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Review Essay
JAPANESE AMERICANS AND THE WAR IN COLORADO
Nikkei Amerikajin To Senso: Rokujunengo No Shinjitsu: Kororado Nihonjin Monogatari. By Eiichi Imada. Osaka, Paredo, Tokyo: Seiunsha, 2005. 339 pp. Photos, illustrations, and bibliography. ¥1800.
Off the Fat of the Land: The Denver Post's Story of Japanese Internment during World War II. By Kumiko Takahara. Powell, WY: Western History Publications, 2003. 198 pp. Maps, tables, photos, illustrations, bibliography, notes, and appendix. $16.95 (paper).
Amache: The Story of Japanese Internment in Colorado during World War II. By Robert Harvey. Boulder, CO: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004. 246 pp. Photos, notes, and index. $85.00 (cloth).
Koko Ga Watashi No Kokyo Desu: Kororado San Ruisu Bare Nihonjin Nyushokusha No Monogatari. By Harumi Kato. Tokyo: Shinpusha, 2004. 191 pp. Maps, photo, illustrations, and bibliography. ¥1800.
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When considered together, the four recent monographs discussed below greatly solidify our understanding of the experience of Japanese Americans in Colorado during World War II. |
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In English, the title of Eiichi Imada's new book is "The Story of the Japanese in Colorado: Japanese Americans and World War II—The Truth after Sixty Years." Although originally from Japan, Imada has sunk deep roots in the Colorado Japanese American community as the long-term publisher of the Rocky Mountain Jiho, a Denver-based vernacular newspaper. |
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Imada's account of the war years is squarely situated within a longer history of Japanese Americans in the thirty-eighth state. Despite its subtitle, the book presents detailed information about the Japanese pioneers in Colorado and the initial formation of its early Japanese American community. |
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Readers will immediately wonder about the title, since it indicates that Imada presents startling revelations that have been heretofore unknown. Although these are more modest than his title implies, Imada does recount little-known stories that bring Colorado's history to life. Unlike previous Colorado historians, for example, Imada details accounts of young Kibei—Americans of Japanese ancestry whose parents sent them to be educated in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. A number of Kibei returned to Colorado right before the United States entered the war. Before Imada, no one had explored their particular situation as an integral part of the larger Japanese American experience in the states. Imada also recounts the little-known story of the Ozaki family, who were deported from Peru during World War II and who eventually settled along the Colorado Front Range. |
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Of course, the stories of Kibei and Japanese Latin Americans have already been recorded in the scholarly literature, but not necessarily in Colorado. Imada does not tell us if the experiences of Colorado Kibei and Japanese Latin Americans were different from counterparts in other Rocky Mountain states, the Southwest, or anywhere else. Still, Nikkei Amerikajin To Senso offers a solid, chronological narrative, and Imada provides detailed personal and family histories that enliven his account throughout. |
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If oral histories and biographies offer one kind of data about the Japanese American experience during the war years, other approaches offer new insights into the institutions and conditions that framed that experience. Kumiko Takahara's recent Off the Fat of the Land is an excellent example of this point as she highlights how a regional media outlet, the Denver Post, played a major role in both shaping and reflecting the public's view of people of Japanese ancestry. Originally born and raised in Japan, Takahara is a retired professor of Japanese who taught for many years at the University of Colorado, Boulder. |
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In her introduction, Takahara describes how lurid articles from the Post in local archives caught her attention and made her curious about American-style racial prejudice. After reading in more depth, she became convinced that anti-Japanese sentiments during the war could best be captured by carrying out a detailed "content analysis" of the Post's feature articles, editorials, and letters to the editor. |
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Over the next fifteen years, Takahara conducted a remarkable piece of research. In her "Notes" (pp. 188–194), she cites literally every major article about Japanese Americans in Colorado that appeared in the Post between 1942 and 1945. Her detailed presentation of the Post's coverage provides a hair-raising litany of anti–Japanese American rhetoric. The racial hatred expressed in the Post is palpable and will serve as a potent reminder to those born after the war of how virulent and openly expressed were anti-Japanese feelings during the war years. |
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Takahara bluntly conveys her contempt for the injustices of racist irrationality. However unpalatable some may find this bluntness, Takahara deserves credit for her laborious efforts. Her outstanding chapter on three Nisei sisters, tried and convicted as "Benedict Arnolds in Skirts" for helping two German prisoners of war in their attempt to escape, makes her point indelibly. It alone is worth the price of the book. |
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To her credit, Takahara also considers how influential the Post actually was during the 1940s and acknowledges that this is almost impossible to gauge. For what it is worth, when Colorado voters had the opportunity toward the war's end to approve a state "alien land law" that would have made it illegal for immigrant Japanese to buy property, the referendum failed. Considering the Post's endorsement of the land law, its ability to influence local perceptions of Japanese Americans must be questioned. Takahara fails, however, to address a potentially fascinating comparative case study. If the Post, a key media outlet in Colorado, was not all that influential, in what ways did it differ from a newspaper that evidently was, such as the San Francisco Chronicle? |
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If Takahara's book explores the larger public's view of Japanese Americans during the war, Robert Harvey's monograph provides the most detailed history of Camp Amache yet published. It is based on a judicious mix of archival and newspaper sources, written and oral history accounts by survivors, and Harvey's survey of the secondary literature. |
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Robert Harvey is a local Denver-area teacher. His detailed history of Camp Amache, formally known as the War Relocation Authority's (WRA) Granada Relocation Center, bespeaks his passionate interest in the topic. Although not as thorough an account as Harlan Unru's two-volume online study of Manzanar, most readers of Amache will feel that they have learned something about almost every aspect of the camp. Harvey is also a good writer, and his detailed coverage is not at all tedious. This book is an engaging read, perhaps because Harvey offers a thoughtful mix of perspectives, and his many quotes respect differences of gender, generation, and political perspectives inside the camp and among the various Euro-Americans in Colorado and beyond who set it up and then helped run it. |
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In the final analysis, however, Harvey's portrait of Amache does not seem that different from available accounts of the other WRA camps. To be fair, this seems to be characteristic of a good deal of the literature in Japanese American studies as a whole. Unless we carry out descriptive work with an eye to broader comparative or analytic themes, we run the risk of repetitiveness and of particularism, rendering the relevance of our accounts even more limited than straight descriptions should be. |
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For example, Harvey mentions that as in other WRA camps, some of the Issei (first-generation) residents of Camp Amache purposely refused to obtain jobs. And while some Amache residents dissented, their rebelliousness encompassing refusals to be inducted into the U.S. Army, popular resistance in Amache appears to have been limited in comparison to some of the other WRA camps. Harvey, however, does not grapple with this fact, although his data suggests a provocative question. Considering the clearly colonial attitudes of Amache's director and its leading "community analyst," why were the Californians held at this location seemingly more tractable than Japanese Americans confined elsewhere? |
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In Koko Ga Watashi No Kokyo Desu ["Here is My Home Town: A Story of Japanese Immigrants in the San Luis Valley, Colorado"], Harumi Kato highlights the personal experiences of Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) and Kibei (second-generation Japanese Americans educated in Japan) before and after the war. They were the first American-born generation who spent their childhood and adolescence in small towns and villages in this region, located in the southern-central part of the state. |
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Kato was born in Japan after the war. She took her BA and MA degrees in Colorado and has lived in Denver since 1989, working mainly in the area of TV news for a Japan-based broadcasting company. |
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Kato's language skills and expertise in interviewing allow her to describe efficaciously the experiences of ordinary individuals living in a fairly isolated rural setting among a high concentration of Mexican and Mexican American residents. These oral histories are important contributions because only a few secondary accounts have commented on Japanese Americans in this old and ethnically variegated agricultural region. |
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Because the small farm settlements were somewhat dispersed, the Colorado Japanese immigrants and their descendents in San Luis shared some experiences with the majority of the prewar Japanese populations on the West Coast. Overall, because they were few in number and fit into local hierarchies of power and privilege, the Issei pioneers and their descendants in the San Luis Valley seemed able to integrate more thoroughly in rural Colorado than in the Far West. |
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During the 1940s, however, personal accounts clearly indicate that Japanese Americans—both adults and children—faced immediate hostility even in the small communities in the valley, where they had been relatively well accepted before the war. Here again Kato has made a significant contribution by describing the experiences of Japanese Americans who were not incarcerated in the WRA camps during World War II, which have been largely undocumented in both the scholarly and popular literature. |
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Finally, Kato brings us up to date and effectively links the past to the present by identifying a clear pattern in the evolution of most of the Japanese American communities in rural Colorado and elsewhere in the Rockies and the intermountain states. They begin as small, close-knit, ethnic communities before the war; rapidly expand in population during the resettlement period; and, finally, disperse in the new millennium, when the most visible signs of territorially based Japanese American farming clusters and communities have been erased. |
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In sum, this is an important and innovative contribution to the literature on the Colorado Japanese American experience. Perhaps the book's main limitation stems from Kato's treatment of Buddhism as the pervasive if not the sole source of Japanese American cultural heritage. Here, Kato's analytic insights clearly suffer because she focuses too narrowly on the San Luis Valley. As in California and Washington, Issei Christians were present in Colorado from early days. A Euro-American Methodist minister started to work with Japanese Americans in Pueblo during the first decade of the twentieth century. Similarly, in Brighton and Greeley, two farming communities around Boulder that had Japanese American populations, Issei and Nisei gathered at the local Methodist churches, where they sometimes set up their own services. Had Kato referenced a more comprehensive, comparative perspective on Japanese Americans, she might have looked into why Buddhism prevailed in the valley, whereas in most urban and rural settings in Colorado, a notable Christian presence developed within Japanese American communities well before the war. |
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These publications have undoubtedly each made a substantive contribution to our understanding of the Japanese American experience in Colorado. Each is commendable because it provides the foundation for additional research on more specialized topics. Although none of the authors considered here has chosen to deal with the more broadly comparative, let alone analytical, importance of their topic, their books raise many questions concerning the regional characteristics of the history and experience of Japanese Americans in the Rocky Mountain West. Perhaps future scholars will take up their challenge and ask, "How is the history of Japanese Americans in Colorado similar to and different from that of Nikkei in other parts of America or the Americas?"
Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
University of California at Los Angeles
Kenichiro Shimada
Gordon W. Prange Collection
University of Maryland Libraries
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