The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans
Frank F. Chuman, 1976
The first 7 chapters of the book deal with the Japanese immigration into the U.S. and the various anti-Japanese actions taken in the form of immigration policies, etc. and various cases that occurred as a result of the anti-Japanese prejudice.
Chapter 8 talks about the time just before WWII and covers things not seen in other books, examining what was going on in Japan at the time and how it related to the U.S. Great Depression and legal actions being taken to stop Japanese immigration. It also discusses Japan's economy of the time and how it looked to China as a market for its goods. It also discusses a 1932 joint US-Japan military exercise that ended up demonstrating exactly how Pearl Harbor could be attacked and destroyed, something that was done 9 years later, allowing plenty of time for the military to have taken proper measures to stop such an attack from being successful.
Chapter 9 goes into the internment camp/evacuation process, while Chapter 10 talks about the JACL and the Nisei involvement with the U.S. military resulting in the 100th and 442nd fighting groups. Chapter 11 goes back to the legal areas and examines the cases that challenged the evacuation orders.
Chapter 12 continues the examination of legal issues and further attempts even after the war to ban Japanese-Americans from owning land. Then it discusses how these Alien Land Laws were finally challenged and overturned. Chapter 13 deals with the Issei/Nisei fishermen in particular and the things that were done to them and how the fishing restrictions were successfully challenged.
Chapter 14 deals with the Japanese Evacuation Claims Act which resulted in the Issei/Nisei receiving a very, very small monetary compensation for the losses of their jobs, homes and personal belongings caused by the evacuation.
Chapter 15 deals with the loyalty questionnaire and draft resisters, including the history of the questionnaire, the problems it caused in the camp, and the rise of the draft resistance movement in the camps. Chapter 16 deals with the history of those who ended up renouncing their citizenship and the efforts by some of them to get their citizenship restored.
Chapter 17 is about the "strandees", those Japanese Americans who were in Japan when the war began and were thus unable to return to the U.S. Some of them were denied passports to the U.S. when the war was over because their U.S. citizenship had expired. The section also includes the story of Tokyo Rose.
The book then goes into the period after the war and how some G.I.s fell in love with Japanese women and wanted to marry them but couldn't bring them back to the U.S. due to the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924. The rest of the book deals with other legal matters affecting the Japanese-Americans and other minorities after the end of WWII.
(Due to the age of the book, 1976, there is no information on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which would have drawn a great deal of interest from the author, I am sure.)
A rather interesting albeit somewhat specialized-interest type of book.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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