Imaging Japanese America

Creef looks at racial profiling Asian Americans over the past 100 years by examining images by well known photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams.

As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive national American community. Beginning with another moment of national historical trauma—December 7, 1941 and the subsequent internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans—Imaging Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom seen photographs of Japanese Americans by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Mitatake. In turn, Elena Tajima Creef examines the perspective from inside, as visualized by Mine Okubo's Maus-like dramatic cartoon and by films made by Asian Americans about the internment experience. She then traces the ways in which contemporary representations of Japanese Americans in popular culture are inflected by the politics of historical memory from World War II. Creef closes with a look at the representation of the multiracial Japanese American body at the turn of the millennium.

"Unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history."—Dinitia Smith, The New York Times Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006.

Images of Japanese and Japanese American women can teach us what it meant to be visible at specific moments in history. Elena Tajima Creef employs an Asian American feminist vantage point to examine ways of looking at indigenous Japanese Ainu women taking part in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition; Japanese immigrant picture brides of the early twentieth century; interned Nisei women in World War II camps; and Japanese war brides who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Creef illustrates how an against-the-grain viewing of these images and other archival materials offers textual traces that invite us to reconsider the visual history of these women and other distinct historical groups. As she shows, using an archival collection’s range as a lens and frame helps us discover new intersections between race, class, gender, history, and photography. Innovative and engaging, Shadow Traces illuminates how photographs shape the history of marginalized people and outlines a method for using such materials in interdisciplinary research.

When the American government began impounding Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor, photography became a battleground. The control of the means of representation affected nearly every aspect of the incarceration, from the mug shots criminalizing Japanese Americans to the prohibition of cameras in the hands of inmates. The government also hired photographers to make an extensive record of the forced removal and incarceration. In this insightful study, Jasmine Alinder explores the photographic record of the imprisonment in war relocation centers such as Manzanar, Tule Lake, Jerome, and others. She investigates why photographs were made, how they were meant to function, and how they have been reproduced and interpreted subsequently by the popular press and museums in constructing versions of public history. Alinder provides calibrated readings of the photographs from this period, including works by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Manzanar camp inmate Toyo Miyatake (who constructed his own camera to document the complicated realities of camp life), and contemporary artists Patrick Nagatani and Masumi Hayashi. Illustrated with more than forty photographs, Moving Images reveals the significance of the camera in the process of incarceration as well as the construction of race, citizenship, and patriotism in this complex historical moment.

Why do some groups retain their ethnicity as they become assimilated into mainstream American life while others do not? This study employs both historical sources and contemporary survey data to explain the seeming paradox of why Japanese Americans have maintained high levels of ethnic community involvement while becoming structurally assimilated. Most traditional approaches to the study of ethnicity in the United States are based on the European immigrant experience and conclude that a zero-sum relationship exists between assimilation and retention of ethnicity: community solidarity weakens as structural assimilation grows stronger. Japanese Americans, however, like American Jews, do not fit this pattern. The basic thesis of this book is that the maintenance of ethnic community solidarity, the process of assimilation, and the reactions of an ethnic group to outside forces must be understood in light of the internal social organization of the ethnic group, which can be traced to core cultural orientations that predate immigration. Though frequently excluded from mainstream economic opportunities, Japanese Americans were able to form quasi-kin relationships of trust, upon which enduring group economic relations could be based. The resultant ethnic economy and petit bourgeois family experience fostered the values of hard work, deferred gratification, and other perspectives conductive to success in mainstream society. This book will be of interest to sociologist and psychologist studying ethnicity, community organization, and intergenerational change; and to anyone interested in the Japanese American experience from an economic or political perspective, Asian American studies, or social history of the United States.

A celebration of JA culture: facts, recipes, songs, words, and memories that every JA will want to share.

At the outbreak of World War II, more than 115,000 Japanese American civilians living on the West Coast of the United States were rounded up and sent to desolate “relocation” camps, where most spent the duration of the war. In this poignant and bitter yet inspiring oral history, John Tateishi allows thirty Japanese Americans, victims of this trauma, to speak for themselves. And Justice for All captures the personal feelings and experiences of the only group of American citizens ever to be confined in concentration camps in the United States. In this new edition of the book, which was originally published in 1984, an Afterword by the author brings up to date the lives of those he interviewed.