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Reviews
| Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations. Edited by Akemi Kikumura-Yano, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, and James A. Hirabayashi. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. viii + 227 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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Asian American museums and historical sites have only recently received national recognition despite the long presence of Asians in the Americas. In 1985 and 1996 respectively, the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar and the Angel Island Immigration Station became National Historic Landmarks after decades of community campaigns. Within this context, the proactive establishment of a national museum celebrating Japanese American social history merits special attention. Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations is a rare collection offering seventeen different, yet interlocking perspectives on the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo. The authors are museum staff, trustees, consultants, scholars, and affiliated others who emphasize multi-ethnic collaboration in the planning, implementation, and maintenance of the museum. The details of these collaborative projects provide an excellent institutional history of JANM, including specific strategies applicable to others working in the museum industries. |
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How can the social history of Japanese Americans be honored, preserved, and exhibited to interest non-Japanese without diluting the specificity of the community? This anthology's first section, "The National Museum: Mission and Leadership," provides some answers through six essays describing the goals of the museum and its fund-raising and outreach strategies. JANM conscientiously "builds community" by working collaboratively on projects that emphasize shared experiences, a paradigm that moves the museum beyond specifics of Japanese American experiences to highlight cross-ethnic narratives: resentments during periods of war or social upheaval, daily life in immigrant enclaves, sports narratives, and ethnic foodways. |
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The seven case studies in Part II focus on specific programs and exhibits situated at varying local and national scales. Much of the local programming highlights the multi-ethnic diversity of Southern California. Claudia Sobral's "Finding Family Stories" examines collaborations with other Los Angeles ethnic museums that create cross-cultural dialogue through the exchange of family stories. Sojin Kim's "All Roads Lead to Boyle Heights: Exploring a Los Angeles Neighborhood" examines the ethnic transformation of a once robust Japanese American neighborhood that was emptied during the forced internment during World War II, to be repopulated by more recent Latino and Asian immigrants. |
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One of the most illuminating articles examines the tensions among JANM, Jewish Americans, and the National Park Service regarding a traveling exhibit about Japanese internment housed at Ellis Island in 1998. "Coming to Terms: America's Concentration Camps" examines what author Karen L. Ishizuka describes as the "semantics of suppression" (p. 107) over JANM's naming of America's internment of Japanese Americans as "America's Concentration Camps," leading to protests by some concerned with the history of the Holocaust. Asian American Studies scholars, on the other hand, have claimed the term to take issue with the U.S. government's euphemistic and disingenuous naming of Japanese American incarceration in "assembly centers" and "relocation centers." |
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The exhibition controversy did not raise protests from Jewish Studies scholars or community groups but from the National Park Service (NPS). The exhibit ran with no major incident in Los Angeles, and JANM had consulted national Jewish organizations concerning the politics of terminology during the planning stage. However, the NPS feared potential controversy when the exhibit moved to New York and informed JANM "that the word 'concentration' must be removed from the title" (p. 108) before it could show. The issue spiraled into a full-blown controversy with headlines in New York newspapers and involving U.S. senators. After the addition of a definition of "concentration camp," the exhibit ran without any further incident. |
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The brief final section on "Collaborative Dimensions in Transnational and Global Settings" includes two narratives of international partnership and exchange programs with the Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil and two Japanese museums in Okinawa and Osaka. The section ends with an ambitious project linking researchers of the Japanese diaspora to the International Nikkei Research Project written by the three editors: Akemi Kikumura-Yano, James A. Hirabayashi, and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. |
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Common Ground's emphasis on collaborative projects provides a refreshingly optimistic view of the metropolitan American city, promoting the enduring possibilities of multi-ethnic communities rather than dystopic scenes of urban strife. Japanese American Nisei and Sansei patrons, school groups, and other museum visitors will most likely pass Common Ground on the bookshelf for lighter fare, yet professionals and scholars in Ethnic Studies and Museum Studies will find the institutional history and programmatic details valuable.
Jeffrey A. Ow
Arizona State University
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