« The Wyoming Quarter | Main | American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 2 »

September 6, 2007

American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 1

I
n about a month, the University of North Carolina Press will publish my new book "American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II." It tells the story of the enormous system of bureaucratic tribunals that was created between 1943 and 1945 to decide which Japanese Americans were "loyal" and which were "disloyal."

The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. Here is the first:

Q: How does AMERICAN INQUISITION differ from other studies on Japanese internment during World War II?

A: AMERICAN INQUISITION focuses on what you might call the "inner workings" of the Japanese American internment—the tribunals in the bowels of the wartime bureaucracy that tried to decide which Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States and which were disloyal. Even though these loyalty programs were an important engine of the internment program—the mechanism that continued to repress Japanese Americans long after the government made its initial decision to force Japanese Americans into camps—the literature on the Japanese American internment has paid scant attention to these tribunals.

Q: How did you become interested in writing about the Japanese American internment and about the government's loyalty tests for its supposed internal enemies?

A: The themes of racial incarceration and the persecution of internal enemies run strongly through my own family history. I am the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. My grandfather was incarcerated at the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938; this incarceration came after years in which my grandparents and all other German Jews were increasingly depicted as dangerous internal enemies to the German nation. For these personal reasons, I grew interested in how the United States racially identified and then incarcerated a supposed internal enemy during the same time period. Obviously, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment were different sorts of programs in crucial ways. Yet they shared a similar engine—the engine of racial scapegoating.

Posted by Eric at September 6, 2007 2:48 PM