| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 209 words from this article are provided below; about 387 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Post-war American Culture, 1945–1960. By Caroline Chung Simpson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xii, 234 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2756-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2746-5.)

Since the September 11 attacks, commentators have repeatedly invoked the specter of the internment of Japanese Americans to demonstrate the fragility of constitutional protections. The internment as the great caveat has clearly displaced the once common notion that it was a military necessity. But whereas the decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944) has become enmeshed in the curriculum of law schools, scholarly inquiry into how the internment shaped the postwar lives of Japanese Americans and the postwar culture of the nation has been sorely lacking.

Driven by the idea of the internment as a "vacated history" (p. 3), Caroline Chung Simpson's An Absent Presence thus arrives in timely fashion. She draws attention to the pivotal years from 1945 to 1960, during which time the popular image of Japanese Americans transformed remarkably from "yellow peril" to "model minority." Simpson analyzes "key instances of 'discourse' about the internment" (p. 8) through five chapters devoted to the trial of "Tokyo Rose," the Hiroshima Maidens project, Japanese war brides, and scholarly and journalistic writings on the internment.

. . .

There are about 387 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.