Review: <i>Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America’s First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp</i>, by Arthur A. Hansen

A half century ago, oral history was seen as a promising approach to historical research. For many scholars, the method circumvented problems with written documents generated by federal government officials, some whose credibility was open to question. For others, it revealed a democratic past relevant to the present by giving voice to ordinary people not seen in written documents. Some advocates adopted Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving’s distinction between episodic and semantic memory to preserve the personal experience of the interviewee’s past from the biases of present-day concerns couched in the language of general, abstract knowledge. In recent years, however, memory specialists in the neurosciences have seen large overlaps between episodic and semantic memory, since the former requires the latter at the initial stage of encoding for successful retrieval of a memory. For historians, disentangling the two types of memory requires dissection of the different semantic frameworks used in the initial encoding process and careful selection of diverse interviewees for the creation of an oral history–based historical mosaic.Some of this complexity is reflected in the best oral history–based tesserae shining through in Manzanar Mosaic. In the first part of the book, Hansen provides readers with an introduction to Manzanar—one of ten camps where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, located in the Owens Valley in eastern California—before presenting two of his most important essays. The first one should have been published as it reflects a bold interpretation of how some Japanese American leftists collaborated with camp administrators in suppressing dissidents among camp residents. The other is Hansen and David Hacker’s groundbreaking essay on the 1942 Manzanar Riot, which they claim was rooted in an attempt to reestablish familiar prewar communal values and relationships rather than involving any real identification with Imperial Japan, a claim that is less persuasive now than in the 1970s, when the essay first appeared.But the tesserae really sparkles in Part 2. In a section that comprises slightly over half the book, Hansen presents five notable individuals whom he and his graduate students interviewed in the early 1970s, before Tulving fully developed his episodic-semantic conceptual distinction. The five people—Sue Kunitomi Embrey (“Progressive”), Togo W. Tanaka (“Thinker”), Karl G. Yoneda (“Advocate”), Elaine Black Yoneda (“Partisan”), and Harry Y. Ueno (“Martyr”)—were key figures in the Manzanar Relocation Center, established in March 1942. One worked for the Manzanar Free Press, the camp newspaper; three were leaders in the Manzanar Citizens Federation and the camouflage net factory; and one headed the Kitchen Workers Union, a major player in the Manzanar Riot, which resulted in the killing of two Japanese Americans by the military police guard. Each of these interviews offers a different piece of the mosaic to the uprising. Sue Kunitomi Embrey blamed the Riot on the kibei, those America-born, Japan-educated camp residents who experienced considerable discrimination (158). Ueno admitted some of the riot participants sang the Imperial Japanese Navy march song, but only to keep warm, and recalled that none threatened violence against the military police (288–89). Karl Yoneda left Manzanar before the riot but had personally confronted the opposition groups that were part of the riot crowd. Unlike Embrey and Ueno, however, he remembered that members of these groups had been American-born Japanese and embraced pro-Japan sentiments that were camp-wide (227). Elaine Black Yoneda agreed with her husband, seeing in hindsight that the group were mostly kibei, with a smaller number of American-born Japanese, some of whom had never set foot in Japan (271). Like Embrey, JACL leader Togo Tanaka did not blame the kibei and even credited one of them with saving his life during the riot (176).While Part 2 provides colorful tesserae in the form of oral histories, the two essays in Part 1 supply the only two-tone pieces to the Manzanar Mosaic. In a section comprising a third of the book, Hansen offers one essay that originally appeared in Amerasia Journal in 1974 and another, previously unpublished piece. The latter, titled “Doho: The Japanese American ‘Communist’ Press, 1937–42,” is a solidly researched essay despite its omission of analysis of the Japanese-language section. This reviewer agrees with the two authors’ conclusions that “Doho was indeed a viable ‘community newspaper,’ offering a much-needed alternative to the established vernacular press and providing realistic solutions for a wide assortment of pressing social issues and concerns” (27). They find that the sole editor and publisher, Shūji Fujii, maintained a consistent leftist-liberal stance throughout the newspaper’s short life. The authors carefully dissect the editorials to show the paper was “much more than a mere echo of Comintern [Communist International] politics within the Japanese American pre-World War II community” (26). They further cite as proof news reporter John Kitahara, who emphatically declared, “There is no Moscow Gold behind us [Doho] and there is no special interest financing us”—a claim confirmed by the newspaper’s financial struggle to survive off its two hundred paying subscribers (39). By contrasting the other Japanese American community newspapers’ (Rafu Shimpō and Kashū Mainichi) anti-labor and pro-Japan foreign policy with the Dōhō’s searing critique of Japanese American elite businesses (Three Star Produce with its chain of fruit and vegetable stands and Fred Tayama’s U.S. Cafes), Larson and Hansen show readers how these “progressives” truly offered an alternative view that stigmatized Shūji Fujii, Karl Yoneda, and other Dōhō staff members and subscribers before they came to Manzanar.In contrast, Arthur Hansen and David Hacker’s essay “The Manzanar ‘Riot’: An Ethnic Perspective” offers a speculative viewpoint of the root causes of the violence. The authors assert the Riot was “one intense expression of a continuing resistance movement” (86) aimed at re-creating a Japanese American community in response to racial discrimination. “Through the operation of continuing resistance activity,” Hansen and Hacker argue, “Manzanar would eventually be transformed into a Little Tokyo of the desert where, as in prewar days, the most salient community characteristics were group solidarity and the predominance of elements of Japanese culture” (116–17). The authors then point to Karl Yoneda as an example of how “cultural politics” rather than “real” political differences over which country—Japan or the United Stated—the interned population should support was the main propellent for the Riot. “The overriding significance,” Hansen and Hacker declare, “…is cultural; from the perspective of the inmates in his block, Yoneda was a quintessential deviant, representative of all those characteristics the subculture abhorred. A cultural anti-hero, he symbolized for the inmate population its need of social cohesion” (106).While certainly innovative in 1974, Hansen’s re-publishing of the essay and oral histories illustrates the limitations of Manzanar Mosaic. The existence of an essentialized, cohesive community of Hansen’s “ethnic perspective” is conceptually outdated in today’s cultural anthropology and sociology, after Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (University of Minnesota, 1996) and Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Harvard University Press, 2006) published their works. Moreover, their own evidence in the oral histories suggests otherwise. Hansen asked Elaine Black Yoneda if her support for the camouflage net factory production, for example, put her in “a supportive position for a culture” that she spent her life fighting against. But Elaine denied it was culture by answering, “Well, I wouldn’t call it culture. I’ve fought against war profiteering and the harassment of those who have nothing, or are unemployed, or have to apply for welfare. I don’t call that culture. I hope it isn’t considered culture by anyone!” (263).Despite these and other flaws, Manzanar Mosaic is clearly a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarly literature on the mass removal and internment of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II.

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