In “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth’s nightmare fantasy of a wartime America in which the fictitious President Charles Lindbergh makes common cause with Hitler, an Office of American Absorption is created with the purpose of taking all Jews from urban areas and dispersing them to various parts of the country where they can be more efficiently managed and won’t cause trouble. For those with only a rudimentary grasp of history, Roth makes plain in an afterword that this is a novel and not to be taken literally.
Ironically, however, what Roth was writing about as fiction actually happened to another group of Americans during World War II whose only crime was that they happened to be of Japanese ancestry. It is a matter of lasting national shame that in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which banished 120,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas and Colorado. The Amache Relocation Center, near Pueblo, was established in 1942 and remained open until 1945. More than 7,000 people were interned there.
Despite the fact that no Japanese-American ever was convicted of sedition, such journalists as Walter Lippmann and Westbrook Pegler warned of a “Fifth Column” that would join with the Japanese army to invade the West Coast and anti-Japanese hysteria was rampant after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since California was deemed to be in jeopardy, camps were set in the heartland but with so many evacuees to house, the War Relocation Authority decided that the only acceptable sites were in remote and inhospitable deserts and swamps.
Most of this is documented in a stunning new book called “The Art of Gaman,” by Delphine Hirasuna, which includes a matter-of-fact recitation of the crimes against her family and others. Hirasuna writes: “The days leading up to evacuation were so frantic and stressful that most Japanese-Americans had not fully absorbed the fact that it meant imprisonment until they arrived at the assembly centers and were marched between a cordon of armed guards into the barbed wire encampment. Body searched, finger-printed, interrogated, and inoculated en masse, they found themselves assigned to horse stalls that contained only metal cots and mattress ticking that they could fill with straw. There were no other furnishings … Privacy was non-existent, mail was censored and belongings were searched for contraband.”
Even more shocking is the fact that no exceptions were made for the elderly or those too ill to travel on their own. According to Hirasuna, “They took people out of hospitals and people were brought into the camps on stretchers. Infants in cribs were taken from their homes as well as more than 100 orphans who had nowhere else to go.”
Beauty from ugliness
Disturbing as this is, what is most remarkable about this book is its depiction of the art created in the camps by people who often had only the most rudimentary materials to work with – packing crates, cardboard boxes, wrapping paper, gunnysacks, shells and automobile springs. Nevertheless, from ugliness sprang beauty in the form of sculpture, pottery and handicrafts. It brings to mind the stories of a symphony orchestra practicing in the Warsaw Ghetto, yet neither the art created in the camps nor artists have received much recognition until now.
In part this seems due to a stoicism that was characteristic of many Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (first-generation Japanese Americans), a feeling that there was no point in discussing what had happened. Indeed, Gaman means “enduring what seems unbearable with patience and dignity.” Nevertheless, the fact that so little is generally known about the internment camps is a disgrace. While bookstores have whole sections devoted to Holocaust literature, few books on the Japanese internment camps are generally available with Bill Hosokawa’s “The Quiet Americans” being an important exception. This neglect of a shameful part of our collective past brings to mind Iris Chang’s shocking “The Rape of Nanking,” a history Imperial Japan would just as soon forget.
Few who read “The Art of Gaman,” however, will remain untouched by its pathos. Illustrated by more than 100 plates of art created in the camps along with archival photographs by Ansel Adams, Clem Albers and Dorothea Lange, the book is an indelible artifact of a time and place many would have preferred to ignore.
An accidental project
As impressive as this, Hirasuna, whose day job is as an editorial consultant for major corporations, says the project began almost by accident. “After my mother’s death in 2000, I happened to find a small bird pin in her jewelry box. It was a little wooden pin with a safety-pin clasp and I thought it must have been done in camp. I mentioned it to my uncle and he urged me to write about the art of the camps. He said, ‘If you don’t do it now, there won’t be anyone left to tell the story.’
“But when I asked around, I found many people had simply thrown their things away. So many people of my generation didn’t know where these things were made or their significance. Books had been written about the fine art paintings done in the camps but no one had written about craft objects and much of what I found came out of peoples’ garages and attics. If I had waited another five years, even the children of the artists would have been gone, so that was my motivation and the urgency behind the project.”
On Dec. 17, 1944, the federal government lifted the order excluding Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and many internees returned home. But their problems weren’t over. Hirasuna writes, “Leaving the camps would prove as traumatic as entering them. “(On returning) many found their homes had not always been maintained and, in some cases, had been destroyed … Night riders shot at the homes of early arrivals and signs in stores refused service to ‘Japs.’ Still about 90,000 of those evacuated eventually returned to the West Coast.”
In time, things returned to normal but many Nisei were reluctant to talk about or relive their experiences as internees. “Gaman for the Nisei meant staying silent, talking up the good times, and denying the magnitude of their loss.” Not until the third generation of Japanese-Americans or Sansei began the so-called Redress Movement through the Japanese-American Citizens League was attention officially paid to those who had been banished by their government during World War II. Finally, in 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which provided a presidential apology and symbolic payment of $20,000 to those whose civil rights had been violated.
Some might consider this an example of too little too late, but according to Hirasuna, “the real cathartic effect came through the quest for redress itself … To those of us who lived through this era, the change in demeanor and attitude among Nisei was palpable, and what one saw was a community healing itself.”
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
