Though much has been said about Japanese-American incarceration camps, little attention is paid to the community newspapers closest to the camps and how they constructed the identities and lives of the occupants inside. Dependent on government and military officials for information, these journalists rarely wrote about the violation of the evacuees’ civil rights. Instead, they concentrated on the economic impact the camps—and the evacuees, who would replace workers off to enlist in the military and work for defense contractors—would have on the areas they covered. Newspapers like the Cody Enterprise and Powell Tribune in Wyoming, the Lamar Daily News, and the Casa Grande Dispatch regularly published overly optimistic updates on the progress of construction, the size of the contractor payrolls, and the amount of materials used to build the camps. Ronald Bishop and his coauthors reveal how journalists positioned the incarceration camps as a potential economic boon and how evacuees were framed as another community group, there to contribute to the region’s economic well-being. Community Newspapers and the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps examines the rhetoric and journalistic approach of the local papers and how they informed the communities just outside their walls. This book will appeal to scholars of history and journalism.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021 Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Christopher Award “Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because of Mr. Brown’s ability to make us care deeply about the fates of these individual soldiers...a page-turner.” – Wall Street Journal From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and resistance, focusing on four Japanese American men and their families, and the contributions and sacrifices that they made for the sake of the nation. In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best—striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming "edge city" on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries. Many of its farmers were recent Japanese immigrants who, despite being rejected by white society, were able to make a living cultivating the rich soil. Yet the lives they created for themselves through years of hard work vanished almost instantly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. David Neiwert combines compelling story-telling with first-hand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war. Ultimately, Strawberry Days represents more than one community's story, reminding us that bigotry's roots are deeply entwined in the very fiber of American society.

2004 Washington State Book Award Finalist Judgment without Trial reveals that long before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began making plans for the eventual internment and later incarceration of the Japanese American population. Tetsuden Kashima uses newly obtained records to trace this process back to the 1920s, when a nascent imprisonment organization was developed to prepare for a possible war with Japan, and follows it in detail through the war years. Along with coverage of the well-known incarceration camps, the author discusses the less familiar and very different experiences of people of Japanese descent in the Justice and War Departments� internment camps that held internees from the continental U.S. and from Alaska, Hawaii, and Latin America. Utilizing extracts from diaries, contemporary sources, official communications, and interviews, Kashima brings an array of personalities to life on the pages of his book � those whose unbiased assessments of America�s Japanese ancestry population were discounted or ignored, those whose works and actions were based on misinformed fears and racial animosities, those who tried to remedy the inequities of the system, and, by no means least, the prisoners themselves. Kashima�s interest in this episode began with his own unanswered questions about his father�s wartime experiences. From this very personal motivation, he has produced a panoramic and detailed picture � without rhetoric and emotionalism and supported at every step by documented fact � of a government that failed to protect a group of people for whom it had forcibly assumed total responsibility.

It's 1941 and ten-year-old Norman Mineta is a carefree fourth grader in San Jose, California, who loves baseball, hot dogs, and Cub Scouts. But when Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor, Norm's world is turned upside down. Corecipient of The Flora Stieglitz Straus Award A Horn Book Best Book of the Year One by one, things that he and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind. At the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, Norm and his family live in one room in a tar paper barracks with no running water. There are lines for the communal bathroom, lines for the mess hall, and they live behind barbed wire and under the scrutiny of armed guards in watchtowers. Meticulously researched and informed by extensive interviews with Mineta himself, Enemy Child sheds light on a little-known subject of American history. Andrea Warren covers the history of early Asian immigration to the United States and provides historical context on the U.S. government's decision to imprison Japanese Americans alongside a deeply personal account of the sobering effects of that policy. Warren takes readers from sunny California to an isolated wartime prison camp and finally to the halls of Congress to tell the true story of a boy who rose from "enemy child" to a distinguished American statesman. Mineta was the first Asian mayor of a major city (San Jose) and was elected ten times to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he worked tirelessly to pass legislation, including the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. He also served as Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Transportation. He has had requests by other authors to write his biography, but this is the first time he has said yes because he wanted young readers to know the story of America's internment camps. Enemy Child includes more than ninety photos, many provided by Norm himself, chronicling his family history and his life. Extensive backmatter includes an Afterword, bibliography, research notes, and multimedia recommendations for further information on this important topic. A California Reading Association Eureka! Nonfiction Gold Award Winner Winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award’s Children’s Reading Round Table Award for Children’s Nonfiction A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Title A Junior Library Guild Selection A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year A Bank Street Best Book of the Year - Outstanding Merit

"Collection of autobiographical remembrances related to life in the Jerome and Rohwer Japanese American internment camps during World War II"--

"An oral history about Japanese internment during World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, from the perspective of children and young people affected"--

The New York Times bestselling graphic memoir from actor/author/activist George Takei returns in a deluxe edition with 16 pages of bonus material! Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in STAR TREK, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. THEY CALLED US ENEMY is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? George Takei joins cowriters Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.