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.”