Wendi Yamashita’s new book Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration (2024, Temple University Press) radically ruptures dominant representations of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. She articulates why the historical experiences of Japanese Americans must be understood within the frameworks of imperialism, racial projects, and settler-colonialism and in direct connection to the racialized experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC). Otherwise, mainstream representations of the World War II incarceration promote sanitized narratives of Japanese Americans as upstanding model-minority citizens who overcame racism, and thus deserving of redress. Such views are problematic for these interrelated reasons: (a) they categorically erase how anti-Black and anti-Indigenous ideologies have foundationally shaped the course of carceral and colonial violence in North America before, during, and after 1942, and (b) they stall much-needed progress on governmental action related to moving forward with reparations for Black and Indigenous communities.
Drawing on Queer of Color critique and other intersectional frameworks, Yamashita directly critiques a range of gendered and heteronormative representations of Japanese American citizenship, loyalty, and patriotism. Her approach is unique for challenging collective memories specifically produced and reproduced by Japanese American camp survivors, their descendants, and key institutions that support selective acts of remembrance. Here, a Queer of Color critique centers “an intersectional approach to comparatively understanding carceral experiences” (p. 53).
Significantly, Yamashita also breaks scholarly ground by rupturing common theories of Japanese American identity, especially in relation to rigid generational categories that generally follow a linear model as follows. The Issei or the immigrant generation, largely arrived in North America before 1930; the Nisei or the bicultural second-generation children of immigrants primarily came of age during World War II; and the Sansei or the third generation, are associated with being part of various social movements in the 1960s and 1970s and fought for (and obtained) redress. Yamashita’s analyses here are significant, given recent attempts by major Japanese American institutions to promote a unified Nikkei identity, a term encompassing all persons of Japanese lineage across space and time. Challenging straight-line assimilation theories, Yamashita introduces how underrepresented Nikkei subgroups, such as the Shin Issei or post-1945 Japanese immigrants and their descendants, mixed-race Japanese Americans, and Japanese Americans who identify as Queer, interpret racialized realities of the past and present differently, including how collective memories of the World War II incarceration resonate (or not) with how they understand their own sociocultural identities.
In Chapter 1, Yamashita focuses on the post-redress era, especially gendered and heteronormative representations of Japanese Americans during this time. Critiquing narratives of Japanese American respectability in a White-dominated society, she analyzes two events, the Japanese American National Museum’s 2011 Gala Dinner and the 2015 Day of Remembrance Los Angeles, and the ways that masculine retellings of Japanese American resilience and survival have dominated how Japanese Americans have attempted to rehabilitate their public image from enemy aliens to all-American patriots. Yamashita disrupts these narratives of multiculturalism and post-racial progress, where, as she notes, Japanese Americans, through these reductive acts of remembrance, “continue participating in the denial of property rights via incarceration that devalues Black lives and subjects them to even more brutal forms of punishment and death” (p. 44). Especially valuable is how she centers the perspectives of two multiracial and Queer-identified Japanese American speakers, whose insights “forc[ed] a discomfort with cultural nationalist and masculinist retellings of Japanese American history” (p. 46).
In Chapter 2, Yamashita delves into the politics of collective and individual memory using the case example of Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project. Denshō provides the most widely accessible digital archive of primary sources available to the public “to ensure that Nisei history lives on even after physical death” (p. 57). Yamashita meticulously content-analyzes select Denshō promotional materials and web-based content, including freely available online lesson plans about the incarceration of Japanese Americans geared toward teachers who teach middle and secondary students. By offering comparative approaches to understanding the World War II incarceration, these publicly available Denshō-endorsed lesson plans support a more expansive understanding of the relationship between carceral and racialized violence in the United States in what she describes as an aspirational “abolitionist future…that narrates carcerality as inherently part of U.S. democracy and not an exception” (p. 83). Yet, Yamashita also highlights the limitations of adequately representing complex lives through digital archives, especially how intergenerational trauma complicates one’s precise recollection of the past.
Yamashita explores a relatively unknown topic of the relationship between carceral and colonial violence at Manzanar in Chapter 3 by illustrating how the lives of Japanese Americans and Indigenous communities in the Owens Valley intersected. What initially brought these communities together was they were actively protesting the construction of a large-scale solar ranch nearby where the Manzanar National Historic Site sits that is also on the traditional ancestral homelands of the area’s tribal communities. Here, we learn how the Manzanar Committee, a nonprofit education organization “dedicated to educating and raising public awareness about the incarceration and violation of civil rights of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and to the continuing struggle of all peoples when Constitutional rights are in danger,” has, in recent years, made efforts to integrate Indigenous histories and perspectives into their education programs. What is especially significant is the lingering question Yamashita poses about the moral responsibility that the Manzanar Committee has “to recon with those histories and learn how to be ethical allies to Indigenous communities” (p. 103).
Chapter 4 delves into the efficacy of contemporary Nikkei youth engagement in collective-memory preservation, a challenging reality now that most Japanese American camp survivors have passed away. Yamashita traces the formation of UCLA’s Nikkei Student Union or NSU and the role of multigenerational Japanese Americans, ranging from Yonsei (fourth generation) and subsequent generations, as well as today’s Shin Nisei or the children of Japanese immigrants, in attempting to preserve Japanese American history while negotiating a shifting landscape of pan-ethnic identity formation among Asian Americans and race relations across the nation. Founded in the early 1980s, NSU was directly involved in the national redress movement. However, in more recent years, the organization has grappled with questions of long-term viability among a membership primarily consisting of Yonsei and subsequent generations who largely identify as assimilated ethnic Americans. Here, Yamashita captures the challenge of longstanding attempts in the co-ethnic community to sustain a coherent twenty-first-century Nikkei identity, although several Japanese American youth are working toward a hybrid future that both preserves collective and/or familial memories of the World War II incarceration while also critically interrogating how different intersectional realities impact their own positionality, especially their moral responsibility in continuing to support and uplift other racialized communities.
Carceral Engagements ends with critical reflections about the future of Japanese American memory in a highly fractured post-2000 world. Indeed, many Japanese Americans, especially Nisei and Sansei, stood up against racial injustice in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the litany of dehumanizing, racially derogatory, and xenophobic executive orders enacted during Donald Trump’s presidential administration after he took office in 2017. Here, Yamashita has a bold call for Japanese Americans across generational and intersectional lines “to mobilize against settler colonialism, antiblack racism, and immigration detention and deportation” (p. 135).
Yamashita’s scholarly approach could have been strengthened by drawing on seminal theories in Asian American Studies around cross-racial positioning. For example, in the late 1990s, Asian Americanists such as Claire Jean Kim introduced a revolutionary framework on how Asian Americans have been racially triangulated in a Black-White racial binary, providing insights on how foundational White-supremacy culture has been in not just maintaining fractured race relations over time but also in preventing the types of abolitionist activism and cross-racial solidarities that Yamashita calls for in Carceral Entanglements. Nevertheless, Yamashita’s thought-provoking new book reminds us that Japanese Americans are well-positioned to continue engaging in ongoing and reciprocal approaches to cross-racial advocacy, both critically reflecting on their familial and/or historical connections to the carceral state and maintaining solidarities with BIPOC communities and other Americans who find themselves continually subjected to state-sanctioned criminalization, exclusion, and violence.
Rachel Endo is an award-winning educator, leader, and scholar who is currently based in the Tacoma area. She was born and raised in Nebraska and hails from a multi-generational Nikkei family. A first-generation college student, she graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with honors, where she also earned her MA in Education and MPA in Public Management . She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. To learn more, including how to contact her directly, visit her website at: www.rachelendo.com
