BOOK REVIEW ON LAST WITNESSES: REFLECTIONS ON THE WARTIME INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE AMERICANS.

Harth, Erica. Editor. Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans. Palgrave: New York. 2001. Reviewed in the Asian American Press.
This book was written before 9-11, 2001. Yet, it has an uncanny message for the security bureaucracy that is trying to make America safe from domestic terrorists.
Let me explain with a seeming digression. Behrooz Arshadi, a 48-year-old Iranian who fled to the United States in 1987 was "detained" with over 500 other Muslim security risks for three days without counsel and without charges. He was strip searched, finger printed and photographed. Upon his release with his fellow detainees, an Officer of the Peace told him to return to his f---ing country.
In response to these mass detentions, John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, criticized the actions of the Homeland Security Agency and the policy of Special Registration launched by the Internal Naturalization Service by stating that "the current situation isn't all that different" from the one that led to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The round up of Japanese into the Internment or Concentration Camps began in February of 1942. Sixty-one years later, there is another wave of suspicion and protective security procedures which single out a specific group of aliens based on ethnic origin, and religion (Shinto and Islam).
Erica Harth has compiled a book of testimonials about the effect of the Internment on Japanese Americans (note that there is no hyphen between the two nouns-they are both Japanese and American in heritage), which contains a moving autobiographical account of John Tateishi. He was in a camp for four years as a child. He remembers the forced removal to the camp, the unexplained disappearance of his father from the camp for over a year, and the protests against the camp managers. Eventually, he received his graduate degree in English literature, and in 1988 successfully helped win the struggle to achieve reparations to pay for the unjust internment. One can only wonder when the children of the recent interned Muslims will successfully achieve redress for the actions of the Department of Justice following 9-11.
Other than being timely, why is this book important? The methodology of the book is unique. It publishes personal accounts from three types of witnesses:
1) The Japanese who lived through the isolation, punishment, internal turmoil, and external oppression of the camps. We are reminded that the two camps in Arizona-Poston and Gila River-were the third and fourth largest communities in the State. Many who went to their internment quietly soon became public activists. Many who went to college became social workers, doctors, lawyers, or joined other professions equally committed to social reform and community health.
2) The most stunning contribution to the collection is by those Caucasian Americans who lived in the camps and had responsibility in administrating the lives of the internees. George F. Brown, the son of the Anthropologist G. Gordon Brown, relies on his own childhood memories and the treasure of his father's reports to the War Relocation Authority to narrate and analyze the ambiguous and ambivalent role of the government anthropologist who helped make sure the camps were orderly. Several other contributions form the backbone of this broader view of the camps.
3) The last segment of contributors is by young Americans who have no historical or ethnic relationship to the period of Internment. This section makes us realize how important the memory of this incarceration is to our history, and to our ability to plan a better future. The contributors raise the question of how do we preserve this history, and seek out its meaning.
While these writers discuss the various and multiple monuments to the many camps, we should begin to construct in our minds the monuments we will need to make to our Arab and Muslim neighbors. The no-no boys in the Japanese Internment Camps refused to go to war or to become American citizens. They were asked to take loyalty oaths that were clearly improper at best or illegal at worst. Today, Attorney General Ashcroft is threatening to annul citizenship to alleged terrorists. Is there an historical lesson here that we should learn?
The advent of this book sixty-one years after the Presidential Order in 1942 to create the Concentration Camps testifies to the reality that the effects of a war last a very long time. As we prepare for the war against Iraq, let us realize that the military victory may be quick, but the psychological, sociological, and political effects will last from generation to generation, far more than just a half-century or a century. We must learn from the past that the way we treat our own people will be the way we can judge the rightness of our own causes-domestic and foreign.