Jonathan van Harmelen (JVH): One thing I noticed about the government edicts is that they serves as kind of timeline or individual markers that anchors each section.
Frank Abe (FA): Yeah, amazing, isn't it? At first I resisted the idea of including Executive Order 9066 and the exclusion order and the questionnaire. But when Floyd and I met with our editor, Elda Rotor, the executive Vice President of Penguin Classics, she thought it would be helpful for readers to have the actual documents, the government voice behind the coming orders in the volume.
And these orders serve as a sort of antagonist or villain to this story. Much of previous work about camp literature focus simply on the conditions of camp but not enough on the forces putting them in these horrible situations. And because there will be newcomers to the story we want to familiarize readers with this history. We agreed it is useful to have the language there and see the shock of the actual orders themselves.
Elda was right because, as you say, they do anchor the volume, and they drive the narrative forward. The government, and even the Japanese American leaders who worked with the government, is what drives the story, from government edicts, issuing loyalty questionnaires, and passing laws targeting renunciants.
JVH: Following on this point, I want to talk a little bit about Tule Lake. It seems to be at the center of this story, and important part of telling that story is the translation of magazines like Tessaku by Andrew Way Leong and a team of translators.
Floyd Cheung (FC): Japanese Americans responded in diverse ways to incarceration. Some narratives emphasize their resilience and endurance and cite the phrase “shikata ga nai”—it cannot be helped—as their mantra. This is true and admirable, but my students and I were also interested in those who resisted in various ways.
When Penguin gave me the chance to create an anthology, I knew that I wanted to represent a range of Japanese American responses including those of resistance. I invited Frank Abe as a collaborator not only because he’s a fabulous storyteller and member of the Japanese American community but also because he’s been telling the story of Japanese American draft resisters for a long time.
FA: Tule Lake is at the center, in fact if you open the book to the middle you will find the section Registration and Segregation. We wanted to have a story that spoke from inside the Hoshi Dan with an English language memoir. For many young people at Tule Lake, the Hoshi Dan we found gave something they could hang on after the government had taken away everything else, their freedom, their property, their rights, and their futures in America. And so all that is left is the skin on their back.
I was introduced to Junko Kobayashi at the 2018 Tule Lake Pilgrimage and she introduced me to Tessaku and her synopses of some of its fascinating short stories written in Japanese. Floyd, who had previously worked with Andrew on Lament in the Night, said “Let's commission Andrew to translate these two short stories.” He delivered Jōji Nozawa’s Father of Volunteers to us.
I looked at it and read the ending, and I was shattered by the emotion of the essay of a father who reluctantly permits his three sons to volunteer for the US Army. And when he third son is killed in action, he loses it. The burst of emotion in that short story was remarkable, and it has been locked up in Japanese and unread by us English Speaking Audiences. It really has been the Japanese who have kept this flame alive.
JVH: It certainly is the thing that stands out to me. I think it's one of the contributions that I really enjoyed about the anthology is that you don't find it really much anywhere else.
FA: You know, because the story of incarceration continues past the closure of the camps, resettlement generated its own literature. Looking back, my generation has come to grips with pieces, bits of family folklore that for which we had no context.
The biggest piece of the work was it took Japanese America, as a whole 40 years to be able to just articulate the case for redress and marshal the evidence, and build the support to compel the Government to admit the camps were wrong and to apologize. And then it takes another 20 years for us to look inside and embrace the existence of resistance against the camps in. Before 2000 you know you could not bring up that idea of draft resistors, much less, the renunciants. In polite society without getting a lot of distasteful looks.
So it's taken another 20 years to bring us to today, where scholars are digging into the creative work of the Hawaiian Issei memoirs. And now Tessaku, the creative work of the Issei and Nisei and Kibei Nisei in Camp, who were writing in Japanese, is now being recovered is in English, in a language that many of us can read.
These things take time and it takes all that work, of which I was present for a lot of it. For me the anthology is the capstone of lifetime of work, since the 70s and 80s, to recover, reclaim an authentic sense of Japanese American history. As Frank Chin told me: If you lose redress, you lose Japanese American history. And if you lose your history you can kiss Japanese American art goodbye.
JVH: I think this will be. It's going to be a vibrant book, I think. And it's not just because the publisher is Penguin. I think there’s a lot of valuable information here that I think will help to get people thinking about incarceration, and the readership will not just be Japanese American readers, but also for students of the incarceration as well.
So to ask a final question: What do you think is kind of being the future of either studies of Japanese history or Japanese American literature? I think it's a question to think about going forward of what's going to be the future of this field, either in history or literature.
FA: Well, the Penguin Anthology I think raises the necessary questions and draws the connections between our troubling past and the disturbing resonances that has with what's happening today.
With the othering of anyone who is different, based on their religion, immigration, status, sexual orientation or gender identity. Fear is, is a powerful driver; America is afraid of a threat from abroad, or even an attack from abroad, especially from Asia. It's going to spur another round of anti-Asian hate and exclusion, and possible incarceration and prompt, and that will prompt another cycle of response from Japanese American writers. So I think the literature of Japanese incarceration is one that will continue to be written about.
Regrettably, the underlying biases and fears of 1942 continue to exist today. They were subterranean, underground for much of the last half century and they reemerged. So you know there is an unsettling feeling there. I think many feel we are at a critical juncture in our fragile history. I think regarding the literature of incarceration is that more will be written.
Now I am specifically talking about the literature of incarceration. That is different from the future of Asian American literature as a whole. Literature is not just in the service of telling stories, it’s also to get us to think about the world we live in now, and how we even interpret and rethink the state of things.
FC: I love learning from colleagues. Some, like Iyko Day and Erin Aoyama, have been teaching me about the intersection of incarceration and settler colonialism. Andrew Way Leong, the translator of two stories for the anthology, is making Japanese American literature written in Japanese more accessible to a general audience. His work on translating the Tule Lake literary journal, Tessaku, is a revelation.
JVH: Let's talk about your future projects. What are you working on now?
FC: For me, I’m currently focused on doing as much good as I can as the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at Smith College.
FA: I am working on this new stage adaptation I'm writing of John Okada’s No-No Boy. To not just adapt the novel, but to bring the novel and the story of a draft resister returning to Seattle in 1946 into the 21st century and make it real for today’s audiences. Shawn Wong and I are also working on publication of a novel that was actually written in camp, but never saw the light of day.
* * * * *
On Saturday, October 12, 2024, join editors Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung, along with discussion moderator Brian Niiya, for a discussion on The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration at the Japanese American National Museum. The program will also feature readings from the new anthology by audiobook performers Keone Young, Ren Hanami, and traci kato-kiriyama. Register for tickets here.
© 2024 Jonathan van Harmelen
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