Book review: Japanese Americans voice the pain of mass incarceration

During World War II, Fred Korematsu, one of the 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans incarcerated under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, refused to be moved into horse stalls and was convicted for resisting. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged his conviction, but the Supreme Court ruled against him, citing military necessity. Forty years on, however, a federal district court vacated the conviction, because the Department of Justice had originally withheld evidence showing there was no military necessity. Korematsu received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Reparations were paid to him and others of Japanese ancestry. But the legacy of those imprisonments is pivotal for many Japanese Americans. Fourth-generation Japanese American poet Brandon Shimoda’s “The Afterlife Is Letting Go,” a well-researched, intriguing essay collection, reappraises not only the official narratives but also the supposedly ameliorative efforts made subsequently.

In 15 essays, Shimoda blends interviews and personal insights, many gleaned from his visits to concentration camps around the West. Initially at least, the multiplicity of voices presented lend the book an almost Lyotardian awareness that no metanarrative can conclusively encompass what happened. Shimoda’s astounding prologue, “Paper Flowers,” frames the book’s concerns with the image of a Japanese man, James Hasuaki Wakasa, in the desert bending to pick an unusual flower. But what seems to be a beautiful image transforms into one of brutal governmental violence: We learn the man was in the Topaz concentration camp and shot by a white teenage guard whose account, Shimoda skillfully demonstrates, was not credible.

In the same camp, two Issei men erected a 2,000-pound stone monument to Wakasa, but the government demanded the monument’s destruction. Instead, the two men buried the stone, creating a covert memorial site. Years afterward, when it was dug up, survivors and descendants of Topaz, along with archaeologists and Topaz Museum members, agreed to leave it in place. One archaeologist explained, “Excavation and removal are by their nature irreversible and destructive acts.” However, in 2021, the museum, founded by a white English teacher, relocated the stone without notifying the Japanese American community. Shimoda writes: “I had a theory before visiting the Topaz Museum: that it is not for Japanese Americans, but about them. And that it might not even be about them.”

The term “internment camp” was long used in official documents to minimize Japanese Americans’ pain. Consider the majority’s statement in U.S. vs. Korematsu: “We deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies — we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order.” It is thus significant that “The Afterlife Is Letting Go” is built around what critical race theory would call the “counter stories” of Japanese Americans.

The book’s style is anything but dogmatic — it shares an aesthetic with Shimoda’s poetry, which sometimes marries abstract ideas with seemingly unrelated concrete impressions. In one essay, when Shimoda reads an Issei couple’s letters while sitting in the barracks of Ft. Missoula, Mont., he finds it difficult to reconcile his grandfather’s imprisonment with the barracks’ “charming, willowy air.” And in “The Wooden Building Will Be Left for Revenge,” a man on Angel Island, Calif., whispers “researching the ancestors” to him, and Shimoda is unsure whether this is meant to be a question. Later, he repeats the words so frequently, he writes: “They became phenomenal, until I was no longer sure if the man said ‘researching’ or if what he had actually said was ‘rehearsing.’ Because they were doing that, too.”

A grand narrative of sorts does emerge, as the book comes into conversation with other anticolonial works such as Deborah Miranda’s “Bad Indians,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Nothing Ever Dies,” Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas.” In certain experimental pieces, Shimoda stacks others’ counterstories without exposition, privileging the composite group perspective over his individual take. “Researching the Ancestors” and “Rehearsing the Ancestors” are two such compilations. The former consists of quoted responses to: “What is an ancestor? What is your relationship with them?” Fellow poet Mia Malhotra writes, “Someone whose energy I feel pass through me,” and Shimoda’s young daughter answers, “A dead person you love.”

In “To Force Upon Them the Authority of History,” the author amasses quotes about how incarceration has been taught. A man recounts presenting his model of the Topaz Art School: “Suddenly my class of almost all white students would turn slowly to look at me like I was a statue in a museum.” A woman mentions her model of the Tanforan horse stall where her grandmother was incarcerated. She received a C-plus because, she explains: “The project was supposed to be about genocide. But the incarceration was not murder-y enough.” Shimoda’s equalizing of numerous remembrances produces an indictment of white supremacy by way of simple accumulation: The anecdotes are similar enough, voluminous enough, that a reader must conclude the racism was systemic.

While this strategy produces a resonance, Shimoda’s experiment can, perversely, keep sad experiences emotionally flat for the reader. The depth of his own descriptions and insights highlights this; for instance, after interviewing his grandmother, not incarcerated because she lived outside the exclusion zone, Shimoda notes, “I felt seedless and pale, the diminishment of being Japanese in favor of being American.” But in “Japanese American Incarceration for Children,” he surprisingly sets forth the paradox of accumulation: “The history has experienced a strained frustrated life. The more it is told, the less the public seems to remember, so when it is told — most frequently provoked, these days, by present injustice — it begins with a reiteration of the facts. It is less about facts though, and more about having to start, with each telling, all over again, to appease a citizenry that is not listening, that is defined by its refusal to listen.” With these observations, Shimoda requires readers to consider that the flattening he has artistically reproduced may also be the feeling of unheard Japanese Americans.

The Korematsu majority opinion was never expressly overturned. In 1983, addressing Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who vacated the lower court’s conviction, Korematsu said, “We can never forget this incident as long as we live.” As if yielding to that exhortation, “The Afterlife Is Letting Go” becomes a textual monument for present-day conditions. It recognizes that a literature of and for the people, not government documents, may be a balm for the obfuscations of power, memory and time.

Anita Felicelli served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021 to 2024 and is the author of several books including “How We Know Our Time Travelers: Stories.”