Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai‘i’s Japanese in World War II

Description

When author Gail Okawa was in high school, a neighbor mentioned that her maternal grandfather had been imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp on the mainland United States. Questioning her parents, she learned only that “he came back a changed man.” Years later, as an adult salvaging that grandfather’s documents and memorabilia, she found a mysterious photo of a group of Japanese men standing in front of an adobe building with the sign “Liaison Office.” Not until she was the same age that her grandfather was at his arrest did she embark on a project to learn what happened to him.Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai‘i’s Japanese in World War II is a composite chronicling of the Hawai‘i Japanese immigrant experience in mainland exile and internment during WWII—from pre-war climate to arrest to exile to return. Told through the eyes of a granddaughter and researcher born during that war, it is also a research narrative that reveals parallels between pre-WWII conditions and current 21st century anti-immigrant attitudes and heightened racism. It includes an introduction of Okawa’s grandfather, Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Protestant minister, and other Issei prisoners—all legal immigrants excluded by law from citizenship—in a collective biographical narrative that depicts their suffering, challenges, and survival as highly literate men faced with captivity in the little-known prison camps run by the U.S. Justice and War Departments. Okawa interweaves documents, personal and official, and internees’ first-hand accounts, letters, and poetry to create a narrative that not only conveys their experience but, equally important, exemplifies their literacy as ironic and deliberate acts of resistance to oppressive conditions. Her research also revealed that the Hawai‘i Issei/immigrants who had sons in military service were eventually distinguished from the main group; the narrative relates visits of some of those sons to their imprisoned fathers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and elsewhere, as well as the deaths of sons killed in action in Europe and the Pacific. Documents demonstrate the high degree of literacy and advocacy among some of the internees, as well as the inherent injustice of the government’s policies. Okawa’s project also expanded to include New Mexico residents having memories of the Santa Fe Internment Camp, witnesses who provide rare views of the wartime reality. This book is not intended to be a traditional history with historical analysis, nor is it an exhaustive or conclusive study. Rather it is a multivocal, multigenerational narrative that opens windows into a more complete understanding of the larger less-known Justice/War department internment story. Apart from internee memoirs, this is unique as a book-length study of the American internment of Hawai‘i Japanese immigrants that culminated in New Mexico.