Last Witnesses

Erica Harth

Sixty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR's Executive Order 9066 making possible the incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent (two thirds of them American citizens) one question remains unresolved: "Could it happen again?" To the writers in this book--novelists, memoirists, poets, activists, scholars, students, professionals--the WWII internment of Japanese Americans in the detention camps of the west is an unfinished chapter of American history. Former internees and their children join with others in challenging readers to construct a better future by confronting the past. This is a fresh look at a compelling story, that continues to tarnish the American dream.

1 There has never been a successful solution to the way Japanese-Americans were detained during WWII, fuelling people's curiosity2 The editor is the daughter of one of the teachers in the camp at Manzanar, CA3 A good number of the people in the book were detained in the camps and give first-hand accounts4 This book will be extremely popular on the West Coast, especially in Northern California and Washington

Introduction--Erica Harth * Part I: Parents and Children * Another Spring--Toyo Suyemoto * Legacy of Silence (i)--Mitsuye Yamada * Legacy of Silence (ii)--Jeni Yamada * Echoes from Generation to Generation--Donna K. Nagata * Part II: Family Secrets * Mixing Stories--Stewart David Ikeda * A Daughter's Need to Know--Marnie Mueller * Return to Gila River--George F. Brown * Part III: What We Took from the Camps * Memories from Behind Barbed Wire--John Tateishi * Pictures from Camp--Patrick S. Hayashi * "Isamu Noguchi: 5-7-A, Poston, Arizona"--Robert J. Maeda * From Manzanar to the Present: A Personal Journey--Sue Kunitomi Embrey * Democracy for Beginners--Erica Harth * Part IV: From the Past to the Future * Ethnic Expectations: The Politics of Staging the Internment Camps--Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro * The Life and Times of Rabbit in the Moon --Chizu Omori * The Legacy of the Battle of Bruyères: Reflections of a Sansei Francophile--Valerie Nao Yoshimura * Loyalty and Concentration Camps in America: The Japanese American Precedent and the Internal Security Act of 1950--Allan Wesley Austin * Nineteen in '98: A Conversation on Studying the Internment--Jason Kohn & Cara Lemon