During World War II some 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and detained in concentration camps in several states. These Japanese Americans lost millions of dollars in property and were forced to live in so-called "assembly centers" surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed sentries.
In this insightful and groundbreaking work, Brian Hayashi reevaluates the three-year ordeal of interred Japanese Americans. Using previously undiscovered documents, he examines the forces behind the U.S. government's decision to establish internment camps. His conclusion: the motives of government officials and top military brass likely transcended the standard explanations of racism, wartime hysteria, and leadership failure. Among the other surprising factors that played into the decision, Hayashi writes, were land development in the American West and plans for the American occupation of Japan.
What was the long-term impact of America's actions? While many historians have explored that question, Hayashi takes a fresh look at how U.S. concentration camps affected not only their victims and American civil liberties, but also people living in locations as diverse as American Indian reservations and northeast Thailand.
"Hayashi's book provides a newer, deeper insight into Japanese American history. Hayashi's book is a masterpiece and should be read by anyone writing on the Japanese American internment."--Eriko Yamamoto, History
"This fresh and far-reaching interpretation of the World War II Japanese American exclusion and detention experience achieves benchmark historiographical status. . . . Brian Hayashi has written a book that dramatically reconfigures how the topic of the Japanese American internment will be approached in the coming generation of scholarship."--Arthur A. Hansen, Journal of American History
"Brian Masaru Hayashi's ambitious effort makes available much new archival data and presents original and provocative interpretations. . . . Democratizing the Enemy is an original and stimulating examination of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, and as such, it brings new perspectives to the topic. It should be read by all those interested in this unique and tumultuous period."--Stephen S. Fugita, Western Historical Quarterly
"Brian Hayashi's book is one of the most detailed, insightful and thoroughly documented accounts of the Japanese American experience during World War II. It will set a new standard for scholars for years to come."--Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, University of California, Riverside, author, Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston
Table of Contents:
LIST OF FIGURES ix
LIST OF TABLES xi
PROLOGUE: Beyond Civil Rights 13
CHAPTER ONE: Governors and Their Advisers, 1918-1942 16
CHAPTER TWO: The Governed: Japanese Americans and Politics, 1880-1942 40
CHAPTER THREE: Establishing the Structures of Internment, from Limited to Mass Internment, 1942-1943 76
CHAPTER FOUR: The Liberal Democratic Way of Management, 1942-1943 107
CHAPTER FIVE: "Why Awake a Sleeping Lion?" Governance during the Quiet Period, 1943-1944 148
CHAPTER SIX: "Taking Away the Candy": Relocation, the Twilight of the Japanese Empire, and Japanese American Politics, 1944-1945 180
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Long Shadow of Internment 207
EPILOGUE: Toward Human Rights 219
A NOTE ON SOURCES 295