"Collection of autobiographical remembrances related to life in the Jerome and Rohwer Japanese American internment camps during World War II"--

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II, the federal government rounded up more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent—both immigrants and native-born citizens—and began one of the most horrific mass-incarceration events in US history. The program tore apart Asian American communities, extracted families from their homes, and destroyed livelihoods as it forced Japanese Americans to various “relocation centers” around the country. Two of these concentration camps—the Jerome and Rohwer War Relocation Centers—operated in Arkansas. This book is a collection of brief memoirs written by former internees of Jerome and Rohwer and their close family members. Here dozens of individuals, almost all of whom are now in their eighties or nineties, share their personal accounts as well as photographs and other illustrations related to their life-changing experiences. The collection, likely to be one of the last of its kind, is the only work composed solely of autobiographical remembrances of life in Jerome and Rohwer, and one of the very few that gathers in a single volume the experiences of internees in their own words. What emerges is a vivid portrait of lives lived behind barbed wire, where inalienable rights were flouted and American values suspended to bring a misguided sense of security to a race-obsessed nation at war. However, in the barracks and the fields, the mess halls and the makeshift gathering places, values of perseverance, tolerance, and dignity—the gaman the internees shared—gave significance to a transformative experience that changed forever what it means to call oneself an American.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, Concentration Camps on the Home Front is an eye-opening account of the inmates’ experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria. While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard’s extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government’s aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves. Howard’s re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. Concentration Camps on the Home Front rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.

Confinement and Ethnicity documents in unprecedented detail the various facilities in which persons of Japanese descent living in the western United States were confined during World War II: the fifteen “assembly centers” run by the U.S. Army’s Wartime Civil Control Administration, the ten “relocation centers” created by the War Relocation Authority, and the internment camps, penitentiaries, and other sites under the jurisdiction of the Justice and War Departments. Originally published as a report of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center of the National Park Service, it is now reissued in a corrected edition, with a new Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington. Based on archival research, field visits, and interviews with former residents, Confinement and Ethnicity provides an overview of the architectural remnants, archeological features, and artifacts remaining at the various sites. Included are numerous maps, diagrams, charts, and photographs. Historic images of the sites and their inhabitants -- including several by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams -- are combined with photographs of present-day settings, showing concrete foundations, fence posts, inmate-constructed drainage ditches, and foundations and parts of buildings, as well as inscriptions in Japanese and English written or scratched on walls and rocks. The result is a unique and poignant treasure house of information for former residents and their descendants, for Asian American and World War II historians, and for anyone interested in the facts about what the authors call these “sites of shame.”

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to ban anyone from certain areas of the country, with primary focus on the West Coast. Eventually the order was used to imprison 120,000 people of Japanese descent in incarceration camps such as the Rohwer Relocation Center in remote Desha County, Arkansas. This time of fear and prejudice (the U.S. government formally apologized for the relocations in 1982) and the Arkansas Delta are the setting for Camp Nine. The novel's narrator, Chess Morton, lives in tiny Rook Arkansas. Her days are quiet and secluded until the appearance of a "relocation" center built for what was, in effect, the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Chess's life becomes intertwined with those of two young internees and an American soldier mysteriously connected to her mother's past. As Chess watches the struggles and triumphs of these strangers and sees her mother seek justice for the people who briefly and involuntarily came to call the Arkansas Delta their home, she discovers surprising and disturbing truths about her family's painful past.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.