The Novelist Reimagining the Japanese American Internment
In 1943, the United States government administered a questionnaire to people of Japanese descent who had been confined to wartime concentration camps in California, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas. The forced imprisonment of some hundred and twenty thousand residents, a majority of whom were U.S. citizens, rested on dubious evidence that they posed any meaningful threat to American safety. The removal orders seemed cruel and arbitrary, given that they applied only to people living on the West Coast. Still, the government sought to measure their loyalty. The title of Karen Tei Yamashita’s fifth novel, “Questions 27 & 28” (Graywolf), refers to the survey’s last two questions:
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The Japanese American Citizens League, one of the first organizations that pressed Japanese Americans to view themselves as a community, had encouraged its members to prove that they were “200% American” and to view their incarceration as a kind of patriotic obligation. Some young men, eager to assert their Americanness, answered yes to both questions and volunteered for military service; members of the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team quickly became war heroes. Others feared that these were trick questions; there was a rumor that everyone would be sent to Japan anyway as part of a P.O.W. exchange. Those who answered no to the questions were, in most cases, imprisoned for the remainder of the war or beyond. They became pariahs referred to as “no-no boys.”
“Questions 27 & 28” is about what preceded and followed this episode. At first, the novel’s conceit seems familiar: a series of scattered, representative lives cohering into a kind of collective story. In the opening pages, the real-life Japanese writer Yone Noguchi—a sensuous seventeen-year-old bohemian who “has left everything behind for his first love, an English spelling book”—sets sail, in the eighteen-nineties, for San Francisco. Subsequent chapters dramatize the lives of other turn-of-the-century immigrants before returning to Noguchi’s thread, this time through the story of his son, Isamu, already an established artist, who voluntarily submits to internment as an act of solidarity.
As we encounter more people, Yamashita’s approach to narrating their stories grows strange. Life in the camps is told largely through collaged fragments of latter-day writings, testimonies, and oral histories; footnotes remind us that we are accessing these voices at a distance. Other experiences are recounted through dramatic dialogue, or from the perspective of an inanimate object; some chapters adopt the pulpy tone of a spy thriller, breaking from any sense that “Questions 27 & 28” is meant to be a straightforward account of the past.
What initially seems like a novel about the Second World War unspools into the stories of the researchers who first documented and wrote about camp life, and then of the scholars and activists who followed them. Government officials weren’t the only people interested in understanding Japanese Americans. Because of the unprecedented scale of forced removal, social scientists also viewed the camps as rich sites for field work. A recurring presence in Yamashita’s novel is the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), a project headed by Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She hired interned Japanese Americans, who had to work clandestinely, to document life behind barbed wire.
Drawing on these accounts, Thomas published some of the first books that explored the Japanese experience of the war at a time when the subject was seldom discussed, including in the Japanese American community. Yamashita imagines the anthropologist Rosalie Hankey Wax, now an elderly woman, reflecting on the work she did on Thomas’s behalf. She hadn’t expected that the lives she recorded would be fashioned into an official story, or that this story would take on a new political significance decades later:
Historical fiction usually takes for granted the existence of something called “history.” The past becomes a fixed backdrop for the reader’s own present, a way to appreciate how far we’ve come or to realize that nothing has changed at all. “Questions 27 & 28” is a work of fiction about the nature of history, and about the mechanics by which we come to know anything reliable about the past in the first place. It is a sprawling and overwhelming volume, encompassing about a hundred real lives and spanning more than a hundred years, so that the reader experiences the process through which the accumulated occurrences of the past get shaped into historical fact. Yamashita writes of the legal scholar Peter Irons as he explores the Department of Commerce’s archives in 1981. Working his way through the boxes, he finds a 1944 memo suggesting that the concentration camps were not a military necessity. Here was a “smoking gun” that would become a part of Irons’s book “Justice at War,” from 1983, which informed the movement for reparations, redress, and an eventual government apology. “His heart beats faster, but he needs to look placid, like it’s just paper,” Yamashita writes, as Irons wonders how he will get a copy out of the facility.
A novel about writers writing or researchers digging through archives runs the risk of tedium. But Yamashita is at her best when she zooms out of such small moments and meditates on the greater stakes of these scattered lives. “Even if we don’t survive the consequences of history,” Irons thinks, “what’s left of it becomes a record, stored on hundreds of metal shelves in acid-free boxes, forming an endless labyrinth. Of course, it’s just saved stuff.”
Yamashita, who is seventy-five, has always been fascinated by unlikely convergences. She grew up in Los Angeles, enamored with the countercultural and protest movements of the sixties, then spent long stretches of the seventies and eighties living in Brazil, pursuing an interest in the many Japanese immigrant communities there. She conducted serious inquiries into globalization and connection, held together through magical-realist quirkiness, in such novels as “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest” (1990), a work of speculative fiction about ecological devastation which is narrated in part by a sentient extraterrestrial orb, and “Tropic of Orange” (1997), in which characters across the U.S.-Mexico border realize their shared plight, owing to a mystical orange capable of shifting the Tropic of Cancer. She is formally restless. She’s written a play about cyborg kung-fu fighters, a series of short stories that adapt Jane Austen for the L.A. suburbs, and a memoir inspired by possessions left behind by a hoarder aunt.
In 2010, she published “I Hotel,” a novel about the Asian American activist movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies which was a finalist for the National Book Award. It consists of ten interlinked novellas recounting the decade-long fight to save the International Hotel, a San Francisco residence for working-class Asian immigrants. “I Hotel” signalled a shift in Yamashita’s approach, from postmodern whimsy to research-heavy experiments with intricate structures and intertextuality. Near the end of this complex six-hundred-page book, Yamashita switches to a collective pronoun, suggesting that a common dream has connected her characters. It’s typical of the rousing, cri-de-cœur style she uses to recover idealisms of the past: “We ran and ran,” she writes, as the hotel is finally reclaimed by developers who plan to raze it. “We’ve given our lives to this old place, but tonight we know our imminent failure,” she continues. “And for what? To resist death and dementia. To haunt a disappearing landscape. To forever embed this geography with our visions and voices.”
The United States began allowing Japanese people to leave the camps before the conclusion of the Second World War. In December of 1944, the Supreme Court had ruled that the government did not have the authority to detain “concededly loyal” citizens. But many had lost everything during the relocation process and had nowhere to return to. “What kind of poison freedom is this?” a character in “Questions 27 & 28” wonders.
In the decades after the war, Japanese Americans would be hailed as a model minority for their resilience and peaceful reintegration into American life. Yet the truth was more complicated. There’s a moment in Yamashita’s novel when James and Gordon Hirabayashi, two Japanese American academics, walk through a late-sixties demonstration at San Francisco State College, where James teaches. Gordon was a firebrand when he was young, having been imprisoned for challenging curfew and internment orders, but a kind of middle-aged disillusionment has set in. The youth are brash and outspoken, he contends, and “we’re has-been.” But a student activist named Paul, who also appeared in “I Hotel,” recognizes Gordon and shows that their generation views him as a hero. We understand why Paul thinks this. Though ostracized in their time, people who resisted internment are now seen as civil-rights pioneers. In “Questions 27 & 28,” as we read our way through the forties and fifties, we are ever conscious of that passage of time, across hundreds of pages, and of how this distance allows for new stories to be pulled from old materials. Most of us understand that history is often just the victor’s account of how things happened. But the novel’s achievement is that we are forced to experience this insight almost bodily. We feel the weight of the past, all these accumulated voices and perspectives, within and between Yamashita’s novels, as well as the process through which disparate stories, anecdotes, or experiences might coalesce as history.
“In the future,” Yamashita writes, looking at a little girl in a wartime photograph and wondering what she is thinking, “no one will remember this future.” Despite Yamashita’s best efforts, there remain limits to what the “endless labyrinth” of the past still holds. The historical record is often vague when it comes to the capaciousness of our forebears’ imaginations. But Yamashita is entranced by such absences, when fiction allows her to inhabit the dreams of these historical characters. A researcher named Nobuya Tsuchida recalls his work as an interpreter for a peace delegation of survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who visited New York in 1964. Tsuchida is assisting two men known simply as the Writer and the Reporter. One afternoon, the delegation visits the home of Yuri Kochiyama, a famed Japanese American activist, and meets her friend Malcolm X. “I have a memory of his tall benevolence,” Tsuchida thinks, yet, decades later, he has not been able to verify this afternoon in anything published by the Writer or the Reporter: “I see now that big history encompasses little histories, overshadows and encumbers. The small matters of small individuals become invisible, pass into oblivion.” Still, he knows it happened. After leaving Kochiyama’s apartment, Tsuchida, the Writer, and the Reporter wander into Smalls Paradise, a Harlem night club, and debate Malcolm X’s politics. “How do we make peace from war?” they wonder, but Tsuchida is already somewhere else, lost in the wail of a saxophone.
We’re always participating in a larger story, even if it’s up to people in the future to make sense of it all. It’s also up to them to decide what genres to use; we don’t choose the conventions we live within. One of the most wondrous chapters in “Questions 27 & 28” imagines a conversation between Michi Nishiura Weglyn, the author of “Years of Infamy,” a 1976 book that helped inspire the redress-and-reparation movement, and Wayne Collins, a civil-rights lawyer who challenged the government’s relocation orders. It’s presented as dramatic dialogue, or maybe as absurdist tragicomedy. “Where are we?” she asks. He surmises that they’re “in the clouds.” It can’t be Heaven, he jokes, because that’s not where he’s supposed to end up. Is it Purgatory? “We’re in the archive,” she realizes. “I loved the archives. I’ve come home.” ♦