The Asian American Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. xv, 228 pp., [8]pp. of plates. US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03778-8.
This book provides a notable addition to the revisionist literature on the wartime removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans (often, if imprecisely, called the Japanese American internment). In contrast to popular accounts that underline the patriotism of the American citizens of Japanese ancestry herded into government camps, revisionist accounts have emphasized the active role of the inmates in resisting their condition and protesting racist treatment. Among the best-known (or most notorious) dissidents was Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara, a World War I veteran embittered by mass removal. His actions in camp, especially his role in the chain of events leading to the so-called Manzanar Riot, have attracted significant attention since the war years. Yet the man himself has remained rather in the shadows. Eileen Tamura, a professor in the College of Education at University of Hawai’i Manoa, has produced a first biography of Kurihara.
Tamura’s early chapters deal with Kurihara’s boyhood in turn-of-the-century Hawaii. In Tamura’s portrait, Kurihara emerges as an idealistic and ambitious youth. Alone among his siblings, he decided to attend Catholic school in place of the Territory’s free public schools, and ultimately converted to Catholicism. In 1915, he moved to the mainland in hopes of attending medical school. However, after the US entered World War I, Kurihara enlisted in the US Army, though he served in combat duty for just two weeks before the Armistice. After 1919, he settled in California, despite the racial prejudice there, working as an accountant and on fishing boats.
The bulk of Tamura’s work covers Kurihara’s wartime confinement experience. Kurihara believed that the unconstitutional actions of the government in confining him on racial grounds without due process (the more insulting given his record as a veteran) voided his allegiance. At public meetings at Manzanar he proclaimed his attachment to Japan and denounced pro-American Nisei, notably members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), as traitors. Because of his advanced age and experience, and because he was willing to speak out openly, he became an influential advocate for anti-administration forces. In December 1942, after JACL leader Fred Tayama was beaten by dissident inmates, the kitchen workers’ leader Harry Ueno was arrested for the crime. Outraged, a mob of inmates formed. Kurihara addressed the mob in English mixed with Japanese, calling for Ueno’s liberation and for the “extermination” of a list of accused informers, whom he named. In the ensuing revolt, gangs invaded the suspected informers’ barracks, while protesters marched on the police station where Ueno was held. Military guards sent to restore order opened fire on the crowd, killing two inmates and wounding others.
In the wake of the incidents, Kurihara, Ueno and other “troublemakers” were arrested. Over the following months, they were held at a pair of isolation camps, Moab in Utah and then Leupp in Arizona, before being sent to the Tule Lake segregation camp. As Tamura recounts, Kurihara acted as a model inmate in these facilities. Chastened by his Manzanar experience, he refrained from political activism and was even threatened with violence at Moab for cooperating with administrators. Nevertheless, Kurihara determined to renounce the United States. Stripped of his citizenship, he accepted deportation to Japan, where he had never visited. Despite the hardships of life in postwar Japan, he remained there (working initially for US Occupation authorities, ironically enough) for the remaining twenty years of his life.
Tamura’s study is the last of a line of works in the University of Illinois Press’s Asian American Experience series supervised by the renowned historian Roger Daniels, who added a foreword (full disclosure: I edited a volume in this same series). Her work is noteworthy in that, while it underlines Kurihara’s exceptional activism, it uses his biography as a lever for examining larger questions about Japanese American wartime experience, notably the meaning of citizenship and the fluid nature of loyalty and resistance: for all of Kurihara’s asserted Japanese identity, his activism revealed his essentially American character. To her credit, while Tamura admires Kurihara’s principled stand—such can certainly be inferred from her book’s subtitle —she does not shy away from considering its paradoxes, and devotes an extended section to exploring whether he should be considered a hero or villain. The book is also a product of impressively thorough research, incuding Kurihara’s unpublished autobiography, while the author displays a mastery of the main secondary literature.
There are a few substantive matters the reader wishes Tamura had further addressed. First, while she explores Kurihara’s early embrace of Catholicism as an idiosyncratic and assimilationist move, she fails to note its connections to education, especially given Kurihara’s dream of attending medical school. Mainland Catholic colleges such as Loyola University in New Orleans admitted various Nisei, including some from Hawaii. Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska distinguished itself by graduating over a dozen Japanese-American medical students from Hawaii in the prewar decades. Another element deserving further study is the ambivalent connection between Kurihara and Togo Tanaka, the onetime Rafu Shimpo editor whose death Kurihara called for at Manzanar. Tamura notes their durable mutual esteem despite their disagreements, and cites Tanaka’s postwar articles praising Kurihara, but does not explain the context of their appearance. Worse, the author seems unaware of an important moment of missed collaboration between the two men. In February 1942 Tanaka and Larry Tajiri (the future editor of the JACL newspaper Pacific Citizen) proposed creating a United Citizens Federation in hopes of averting mass removal, and held a public meeting to organize it. Kurihara, unable to be present, wrote Tanaka to offer support and propose himself as leader of the fledgling organization, stating “I will gladly sacrifice my personal liberty, and resources for the sake of the the niseis,” While Tanaka reprinted the letter text in his diary, he apparently never acted on Kurihara’s offer. It is tantalizing to consider whether Kurihara’s wartime stance might have been altered had he undertaken partnership with his future adversaries following Executive Order 9066.
Greg Robinson
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada