Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment

In 1942 more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. This paper studies how internees’ careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data, I develop a predictor of a person’s internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that internment had long-run positive effects on earnings. The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased mobility due to re-optimization of occupation and location choices, possibly facilitated by camps’ high economic diversity.

Japanese Immigrants In Sarawak Before World War Two: Assimilation Through Inter-Ethnic Marriages

The arrival of Japanese immigrants, especially karayuki-san, traders, and farmers in Sarawak between the 1880s and1940s, has rarely been given sufficient attention by scholars. For the most part, not only did the Japanese immigrants successfully integrate into the economic eco-system, but they also assimilated with the locals through inter-marriages. Archival records, primarily obtained from the Sarawak State Archives, suggests that families of inter-ethnic marriages went through a life of hardship, especially when Japanese spouses or relatives were imprisoned in the internment camps soon after World War Two ended. For the most part, the research mainly focuses on Seiji Kuno or otherwise known as Mohamed Towpik Kuno, who married a local Malay woman and embraced Islam. The life of Kuno depicts the extent to which a Japanese immigrant became absorbed into the dominant culture of the mainstream Sarawak society. Kuno’s general attitude towards the local society, his service to the community in various capacities, his attitude towards political matters and finally, his religious inclination showcased the extent to which assimilation had taken place voluntarily. Apart from Kuno, the research also examines other personalities’ lives, like Sunao Miyaji, who was married to Lamah Binti Bakar, and Maria Osaichi and Oasa, who were Japanese immigrants married to Chinese Sarawakians. It is against this background that this research argues that marriages between Japanese immigrants and locals in Sarawak before World War Two was indeed a cause for further assimilation into the host culture between spouses, family members and the broader community. At the same time, the research posits that cemeteries involving Japanese immigrants should be promoted as tourist destinations as they reflect Sarawak’s rich multicultural heritage and history of assimilation with foreigners.

The inconography of Afrikaner nationalism and the Ossewa-Brandwag's 'ideal of freedom' in the South African internment camps of the Second World War

The emergency measures of the Union government under Jan Smuts had a strong impact on the Ossewa-Brandwag (OB) during the Second World War. The OB was especially targeted by the government because of its overt pro-German and anti-British stance and its active resistance against the war effort. The ideology of the movement was built upon a strong basis of Afrikaner nationalism in conjunction with National Socialism which was supposed to legitimise the movement as an alternative to party politics. OB members expressed Afrikaner nationalist sentiments which meant resistance against Britain with the goal of attaining an independent republic - the so-called "ideal of freedom". Consequently, the OB's active resistance led to high numbers of internment. This article focuses on the South African internment camps of the Second World War. The nationalist iconography reflected in the artefacts created by OB members during their internment are analysed within the broader context of Afrikaner nationalism and the ideology of the OB. The OB had a very specific brand of Afrikaner nationalism and the ideal of freedom, central to its ideology, was combined with existing Afrikaner nationalist goals and subsequently nationalist iconography manifested itself in internees' creative expressions of their own personal nationalist sentiments. The artefacts also reflect the integration of Afrikaner nationalist iconography and the OB's ideal of freedom with personal contexts of imprisonment illustrating how political myths can be reshaped to provide meaning for the present realities of contemporaries.

At Peace Finally? Gene Oishi’s Fox Drum Bebop and the Last Memories of Japanese American Internment Camps

Gene Oishi’s autobiographical and episodic novel Fox Drum Bebop (2014) will likely be one of the final novels published by someone who was an internee in the detention camps in which the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As such, it presents complicated questions about temporality, rep- resentation, and the processes of trauma. Through focusing on the protagonist Hiroshi Kono (largely, though not restrictively, based on Oishi’s own life experience) and his siblings who have distinct ideological reactions to their ethnic identity and their wartime experience, Oishi explores how internment at once lasted for a determinate period but continues to extend in space and dilate in time for as long as the memories of it endure. The novel uses the musical aesthetics of jazz as a correlate for this discontinuous process- ing of experience. Oishi’s narrative asks if those who suffer oppression and trauma can ever find peace, and how, if at all, having a long life and reflecting upon the past can alter one’s sense of what happened.

Asian Exclusion and Enforced Leisure

Despite their differences, Chinese and Japanese migrants and their American children occupied a shared location in an American racial framework that placed them outside the possibility of inclusion through cultural and political assimilation, regardless of long residence or native birth. The detention of Chinese Americans at the Pacific border and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were physical manifestations of exclusion. Even as social scientists challenged earlier fears about cultural and biological blending, most Americans consistently held Asian people apart as inherently foreign and often threatening. Detention as a measure of national defense, enacted at Angel Island Immigration Station and in wartime incarceration (or “internment”) camps, separated detainees from the norms of work, family, and sociability. Even as the United States screened working-class immigrants for their risk of becoming “public charges,” the government enforced leisure on those incarcerated. Unchosen leisure thus became a problem to be solved.

Separated Families and Epistolary Assistance

This article focuses on clandestine letters between Jews in French internment camps and their loved ones. It offers an examination of these letters, which were hidden in packages or thrown from cattle cars on their way to Auschwitz. These letters are astonishingly abundant today largely thanks to three types of aid: creative self-help, mutual aid among internees, and aid from non-Jewish helpers. At the intersection of three areas of scholarship—the material letter, internment camps, and aid to Jews during the Holocaust—this article explores how internees could write with limited resources, send letters without using the official postal service, and participate in mutual aid inside the camps. The article argues that the internment-camp letter was at once the result of aid and itself an avenue of aid, parallel to the more organized humanitarian organizations. Cet article porte sur la correspondance clandestine entre les Juifs dans les camps d'internement en France et leurs proches. Il présente une analyse de ces lettres que l'on a cachées dans des colis ou que l'on a jetées des wagons à bestiaux destinés à Auschwitz. Une correspondance d'une abondance étonnante existe aujourd'hui en grande partie grâce à trois types d'aide : la débrouillardise individuelle, l'entraide parmi les internés et l'aide des non-Juifs. A la croisée de trois champs de recherche (la matérialité de la lettre, les camps d'internement et l'aide aux Juifs pendant la Shoah), cet article explore comment les internés ont pu écrire avec un matériau limité, envoyer des lettres sans la poste, et s'entraider à l'intérieur des camps. L'article suggère que la lettre du camp d'internement soit à la fois le résultat et l'agent de cette aide, œuvrant en parallèle des organisations humanitaires plus officielles.