Nov/Dec 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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"For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren": Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942

By Brian Masaru Hayashi

Stanford University Press

217 pp.; $35

Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II

By Page Smith

Simon & Schuster

476 pp.; $27.50

Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona

By Richard Nishimoto

Edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

University of Arizona Press

262 pp.; $45, hardcover; $19.95, paper

Breaking the Silence: The Redress Movement in Seattle

By Yasuko I. Takezawa

Cornell University Press

248 pp.; $37.50, hardcover; $14.95, paper Whispered Silences

For another valuable perspective on the internment, see Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II, with text by Gary Y. Okihiro and photographs by Joan Myers (University of Washington Press, 249 pp.; $60, hardcover; $29.95, paper). Myers undertook a personal odyssey, visiting the desolate sites of all ten of the wra camps in which Japanese Americans were held during the war. Her haunting photos of the camps as they are today--and of objects left behind there--evoke the suffering of the internees with stark beauty. Okihiro (a leading scholar in the field of Asian American studies) contributes a superb essay that draws heavily on the memories of those who were in the camps while placing their experience in historical context.

On Sunday evening, December 7, 1941, the college group from Saint James Episcopal Church in Los Angeles (a Caucasian congregation) met as planned with the college group from Saint Mary's Church (a Japanese congregation). Earlier that day, when news came of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, some ...