Voices

Review by Bill Doughty

Art is often created in pain.

During and after the U.S. military’s incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry in World War II, many of the prisoners created literature. Editors Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung collected some of the creations in “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration” (Penguin Books, 2024).

Historians Abe and Cheung write:

“The literature in this volume presents the collective voice of a people defined by a specific moment in time: the four years of World War II during which the United States government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes, farms, and businesses, and incarcerated more than 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy…

By its own latter-day admission, the government had no military need for the mass exclusion –– acknowledging that it was driven by a mixture of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership –– rendering the three-year incarceration that followed just as unnecessary as it was wrong.”

This valuable book brings together “many voices telling a shared story,” according to Abe and Cheung, a “struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization.”

“It’s the story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization,” they write. The literature includes fiction and nonfiction; stories, narratives, and observations; a few drawings and comic strips; and various forms of poetry, some of which we include in this Navy Reads post.

Some of the poems are written in the Japanese style of haiku or tanka; some poems rhyme while others are freestyle. Some were written after detention and imprisonment; others were written in the post-traumatic months and years after the camps.

Voices from the Camps

From Portland Senryū Poets

“Resolution and Readiness, Confusion and Doubt”

Translated by Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa

By Jōnan:

for these current times

all 100,000 of us

made ready

By Mokugyo:

whatever is next ––

father has already written

his final wishes

By Jōnan:

our mother too

awaits the baby's first cry

all on edge

By Goichi:

decided now

my new destination ––

our breakup is near

By Jōnan:

at the train station

my self-control departs

and tears arrive

By Roshyou:

stay forever or return home

the decision never made ––

just too much to bear

By Sen Taro:

they never asked

suspicious or not— 

just put us away

From Fort Sill Incarceration Camp

By Otokichi (Muin) Ozaki

Translated by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano:

I bid farewell

To the faces of my sleeping children

As I am taken prisoner

Into the cold night rain.

Sailing on the same ship—

The son, A U.S. soldier;

His father,

A prisoner of war.

A wretching anguish rises

As the number "III"

Is painted

On my naked chest

In red.

From Sand Island and Santa Fe Incarceration Camps

By Yasutaro (Keiho) Soga

Translated by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano:

Like a dog

I am commanded At a bayonet point.

My heart is inflamed

With burning anguish.

A fellow prisoner

Takes his life with poison.

In the evening darkness, Streaks of black blood

Stain the camp road.

The barren wasteland

Raged by sand storm,

I weep for my friend 

Who sleeps there alone,

Eternally.

Voices After the Camps

“Topaz, Utah”

By Toyo Suyemoto:

The desert must have claimed its own

Now that the wayfarers are gone,

And silence has replaced voices

Except for intermittent noises,

Like windy footsteps through the dust,

Or gliding of a snake that must

Escape the sun, or sage rustling.

Or soft brush of a quickened wing

Against the air. — Stillness is change

For this abandoned place, where strange

And foreign tongues had routed peace

Until the refugees release

Restored calm to the wilderness,

And prairie dogs no longer fear

When shadows shift and disappear.

The crows fly straight through settling dusk,

The desert like an empty husk,

Holding the small swift sounds that run

To cover when the day is done.

“Returning Home”

By Shizue Iwatsuki

Translated by Stephen W. Kohl:

I. Going home,

Gripping my daughter's hand,

Feeling cheated,

I tell her we're leaving

Without emotion.

2. Through the car window

A glimpse of pines.

Oregon mountains.

My heart beats faster,

Returning home.

3. Four years have passed,
Returning home
Though I have no flowers to offer, 

First I visit my child's grave.

4. Evening twilight,
Mother cow chews her cud.
Beneath her
The calf dozes.

5. Home at last
At the dinner table

My husband calls my name, But lapses into silence.

His heart, too, is full.

6. He was kind to us before,

But now—the shopkeeper

Nervously refuses to serve us.

7. Hard at work
Rebuilding our life, 

To help my husband

Today I go

To buy farm tools.

8. Glancing up,
At red-tinged mountains
My heart is softened.
A day in deep autumn.

9. Pointing out the trail to the summit
He says it's steep,

But we agree to try.

10. War and change,

My native land

Once so hard to leave, 

Is behind me now forever.

11. With determination

I sign the naturalization papers.

In my hand

The pen trembles slightly.

12. A naturalized citizen now

I have the right to vote.

So today I climb

The steps of this building.

The art in this volume of literature is painted in various voices, many painful, some plaintive, all powerful. Each voice is relevant to what is happening in the United States in 2026.

Abe and Cheung write, “Many of the voices in this volume are those of protest against incarceration. Some are those of accommodation. All are authentic. Together they form an epic narrative with a singular vision of America's past, one with disturbing resonances with the American present.”

‘Seen and Unseen’ Ties to 1942

Review by Bill Doughty

This award-winning book about the federal government’s incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II has remarkable ties to what is happening today in the United States:

“Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration” by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki (Chronicle Books, 2022).

After Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and other military sites in Hawaii, FDR called for the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens, including children.

The government’s Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration ordered evacuation of whole areas and required disposal of property, including family farms. Families were assigned a number and were no longer known by their proper name. 

Author Elizabeth Partridge shows how prisoners were shamed and ostracized.

When first arrested, detained, and forced on trains and buses to the camps, families, including American citizens, had been treated like prisoners of war, allowed to keep only what they could carry.

Upon first reporting to at least one of the camps, they had been forced to fill bags with hay and sleep in horse stables that smelled of horse manure and urine.

“Seen and Unseen” is filled with distinctive art by Lauren Tamaki augmenting the photos.

Partridge is the goddaughter of Dorothea Lange. Her dad was a Navy veteran who served in World War II and later became a photographer and assistant to Lange after the war.

With the help of Lauren Tamaki’s distinctive and provocative art, Partridge introduces readers to the work of three photographers. Most of the photography is from within the Manzanar concentration camp in eastern California near the border of Nevada.

The first photographer featured is Lange (above), who became famous for her iconic photography during the Great Depression. The U.S. government hired her to take propaganda photos of what they called “internment” of Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese immigrants.

Lange tried to show everyday life of her subjects who were forced to leave their homes and travel in secrecy to faraway camps under armed guard.

Many of Lange’s photographs were impounded because they were deemed to show captivity in a negative light. She was forbidden from taking photos of barbed wire, machine guns, searchlight towers, or crowded conditions with little or no privacy.

“Dorothea wanted to show how hard the Japanese and Japanese Americans wanted to make their situation bearable,” Partridge writes. Resilient captives created furniture from scraps of wood. They cleared sagebrush to start vegetable gardens. And they continued to conduct school studies despite no desks and limited supplies.

One of her most powerful photos was of farmer Torazo Sakawye with grandson Walter (below).

Ten months after the photo was taken, Torazo died in the camp.

“All Dorothea could do was hope her photographs carried a strong message. ‘This is what we did,’ she said. ‘ How did it happen? How could we?’”

Next, Partridge introduces readers to Toyo Miyatake, a professional photographer whose family was incarcerated at Manzanar through the entire war.

At first, Miyatake surreptitiously took photos using an ingenious box camera disguised as a lunchbox. Eventually he was allowed to take photos but at first was told only caucasian helpers were allowed to push the shutter button.

The third photographer whose work Partridge showcases is Ansel Adams, who was attracted to the stark beauty of the desert and mountain terrain surrounding Manzanar. Adams focused on the “hardworking, cheerful, and resilient people.”

According to Partridge, “Ansel believed the faces of earnest, young Japanese Americans would convince other Americans how trustworthy and patriotic they were.”

Most of Adams's photos show smiling faces of young people.

"Everything in a picture is not necessarily true."

– Taira Fukushima, Manzanar, Block 5

Adams was on hand to capture some departures from Manzanar in 1945. Prisoners were given a change ticket and $25. A generation later those who had been incarcerated –– and were still alive –– were awarded reparations of $20,000 each under the Civil Liberties Act.

“The money was a small fraction of what they had lost,” Partridge observes.

“At least the federal government acknowledged that the incarceration had been a profound injustice, but it could not erase the heavy emotional and physical cost to the prisoners of what had been done.”

Readers might wish for more of the photographers’ work. Fortunately many of their photos are easily found online. And the National Archives has many incarceration photographs available –– at least for now –– including previously “impounded” images.

Those who are inspired to learn more won’t be disappointed if they read this book cover to cover. Among the treasures are the back pages of essays, commentary, notes, footnotes, photo credits, and biographies of each photographer, and more. This book is rich with primary sources, critical thinking, and documentation of censorship and history.

One of the essays in the back is titled “Civil Liberties and the Constitution.” The essay addresses one of the four cases brought by Japanese Americans that went before the Supreme Court: Korematsu v United States. In 1944 the Court ruled in favor of the government, but a generation later a federal court overturned that ruling when new evidence was uncovered that the military had lied about the need for incarceration,

“However, In 2018, several Supreme Court justices wrote about the Korematsu case in what are called ‘dicta’ –– statements made in written court opinions that do not affect the outcome of the case being heard. In a ruling restricting travel and immigration to the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘The forcible relocation of US citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful. ... Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear has no place in law under the Constitution. (He referred back to Justice Robert H. Jackson's dissent in the 1944 Korematsu Supreme Court case and quoted Jackson's words.)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor went one step further than Justice Roberts. ‘Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu,’ she wrote, denouncing it as 'gravely wrong the day it was decided.’

Despite the dicta, Korematsu v. United States still stands, a painful symbol of our country's racial prejudice. And how can we be sure it will never be looked upon favorably in the future and used to violate the rights of another group of American citizens?”

Another essay/commentary is “Keeping Our Democracy Strong.” The keyword is “our.”

“As important as our leaders and our institutions are in our democracy, it depends on all of us to keep it safe. Even in the United States, built on strong democratic ideals, deliberate violations of people's civil rights can and do occur. No matter what kinds of inaccurate words are used to hide these violations, we can name them for what they are, and speak out against them, loud and clear. We can bear witness to old injustices, learn from them, and do our best to ensure they never happen again.

In the 194os, taking photographs was complicated.

Cameras could be cumbersome, film expensive, and developing and printing photographs a complex process. Today, we can use our cell phone cameras to capture injustice when we see it, and quickly let others know. These images cannot be marked

‘impounded’ and left hidden in a filing cabinet.

We each have in our pocket a tool for social justice that earlier generations never could have dreamed of.”

Photo by Toyo Mayatake

Cameras –– bulky and rare then, handy and pervasive now –– are one of the remarkable ties to history. Images, and now video, are compelling evidence of the crimes of violence against people who are targets or who practice their First Amendment rights to protest. Witness the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this month in Minneapolis.

Among other ties to history:

• Then (and now), migrants and immigrant families were targeted by race.
• U.S. citizens were also arrested, detained, or worse.
• Officials used (and use) propaganda to lie about processes, procedures, and outcomes of a massive operation.
• People were required to show their “papers.”
• Uniformed law enforcement used chemical agents against protesters.
• Fear was a weapon.
• Those who protested often faced beatings, arrests, and even shootings.
• Families were often separated and given no information about the whereabouts of their loved ones.
• Fort Sill, used for past incarcerations of Native Americans and then Japanese Americans is now used again by the Trump Administration to incarcerate immigrants from Central America.
• Other sites, such as Fort Bliss and Terminal Center, once used as concentration camps for  Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, are now used to incarcerate hispanic immigrants.
• White supremacists and Christian nationalists supported “law and order” despite violations of the rule of law, Constitution, morality, and civil liberties.
• Some military service members and law enforcement personnel followed illegal orders.
• There was no accountability or justice for victims for decades.
• The negative impact on families lasted for generations.
• Then as now, officials covered up facts and prevented investigations.

"My question is always, why was I, a child, put into a

concentration camp? I was a citizen. 

That's against the Constitution."

– Joyce Yuki Nakamura Okazaki

This book and others came onto Navy Reads reading list after listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast production “Burn Order,” a story about how some leaders in the military justified racist persecution of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II, while others, including a Navy intelligence officer told the truth. Maddow documents heroic efforts by a woman and a lawyer to uncover the true reason for the illegal incarceration.

A key takeaway from then and now: Each person has the opportunity to make a difference.