means to belong to two nations at war with one another and to face betrayal by both. Tadashi, in school in Japan when war breaks out, is drafted into the Japanese army and renounces his US citizenship. This novel tells the story of three brothers during the years surrounding World War II.

Mail Volume 1

Mail Volume 1
Author: Housui Yamazaki
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1630084077

Private detective Reiji Akiba has a theory about those awkward moments and weird coincidences we all encounter in life. They are actually encounters with the dead-their way of sending us a message. But you may not want to open such strange mail from beyond-not unless you can see the ghostly attachment, like Akiba can. And not unless you carry a gun that can kill what isn't alive, like Akiba's aptly named Kagutsuchi, "the tool between God and earth" . . . digging a divine grave to lay to rest the evil dead. Volume 1 of Mail opens with a model's photo shoot at what was a lovely riverside. But someone's thrown their trash away here: human bones. When the negatives in the darkroom reveal hidden horror, it's time for the magazine to hire Akiba. The answers lie in the secret basement of a shunned house . . . but they don't lie peacefully! • Mail was recently made into a live-action Japanese horror movie starring Chiaki Kuriyama - "Go-Go Yubari" from Kill Bill.

The Book of Tokyo

The Book of Tokyo
Author: Hideo Furukawa
Publisher: Comma Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2015-06-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

Thermae Romae, Vol. 2

Thermae Romae, Vol. 2
Author: Mari Yamazaki
Publisher: Yen Press LLC
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 0316232238

Whenever Roman architect Lucius is suddenly submerged in water, he always surfaces to find himself in the land of the "flat-faces," a people whose appreciation for the public bathhouse matches that of even the mighty Romans! (Little does he realize that the land of his watery journeys is in fact the Japan of 1,500 years in the future!) Observing the strange practices of these foreigners has allowed Lucius to revolutionize the Roman bathhouse, and public opinion on his innovations-and on Aelius Caesar, the emperor-to-be to whom these marvels are attributed-soars. But those in the Senate maintain strong reservations about the suitability of the emperor-to-be, and they mean to cut off the flow of support at its source-Lucius!

The Aftermath of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

The Aftermath of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
Author: Shoichiro Takezawa
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498542522

An insightful study in disaster anthropology, this book takes as its focus the fishing town of Otsuchi in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, one of the worst damaged areas in the mammoth 2011 tsunami. Here, 1281 of the pre-tsunami population of 15000 were killed and 60% of houses destroyed. To make matters worse, the town’s administrative organs were completely obliterated, and fire ravaged the downtown area for three days, blocking external rescue attempts. Complete with vivid and detailed witness testimony collected by the author, the book traces the course of eighteen months from the day of the disaster, through the subsequent months of community life in the evacuation centers, onto the struggles between the citizens and local governments in formulating reconstruction plans. It particularly addresses community interactions within the post-disaster context, assessing the locals’ varying degrees of success in organizing emergency committees to deal with such tasks as clearing rubble, hunting down food and obtaining fuel, and inquiring into the sociological reasons for these differences. It also casts new light on administrative failings that significantly augmented the loss of human lives in the disaster, and are threatening to bring further damage through insistence on reconstruction centered on enormous sea walls, against local citizens’ wishes.