Looking After Minidoka

Neil Nakadate

Description

A Japanese family's memory of WWII America

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During World War II, 110,000 Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and incarcerated by the US government. In Looking After Minidoka the "internment camp" years become a prism for understanding three generations of Japanese American life, from immigration to the end of the twentieth century. Nakadate blends history, poetry, rescued memory, and family stories in an American narrative of hope and disappointment, language and education, employment and social standing, prejudice and pain, communal values and personal dreams.

Preface: My Nickel
Acknowledgements
Note on Terminology and Pronunciation
Introduction: Looking After Minidoka
I. Issei
II. Nisei
III. Minidoka, 1942-1945
IV. Sansei
V. Unfinished
Bibliography
Credits

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Personal Memoirs
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Memoir
• General officer
• Military
• World War II
• General
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011114
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

This is a compelling story, one that deserves being far better known than it is. . . . This book is very well written. It is clear, well organized, and rises here and there to a quiet grandeur. . . . It is much more than a labor of love, for his love is backed by solid industry and intellectual craft.
- DAVID HAMILTON, AUTHOR OF Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm
Looking After Minidoka is an innovative and engaging excursion into buried history-global and personal. A compelling family narrative, peppered with fragments of memory, history, and poetry, this heartfelt memoir underscores the power of the American Dream, as well as how easily fear and intolerance can corrupt it.
- DEAN BAKOPOULOS, AUTHOR OF My American Unhappiness
By his skillful blending of history and memoir, Nakadate lifts the veil on a story too often shrouded in shadow, revealing beneath a portrait of a Japanese American family in search of the differences between home and homeland.
- B. J. HOLLARS, AUTHOR OF Sightings: Stories
Neil Nakadate s clear-eyed, carefully researched but nonetheless passionate book is rich with the closely observed details of internment camp life. Looking After Minidoka , written with wisdom, understanding, and a writer s eye for the stories worth telling, is not only an important contribution to the literature of internment but also an important story about the promise and peril of America.
- LAUREN KESSLER, AUTHOR OF Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family
Neil Nakadate s Looking after Minidoka: An American Memoir is a beautifully crafted, powerfully moving American narrative. . . . Nakadate s memoir gives poignant life to chapters of American history that are still being written today by all who dream to be, as Nakadate s mother s transcribed name of Meriko says it, a child of America.
- RAM N SALD VAR, EDITOR OF The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn
The story of our country is the story of a family is the story of a man, Neil Nakadate, whose richly researched and deeply felt memoir will move your head and your heart.
- BENJAMIN PERCY, AUTHOR OF Red Moon
ALSO FROM THE AUTHOR
Understanding Jane Smiley
A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy (edited with Stephen Witte and Roger Cherry)
Writing in the Liberal Arts Tradition: A Rhetoric With Readings (with James L. Kinneavy and William J. McCleary)
Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives (editor)
Looking After
MINIDOKA

NEIL NAKADATE
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by Neil Nakadate
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01102-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-253-01111-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For my parents
Katsumi (James) Nakadate 1914-2007
(Meriko) Mary Marumoto Nakadate 1915-2000
and for theirs
Bun ichi Nakadate 1877-1965
Moriji (Ashizawa) Nakadate 1892-1939
Minejiro Marumoto 1880-1963
Hatsune (Imoto) Marumoto 1890-1966
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other s eyes for an instant?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU , Walden (1854)
CONTENTS
Preface: My Nickel
Acknowledgments
Note on Terminology and Language
Introduction
1 Issei
2 Nisei
3 Minidoka, 1942-1945
4 Sansei
5 Unfinished
Bibliography
Credits
PREFACE MY NICKEL
SUMMER , 1987
Hello.
Hello? Is this Neil, uh . . . Naka . . . ?
Yes-this is Neil. . . .
Well, hi. My name is A______, and I live just over here in Boone, and I saw your letter in the paper and wanted to talk with you about it.
He was calling from ten miles away, so there was something neighborly in it, but also reason to give me pause. Long distance. The Des Moines Register had recently published a letter to the editor I had written, urging support of legislation working its way slowly through the U.S. Congress. Invoking the First Amendment of the Constitution, Japanese Americans were petitioning for redress-recognition and compensation from the government for the violation of their rights due to their mass removal and incarceration during World War II.
During the preceding week I had already received several unsigned pieces of mail, apparently (if not explicitly) in response to my letter, containing both hand-written and printed material to the effect that if I rethought my approach to prayer or politics, or both, I might be a better and happier person. I had just put away the supper dishes when the phone rang.
Well, I just don t agree with your letter, my caller told me. I m against apologizing to the Japanese, and I m against paying them anything. After all, there was a war going on, and the Japs were our enemy. Why should we apologize?
I winced at his use of Jap, aware that this could become a testy conversation. Well, I said, it s important to remember that these weren t Japanese, but Japanese Americans . A third of them were legal immigrants, including my grandparents, and two thirds were their children, born in the U.S., American citizens, like my mother and father. The people the government locked up in camps weren t the enemy, they were 110,000 people whose ancestry happened to be Japanese.
But they bombed Pearl Harbor!
Well, not really-I think we both know that. The war was started by the Japanese military-but the Japanese in America had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. They were as angry about it as you were. Believe me, they wished it hadn t happened.
I resisted mentioning how embarrassing it had been in 1941 that the government had ignored diplomatic warning signs and intelligence alerts in the weeks and even hours before the attack on Hawaii. I resisted mentioning how tempting it always is in a situation like that to divert questions and designate an other who can get the scrutiny and take the blame.
But it did happen, and they did it. And out there on the West Coast, in a military zone . . . they could have done even more harm.
Well, Pearl Harbor happened, I repeated, but not because of the Japanese Americans. There was never even a documented case of spying or sabotage on their part. Pearl Harbor was terrible, but the wrong people were punished. Innocent people.
But they were the enemy. Our enemy. I was in the army and fought against them. I was a POW over there, in the Philippines. They tortured us. They killed my buddies, they . . . They. The Japanese.
I did not ask if he was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, but it was clear that his pain came from a very dark place. My father couldn t describe the darkest moments of his army experience, either, wouldn t describe them, especially the Battle of the Bulge. When pressed, he would only say it was tough . . . really tough. Isolated fragments had worked their way out over the years, but no narrative line, no hint of perspective.
I m sorry that happened to you . . . it shouldn t have happened to you. My father would agree with that-he was with the 17th Airborne in Europe. . . . I was about to say that my uncle, too, had served in the Pacific Theater, with the Military Intelligence Service, when my caller added, How can I describe it? They . . . they were the enemy.
His personal horror warranted an explanation-a cause, a reason, a name. But I could only repeat that Japanese Americans were not the enemy. The Japanese badly mistreated you, but the Japanese Americans didn t-
That s what my son-in-law says, he blurted. He teaches history in high school and has told me the same thing you re telling me-but I can t accept that, I can t-
He s right, of course, I said, grateful for the help. It wasn t right to punish an immigrant group and their children for something done by the country they came from. And I added, I d guess from your last name that your background is German, so you probably know that many German Americans were attacked during World War I and that German immigrants were told they couldn t even use the German language . . . right here, in Iowa.
He said that, too, but I can t-
So there we were, a veteran and a child of a veteran of the same war, separated by only ten miles but also by radically different experiences and perspectives. A victim himself, he needed to tell a stranger what he had suffered. I needed to explain three generations of pain and confusion brought on by the imprisonment of an innocent civilian population. My need had emerged in a letter to the editor, his in a phone call to someone he d never met.
Neither of us knew then that H.R. 442 and S. 1007, the redress legislation generated during the administration of Jimmy Carter, would finally be passed by Congress and signed into law by Ronald Reagan. We could not know that the terms of the legislation would fina