American and Japanese Relocation in World War II; Fact, Fiction and Fallacy
Lillian Baker, 1996
This is one of the books that causes intense reactions on the part of people reviewing it on amazon. It's either love it or totally hate it; nothing in the middle. It's not the only book I've gone over that has drawn that type of review, either, although such books are rare.
She starts off by saying the purpose of the book is to be historically correct. One of the problems with history, and telling whether or not it's correct, is that it is history, not something happening right now that you personally can look into. So you have to study whatever you can; books, movies, pamphlets, etc, from whatever sources you can and hope you will come up with an accurate profile of what actually happened.
If 95% of the sources you consult say things happened a certain way and 5% says the exact opposite, it's not impossible that the 5% one is correct, but the odds are against it, especially if the 95% of materials were written by people who are qualified to write about a particular time.
This is obviously one of those 5% type of books.
What the book does is mix actual factual information with rumors and distortions of information. For example, she states that "Families were kept together at great cost to American taxpayers." Any even moderate research done shows that this statement is outright false. Many families were separated especially right after the start of the war when fathers were arrested and interned for the rest of the war for being priests, community and business leaders, etc. The "great cost" to American taxpayers is offset by the fact that the camps were meant to be self-sustaining and many raised much of their own food, built their own furniture, etc.)
The book includes a reproduction of a yearbook from a Manzanar school. The author apparently doesn't understand that the purpose of any yearbook from any school is to present the best face on everything that happened at the school; in other words, they are propaganda agents for the school administration and nice mementos for the students. Do they prove that things were really great? Absolutely not, not at any school; the yearbooks gloss over the bad stuff except in the most extreme cases. So adding the entire yearbook as an Appendix and, I assume, using it to try and prove how good things were in the camps for the internees is pretty much a waste of space. This takes up almost 70 pages of a roughly 240 page book, or almost 30% of the book.
By the way, I've seen other authors address the issue of the yearbooks and newspapers produced at the centers and camps and they say the same thing I have; such items are "feel-good" purposes and don't necessarily reflect things the way they really were.
Ten more pages are spent reproducing two Congressional bills, one being the Civil Rights Act of 1988 and the other relating to redress issues.
Appendix D is about a letter to J.Edgar Hoover, citing some rather spectacular claims such as there were 100 Nisei who were "human bombs" on Hawaii and prepared to spread "contagious disease germs" in Pearl Harbor. (She doesn't really state what the letter writers qualifications were; how did he know these things to be true?) Anyhow, in a letter from J.Edgar Hoover dated February 2, 1942, the following statement is made: "The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data." In other words, Hoover must not have thought much of the original letter's claims.
Appendix E starts out by saying "Today's revisionist historians claim that ‘there was nothing done in Hawaii' where almost half the population consisted of first and second generation Japanese." I don't know what author's she's talking about since virtually all the books I read that discussed Hawaii at all point out that there were some Issei and Nisei taken prisoner, and that the vast majority were not since they were made up a major portion of the work force and their work was necessary.
That's the nature of the book. Setting up straw men, including irrelevant information, or distorting information that is actually there. A complete refutation of the book is, at least in my opinion, not worth taking the time to do. They are far too many good, reliable sources of information to waste time pointing out all the problems with this book.
Skip it and go read better and more reliable works.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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