Book Review

Canada and the United States

One of the wonderful things about interdisciplinary approaches to history is that they often produce fresh interpretations. Disciplines also accomplish their disciplining function through normative assumptions about scholarship, however, and books employing unfamiliar modes of argumentation often find an uncertain reception. Caroline Chung Simpson's book is indicative of recent trends within English toward the reading of historical texts in ways both familiar and jarring to historians. Scholars in the interdisciplinary endeavors of American Studies and Asian American Studies will feel familiar with its mixed history and English approaches.

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The main argument of Simpson's book is that Japanese-American history was an "absent presence" in the post-World War II period. According to Simpson, historical erasure of Japanese American identity in larger narratives of U.S. history was accompanied by intermittent attempts to make sense of Japanese-American internment. Borrowing from such theorists as Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Halbwachs for her analyses, Simpson focuses on historical incidents that she sees as key moments in remembering the war and internment. She has a chapter on the trial (1946–1949) of Iva Toguri D'Aquino, the Japanese-American woman accused of being the infamous "Tokyo Rose"; another on the 1955 "Hiroshima Maidens" project, which brought twenty-five women from Japan to the United States in an attempt to use plastic surgery to fix radiation scars, making them candidates for marriage; and, in her last chapter, she discusses the ways in which Asian war brides married to white GIs were represented during the 1950s.

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