Autobiographical Literature of Japanese-American Women in World War II Internment Camps

When empirical Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Californian racism toward the ethnic Japanese, which was previously fading, came back to dominate the minds of white "Euroamericans" very quickly. This eventually led to the forced internment of ethnic Japanese people on the Pacific coast, American citizens or not, to "War Relocation Centers", which is lovely nomenclature for "concentration camps."

Yet, because Japanese women were subjected to this atrocity, they reacted to it by growing stronger. They rose above their female-oppressing culture and gross racial injustice, becoming more culturally American in the process.

These women, both of the first Japanese generation to live in America (born in Japan; called "Issei") and of their children, the second generation (American-born; called "Nisei") rose above their traditional Japanese gender roles in reaction to the internment experience. Issei women kept their families together when the FBI took their husbands away; they became strong for their families while the Issei males became weaker; and the Nisei women fought back by doing something very culturally uncharacteristic of Japanese women: by publishing autobiography and other non-fiction about their experiences of oppression in the various camps.

Japanese culture, brought to America, lived by the Issei, passed down to the Nisei, is very oppressive toward all who follow it, especially women. The tenets of this culture are respect, modesty, and honor. According to Ann Rayson, a "major concern (of the Issei) (was) showing a 'good face' to the hajukin (Caucasian)" (44).

Thus, in the autobiographical Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Wakatsuki Houston's father does his best to maintain his honor when he is taken away by the FBI (to be questioned about disloyalty to the United States) before the actual internment of the ethnic Japanese. Wakatsuki Houston writes: "He didn't struggle. There was no point to it. He had become a man without a country....all he had left at this point was his tremendous dignity....and he would not let those deputies push him out the door. He led them" (7-8).

While two-thirds of the interned ethnic Japanese were Nisei-American-born and American citizens-they were still young and followed their Issei parents' directions. The Issei did not struggle incredibly against the government's decision to intern them. According to Wakatsuki Houston: "There is a phrase the Japanese use in such situations, when something difficult must be endured. You would hear the older heads, the Issei, telling others very quietly, 'Shikata ga nai' (It cannot be helped.) 'Shikata ga nai' (It must be done)" (14).

When examining Farewell to Manzanar, we first see Jeanne's mother beginning to recognize herself as a person, not as a submissive wife, after the first night in the Manzanar barracks with her husband far away. The conditions inside the Manzanar barracks were deplorable. Wakatsuki Houston writes: "(My mother's) eyes blazed then, her voice quietly furious. 'Woody, we can't live like this. Animals live like this" (24).

The family's patriarch, Jeanne's father and her mother's husband, is finally released from the labor camp he was placed in, and allowed to journey to Manzanar. However, when he rejoined his family, he was a different man. Where he was previously led by honor, dignity, and a pressing desire to do what was right for himself and his family, he is now a wife-beating alcoholic. As chronicled by Wakatsuki Houston:

He made (Mama) bring him extra portions of rice, or cans of the syrupy fruit they served (at the mess hall). He would save this up and concoct brews in a homemade still he kept behind the door, brews that smelled so bad Mama was ashamed to let in any visitors. Day after day he would sip his rice wine or his apricot brandy, sip till he was blind drunk and passed out. In the morning he would wake up groaning like the demon in a kabuki drama; he would vomit and then start sipping again. He terrified all of us, lurching around the tiny room, cursing in Japanese and swinging his bottles wildly. No one could pacify him. Mama got nothing but threats and abuse for her attempts to comfort him (59-60).

In Japanese culture, children are frequently subservient to the patriarch, much like women. However, finally something snapped and familial roles are finally broken:

...the way Mama lay there I believed she was actually ready to be beaten to death. Kiyo must have felt something similar, because at the height of Papa's tirade he threw his covers back, and in his underwear he jumped out of bed yelling....(he) punched Papa square in the face. No one had ever seen such a thing before. Blood was pouring onto (Papa's) shirt, dripping down onto Mama's dress. Kiyo stepped back, crouching, staring at the blood. This was like bloodying the nose of God....Papa's gaze went bleary from the drink in his veins and dropped to the same shirt, to the blood still spattering onto Mama's dress (63-64).

Through time, as Papa continued to sink deeper and deeper into alcoholism, the family fell apart. According to Wakatsuki Houston: "My own family...collapsed as an integrated unit. Whatever dignity or feeling of filial strength we may have known before December 1941 was lost" (33).

When the ethnic Japanese were finally released back into American society, their reactions were mixed. They were put in the camps, basically, because they were considered possibly "disloyal" to the United States, which is one of the most horrible insults one can make to an ethnic Japanese. According to Wakatsuki Houston:

It was the humiliation. That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with late, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it. At ten I saw that coming, like a judge's sentence, and I would have stayed inside the camp forever rather than step outside and face such a moment (118).

This quote is interesting not only because it portrays the dishonor that the ethnic Japanese would suffer with return to American society but also portrays one of the reasons the Japanese allowed the internment ("something in me, something about me deserved it.") Both the Issei and the Nisei almost had an inferiority complex when comparing themselves to white Euroamericans.

Upon release to society at large, the ethnic Japanese did not return to their familial and gender roles as if nothing happened. Mama now knows how to deal with her husband.

He began to pace back and forth across the floor, while Mama looked at me cautiously, with a glance that said, "Be patient, wait him out. After he has spoken his piece, you and I can talk sensibly." He saw this and turned on her.

"Hey! How come your daughter is seventeen years old and if you put a sack over her face you couldn't tell she was Japanese from anybody else on the street?"

"Ko," Mama said quietly. "Jeannie's in high school now. Next year she's going to go to college. She's learning other things..." (159-160).

We see in this passage that Jeanne, a Nisei, has learned many things from American society-and that her mother has also. Her father refuses to assimilate into American culture because of his horrible experiences in the labor camp in North Dakota before joining his family at Manzanar. Thus, when Mama is forced to step up and keep the family together, and when Jeanne tries her hardest to completely assimilate into Euroamerican culture, we see that it is the women who have begun to become more culturally American rather than the men.

The ethnic Japanese obviously could not "fight back" against the atrocity of racially-based internment committed by the American government in any physical manner. Thus, it is very significant that Nisei women found another way to fight back: by writing of their experiences.

Writing autobiographical non-fiction is incompatible with Japanese behavioral codes and traditions (Rayson, 44). However, according to Rayson, "Japanese-American women...were better able to accept the loss of self-esteem which, as women, they never had to the same degree as Japanese-American men...(women) were better able to distance themselves from the relocation experience and then assess it" (45).

Furthermore, the "revelation of self, history, and culture is more natural and less demeaning to women than it is to Japanese-American men, who want to establish themselves as part of the mainstream" (45).

When a female Nisei writer feels pride about herself or her writing, it is "usually masked, understated, or presented modestly because of the expected negative response to their 'vanity' in writing a life study at all, believing that their experiences are 'worthy' of an autobiography" (Jelinek qtd. In Rayson, 44).

Thus, while it is difficult for Nisei women to write about their experiences when interned, it is still "easier" (if such a word can be used in this context) for them to write about what has happened than it is for their male equivalents.

Thus, through writing about their experiences, Nisei women have assimilated into American culture. "No longer is speaking out discouraged as it is in traditional Asian culture. The act of moving away from one's ethnic culture in itself can be a revolutionary act as is the act of writing, particularly writing about the self when one has been schooled in reticence" (48).

Thus, much as in Amy Tan's Chinese-American literature, the Nisei-even Nisei writers-needed to find a way to reconcile the "two parts" of themselves, the two seemingly incompatible cultures they nonetheless absorbed. Monica Sone, in Nisei Daughter, finds that she has combined these two cultures on the last page of her volume:

I had discovered a deeper, stronger pulse in the American scene. I was going back into its main stream, still with my Oriental eyes, but with an entirely different outlook, for now I felt more like a whole person instead of a sadly split personality. The Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one (238).

We now see that the internment experience, while the internment is still an atrocity, made both Issei and Nisei women assimilate into American culture much more quickly than they would have without it. These women learned to stand up for themselves and to be strong, not just for themselves but for their families. Oppressive Japanese culture and gender roles have faded and the Sansei-the children of the Nisei and now the third generation of Japanese-do not follow the rules of oppressive Japanese culture. They may have Japanese faces, but they are truly American. We should celebrate the liberation of the ethnic Japanese woman. She is, like any other woman, strong when she must be.

Works Cited

Exec. Order No. 9066 (1942).

Garza, Jennifer. "Rousing Manzanar's memories: More than 60 years ago, Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and move to a Sierra camp. Lasty month, a group took a painful trip back." Sacramento Bee, The (CA) 09 May 2007. Newspaper Source. EBSCO. Dixie State College of Utah Library, St. George. 29 Nov. 2008 .

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company Trade & Reference Division, 2002.

Kim, Elaine H. "Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature." Cultural Critique (1987): 87-111. JSTOR. Dixie State College of Utah Library, St. George. 29 Nov. 2008 .

Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. "Twelve Asian American Writers: In Search of Self-Definition." MELUS 13 (1986): 64-65. JSTOR. Dixie State College of Utah Library, St. George. 29 Nov. 2008 .

Rayson, Ann. "Beneath the Mask: Autobiographies of Japanese-American Women." MELUS 14 (1987): 43-57. JSTOR. Dixie State College of Utah Library, St. George. 29 Nov. 2008 .

Rico, Barbara Roche, and Sandra Mano. "Japanese Americans: In Camp, in Community." American Mosaic : Multicultural Readings in Context. Boston: Houghton Mifflin College Division, 2000.

Sone, Monica Itoi. Nisei Daughter. New York: University of Washington P, 1979. 145-64.