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Book Review
| Stephanie Bangarth, Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–49, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Pp. 280. $98 (ISBN 978-0774814157).
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| In recent years, the study of the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II has taken a noticeably transnational turn. Brian Hayashi's Democratizing the Enemy (2004) and Eiichiro Azuma's Between Two Empires (2005) exemplify this turn, each of them shifting the typical American-centric focus toward an investigation of Japanese Americans as border and culture straddlers. Stephanie Bangarth's Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–49 shares with these works a desire to examine events of the wartime period in a two-country context. Bangarth's two countries, however, are the United States and Canada. |
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This is a sensible focus. Both of these allied North American democracies faced a similar military threat along their west coasts after Pearl Harbor, both had sizable populations of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancestry (collectively the "Nikkei") along those coasts, and both responded by rounding up those populations and forcibly relocating them into detention facilities in the late winter and spring of 1942. Indeed, given these similarities, a book-length comparison of the two countries' policies calls out to be undertaken. (Roger Daniels's Concentration Camps North America is now more than a quarter century old.) |
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Bangarth's focus is, however, narrower than that. The comparison she draws is between the forces that gathered to protest and challenge the two governments' policies. This is an important contribution to the literature for a number of reasons, not the least of them that it helps to refute the commonly voiced assumption that "just about everyone" in the months and years after Pearl Harbor supported the repression of the Nikkei. It is also important because it vaults the protest of the wartime sufferings of the Nikkei to a more correct place in the twentieth-century narrative of rising opposition to racial injustice. At least south of the 49th parallel, that picture has long been painted mostly in black and white; Voices Raised in Protest reminds us that the portrait is actually more inclusive than that. |
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Bangarth's approach to her subject is topical rather than chronological. A brief first chapter summarizes and contrasts the two governments' policies for eviction and incarceration of the entire Nikkei population of the west Coast (some 120,000 in the United States and some 20,000 in Canada), as well as the dispersal of the evicted people toward the east and the renunciations of citizenship and demands for repatriation to Japan that some filed. Successive chapters document and compare the wartime advocacy and protest efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians (chapter 2), of religious groups and the media (chapter 3), and of other "minority" advocacy groups (including Japanese American groups) as well as individuals (chapter 4). Chapter 5 details the litigation in both the United States and Canada that was brought to challenge various aspects of the governments' programs—curfew, exclusion, and detention of American citizens in the United States, and deportation of Canadian citizens in Canada. Bangarth notes that the nonchronological approach to her subject might lead the reader to "experience periodic feelings of déjà vu as some events and issues are examined in relation to the specific actors previously mentioned in other contexts" (12). This reviewer's experience was not so much déjà vu as vertigo; the desire to construct a complete picture of a discrete episode, such as the litigation challenging deportation, required somewhat dizzying trips through multiple chapters. A more chronological narrative might have been a more reader-friendly approach. |
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In Bangarth's chapter 6, she concludes that the protest movements in the United States and Canada were more instrumental than has thus far been acknowledged in furthering the discourse of "civil rights" (in the United States) and "human rights" (in Canada). As a result of these movements, she argues, "dissent, including dissent from minority representative organizations, became more acceptable" (183), and advocacy groups emerged better situated to collaborate on future efforts at securing human rights and equal justice. |
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These conclusions are important and well-documented. Yet a very curious comparative question remains. Both nations implemented policies that placed people of Japanese ancestry under curfew, forced them from their homes, expelled them from a huge swath of territory, incarcerated them, and led many of the American and Canadian citizens among them to renounce their citizenship in favor of deportation to Japan. Yet the pattern of protest to these policies was inverted on opposite sides of the border. In Canada, no legal challenge to eviction, exclusion, or incarceration arose, but the planned program of deportation drew both a lawsuit and protest from Japanese Canadians and others that was so extensive that it led the government to abandon its plans. In the United States, just about the opposite was true: individuals and groups did mount legal challenges to eviction, exclusion, and incarceration, but those Japanese Americans who renounced their citizenship were the beneficiaries of precious little public support, and were vilified by the mainstream Japanese American community. At the end of Voices Raised in Protest, Bangarth observes that "groups of Canadians and Americans, including those of Japanese ancestry and other minorities, raised their voices in protest and prompted government officials to reevaluate, alter, or abandon their discriminatory policies altogether" (194). At the macrolevel, this is true. At the microlevel, however, the patterns of effort and success in the United States and Canada were puzzlingly out of sync with each other; Bangarth's very good comparative study would have been even stronger if it had pursued this puzzle more directly and vigorously. |
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| Eric Muller
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| University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill |
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