This book maps the terrain of memory in the wake of large-scale injustice, using five case studies of how the unjust wartime imprisonment of Nikkei in North America has reverberated in both Canada and the United States over the past six decades: politically engaged sociological writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of personal disclosure during American efforts at redress, the political and cultural questions that arose in Canadian redress work, the ritualized commemoration of suffering in the Manzanar pilgrimages and in the codification of Fred Korematsu Day, and the pursuit of retroactive diplomas for Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians forced from their high schools, colleges, and universities in 1942. Building on these case studies, the book offers a transnational study of how Nikkei strive not to lay their past to rest, but instead to perpetuate it in ways that encourage direct, empathetic, and muscular political engagement across often profound cultural and political divides. In this respect, it follows a particularly important thread that binds people together, allows them to coexist, and, thereby, to become more fully human.

A case study of how wartime internment reverberated in the life and work of Japanese American intellectuals, this essay discusses the career and interests of Tamotsu Shibutani, a sociologist who began his training as part of Dorothy Swaine Thomas' Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Though recent scholarship has noted some of the ethical problems that attended the use of Japanese American participant observers during the war, this essay concentrates instead on how interned intellectuals responded to their double role of both researcher (and intellectual) and object of study. I argue that in the case of Shibutani, his circumstances and identity shaped his scholarship, both as an academic endeavor and a political project. By tracking Shibutani's postwar scholarly activities, I show that his wartime experiences--as an internee, military officer, and participant-observer--reverberated in his sociological publications long after the war's end.

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