In the 2011 PAN-JAPAN special issue NEGLECTED LEGACIES: Japanese American Women and the Redress/Reparations Movement, guest editor Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, an Asian American studies professor at UCLA (where he is also the George & Sakaye Aratani chair in Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community), acknowledges that in (resourcefully) editing the …
At California State University, Fullerton, I taught history, Asian American studies and American studies courses. My favorite was an American studies offering developed in the mid-1970s: “American Cultural Radicalism.” If now teaching it, I assuredly would assign Daryl Maeda’s Chains of Babylon. The best study on the Asian American Movement’s …
Read Part 2 >> As a historian who has spent the better part of the last four decades researching, teaching, and doing fieldwork and writing on the World War II Japanese American story, I also find Nurse of Manzanar to possess social value in regards to how it helps to fill …
Read Part 1 >> I would like to enter one final comment about the intrinsic merit of Toshiko Eto Nakamura’s manuscript before changing gears to consider its social value. It can be plausibly argued that the memoir is too narrowly focused in its chronological scope. To be sure, the author does …
Whenever I encounter a memoir such as that at the heart of Nurse of Manzanar: A Japanese American’s World War II Journey, I instinctively assay its strengths and shortcomings by viewing it through a flexible template composed of two basic questions: 1) Does the author create an interesting and well …
Read Part 1 >> As one who was a close friend of Michi Weglyn’s, I am quite sure that if alive today she would be championing the current publication of Betrayed Trust. “Proof” for this assertion can be found in something she wrote in June 1998, a year before her death, …
Betrayed Trust: The Story of a Deported Issei and His American-born Family during World War II is a truly remarkable book. While there are now extant numerous published studies (fiction as well as non-fiction) that illuminate the controversial Tule Lake Segregation Center, Betrayed Trust is the first book-length manuscript to …
Read Part 5 >> At the close of our interview, I put this question to Sue. “You said it’s been, or it is increasingly becoming, a form of catharsis for the Nisei generation to talk about their evacuation experiences. Has your involvement in the struggles of the past few years been …
Read Part 4 >> In 1970, a group of people, including Sue, organized a small committee called the Manzanar Project Committee. Along with Furutani, this committee took up the matter of the advisability of the Manzanar site becoming a historical landmark. By the next year, 1971, when the committee first assumed …
Read Part 3 >> Before I pursue that matter, however, I would like to say a few words about one topic that Sue and I did not cover in our second interview session—her involvement in the Nisei Progressive organization.
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