Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America's First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp

All scholars of Japanese American incarceration have benefited from the work of Arthur Hansen, long based at California State University, Fullerton. Hansen, with Betty Mitson and others, conducted pioneering oral histories with survivors and administrators of the camps, and he has edited important memoirs of Nikkei activists. He has been a guide and inspiration to the Manzanar Committee and others working on redress and commemorations, and he has generously advised innumerable researchers. Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation (1974), his first co-edited collection (with Mitson), was foundational to the field, and his recent volume of previously published essays, Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Social Disaster (2018), demonstrated the breadth of Hansen's research and how he has sharpened his methodology and insights over time.Manzanar Mosaic has a narrower focus, consisting of two essays from the 1970s, co-authored with Hansen's students, and excerpts from five extended interviews conducted in that decade with prominent figures in that camp. “The Manzanar ‘Riot,’” written with David Hacker, is Hansen's most influential published work. It reinterpreted the December 1942 violence in the camp as a “rebellion,” prompted by widespread antagonism against the Japanese American Citizens League and a temporarily aligned Communist-oriented group for their cooperation with camp administrators. Hansen here adds to the original several footnotes pointing to recent sources, changes in some terminology (“internment” to “incarceration,” for example, and scare quotes in the title around “riot”), and a brief preface summarizing recent scholarly interpretations of these events.“Doho”—previously unpublished—describes the short-lived (1937–1942) Los Angeles-based, Communist-led Nikkei newspaper (its name means “Brotherhood”) which promoted Popular Front policies, especially unionization of Nikkei workers and anti-fascism, including opposition to Japanese militarism and denunciations of pro-imperial sentiment among Nikkei. Hansen and co-author Ronald Larson argue that Doho, despite its small circulation and adherence to the changing CP line, served as the locus of a progressive community among Japanese Americans.Three of the interviews were previously published, in longer versions. Sue Kunitomi Embrey describes her work as a twenty-one-year-old with the Manzanar Free Press and her growing awareness of conflict at Manzanar. Seasoned JACL-associated journalist and camp “documentary historian” Togo Tanaka reviews his contemporary analysis of factions among incarcerated Nikkei. Harry Ueno, whose imprisonment for alleged assault precipitated the rebellion, offers (in just three-and-a-half pages here, accompanied by a biographical sketch) his recollections of the violence. The two newly published interviews are with husband-and-wife Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black Yoneda, Communist activists in San Francisco before the war (Karl was also a Doho correspondent) and controversial at Manzanar for their full-throated support for the US war effort. These accounts, at about fifty pages each, are, thankfully, much longer than the others, although it may be noted that both Yonedas are now well known to scholars, through Karl's 1983 autobiography, Ganbatte, and two biographies of Elaine: Vivian Raineri's The Red Angel (1991) and Rachel Schreiber's Elaine Black Yoneda (2021).One value of the interplay of essays and interviews is that readers can see how Hansen, Hacker, and Larson utilized these primary sources for their analyses. Indeed, the essays incorporate entire passages from the interviews (e.g., pp. 102–3, 222–23). The differing perspectives of those interviewed—on class, politics, the war effort, camp administrators, gender, the “riot,” and race (Elaine was one of the few whites incarcerated at Manzanar)—will be illuminating, and challenging, even to readers well-versed in this literature. The juxtaposition of the essays is also revealing, as anti-union JACL leader Fred Tayama figures prominently, but with different antagonists, in both, and Doho's progressivism looks quite different before and after Executive Order 9066.With reluctance, given Hansen's distinguished career, weaknesses must be noted. Typographical and other minor errors abound, such as misspelling “Minidoka” concentration camp (pp. 120, 133) and, without evidence, labeling leftist congressperson Vito Marcantonio a “Communist Party member” (p. 48). The interpolation of new footnotes and terminology in fifty-year-old essays gets confusing; the publisher should have clearly denoted such changes. “Doho” (Hansen tells us) had been rejected in 1975 by Amerasia Journal because it analyzed only the few English-language pages of this primarily Japanese publication; one might expect that in publishing it now the co-authors would enlist a bilingual associate to provide—perhaps in an addendum—insights from the Japanese sections. (The essay's treatment of the US Left in the 1930s is simplistic at best, from today's scholarly standards.) Hansen republished “The Manzanar ‘Riot’” in Barbed Voices in 2018, so this reader wonders whether its reappearance here, just five years later, is justified without extended commentary about how it holds up after a half century. Reprinting older essays and interviews has value, but a stronger original interpretive introduction or substantive addenda could have made this volume a significant new contribution to scholarship on Manzanar.