Introduction

Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The Introduction begins by exploring modern examples sanctioning the concept of the citizen enemy combatant, such as the War on Terror cases of José Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. It then suggests that the roots of this concept may be found in the World War II detention of Japanese Americans, including over 70,000 U.S. citizens. The Introduction continues by arguing that this modern conception of the citizen enemy combatant is impossible to reconcile with the historic understanding of the Suspension Clause and the habeas privilege that trace their origins to English legal tradition, an understanding that remained consistent well through Reconstruction. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book.

Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The book concludes by arguing that the current state of American habeas jurisprudence should trouble anyone who cares about the Constitution. As the chapters of the book reveal, the War on Terror Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans stand entirely at odds with everything the Founding generation sought to achieve with the Suspension Clause. Specifically, the origins and long-standing interpretation of the Suspension Clause understood it to prohibit the government, in the absence of a valid suspension, from detaining persons who can claim the protection of domestic law outside the criminal process, even in wartime.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-316
Author(s):  
Anne M. Blankenship

During the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, visions of a peaceful new world order led mainline Protestants to manipulate the worship practices of incarcerated Japanese Americans ( Nikkei) to strengthen unity of the church and nation. Ecumenical leaders saw possibilities within the chaos of incarceration and war to improve themselves, their church, and the world through these experiments based on ideals of Protestant ecumenism and desires for racial equality and integration. This essay explores why agendas that restricted the autonomy of racial minorities were doomed to fail and how Protestants can learn from this experience to expand their definition of unity to include pluralist representations of Christianity and America as imagined by different sects and ethnic groups.


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.


Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The book concludes by celebrating aspects of the history of the writ of habeas corpus as a great writ of liberty, observing that the writ has served as a vehicle for securing the freedom of political prisoners and slaves and for the declaration of bedrock constitutional rights in criminal cases. But, the conclusion also notes, it is also the case that habeas corpus has sometimes fallen short, as the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans reveals. Habeas, in other words, is sometimes only as effective as the politics of the time permit. Highlighting the challenges that lie ahead for the future of the storied writ, the conclusion suggests that we would do well to recall the period when the writ earned Blackstone’s praise as a “second magna carta,” for that history tells a story of a habeas writ that could bring even the King of England to his knees before the law.


Author(s):  
Joseph T. Glatthaar

Technology alone does not transform warfare. “Technology, mechanization and the world wars” demonstrates that it needs to be paired with organization and sound doctrine. The two world wars saw advances in military aviation and naval warfare. During World War II, resources were divided between two theaters: the European and the Pacific. American society was transformed, with a booming economy and more opportunities in defense and the military. Not everyone benefited; hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were interned. Conventional bombings and blockades diminished in effectiveness throughout World War II, which ended with the unprecedented decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
Gerald Haslam

Author, lecturer, and long-time liberal Democrat S.I. Hayakawa joined the faculty of San Francisco State College in 1955. A general semanticist, he became acting president of the school during the student strike of 1968-69, and rode the fame generated then into the U..S Senate as a hard-nosed Republican. He was not an effective senator and served only one term, becoming infamous for sleeping during meetings. He also justified the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians and favored declaring English America's national language. His later image as an anti-immigrant bumbler seems a parody of the man, but an evaluation of the sum of his accomplishments suggests there was much more to him than his opponents concede.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-101
Author(s):  
Lena Ahlin

This article considers Julie Otsuka’s representations of the World-War-II internment of Japanese Americans in When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) and The Buddha in the Attic (2011) from the perspective of collective remembrance, thus highlighting the interconnectedness of remembrance, forgetting, silence and race. Remembering and forgetting are understood as contingent on one another, and on the ideological currents and countercurrents that affect the construction of collective remembrance. The article argues that the content and form of Otsuka’s novels mediate the cultural silence of the internment. In addition, they illustrate the changing nature of the narrativized remembrance of the internment as accounts of the lived experience of the Japanese Americans who went to camp are being replaced by transgenerationally transmitted, imaginatively recreated memories. The historical silence of the incarceration and its aftermath is sometimes explained in terms of “Japanese culture,” but such a description risks reducing the impact of the racialization of Japanese Americans, and obscuring its effect on resistance. Finally, the analysis demonstrates that in Otsuka’s texts, remembrance of the internment is characterized by a negotiation between repressive erasure and restorative forgetting.


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