Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans

by Erica Harth

Book Overview

In a rich and compelling collection, Last Witnesses brings together writers from various cultural backgrounds and personal histories to offer perspectives on one of the great injustices of twentieth-century American history, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

Sixty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR's Executive Order 9066 making possible the incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1403962308
• ISBN13: 9781403962300
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 3.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Looking Back On A Great Injustice

This collection of essays on the Japanese American internment during World War II was published in 2001, with youngest of the internees in their 60s and with many more dead. Not all of the essays contained in this volume are firsthand accounts of the camps. Rather, this collection focuses on the ongoing legacy of the internment in the subsequent generations, and on the ways that people remember traumatic events of the past. The internment, under President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, affected more than 110,000 Japanese immigrants, almost all of them legal residents of the United States and many of them US Citizens. Ten War Relocation Centers were established, camps surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. Internees were issued a controversial loyalty questionnaire, that resulted in the further segregating of many of them into a specially designated camp in northern California set aside for "disloyal" Japanese Americans, which was placed under martial law until the end of the war following protests against the poor living conditions there. A theme through many of the essays is silence. Many third and fourth generation Japanese Americans knew little of their direct connection to the internment experience due to the reluctance of their parents or grandparents to open up about the camps. This in turn could lead to its own lack of resolution and closure for those trying to come to grips with the events of their parents' or grandparents' generation. From sometimes tense and halting conversations came the stories of life in the camps, now passed down to younger generations. The essays cover a variety of perspectives, both firsthand and secondhand, and include accounts of those working in the camps as well as those who were detained. The effort to secure apology and redress and the process of getting camp sites designated with national monument status is also addressed. The book has a decidedly social-science tone to its language, and it is the accounts of actual events that stand out more than the analysis, but it does an excellent job of covering the wide range of social implications of the internment including issues of race relations and civil liberties. Those civil liberties implications take on a new relevance in a post-9/11 society, and it is worthwhile to explore the lengths that our own government has gone to in the midst of a past crisis when thinking about choices that our country may have to face in the future. Beyond the social science implications of the collection, this book contains some fascinating stories of people who survived the internment and of the generations that followed and sought to learn and remember.