An Absent Presence

The forced imprisonment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II was an unparalleled act in the history of the United States. Yet despite the fact that this internment has been the single most widely-reported and studied episode in the history of Asian Americans in the US, Caroline Chung Simpson argues that the shaping power this event has had in national and Cold War history has still not been recognized. Caroline Simpson looks at a number of provocative aspects of the United States government's treatment of Japanese Americans to make the case for the unrecognized saliency this relationship has had in Cold War history. She examines, for instance, the practice of sending anthropologists to the internment camps - as "community analysts" - to study the Japanese and to develop theories of Japanese behaviour that would be useful after the war. She then looks at the trial of the alleged Tokyo Rose - Iva Toguri d'Aquino - who, despite the fact that all reliable sources conceded "there was no Tokyo Rose", was convicted in an expensive and much ballyhooed trial that, Simpson argues, set the stage for the hysteria of McCarthyism. She revisits the Hiroshima Maidens project, an undertaking to bring young Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bombing to the United States for corrective surgery. Their treatments paid for by donations, the girls lived with American families in an experiment designed to celebrate the healing capacities of domestic life in the United States. Finally, she considers the experience of Japanese war brides of the 1950s, and the ways in which their treatment in the United States disguised racial hostility in a discourse of cultural pluralism.

ISBN 0822327562   Pages 224 ISBN13 9780822327561 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 503 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Hardback   Series title New Americanists Publication date 15 Nov 2001   Height (mm) 228 Library of Congress 2001040213   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 305.8956073   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		Acknowledgments
		Introduction		1
1		"That Faint and Elusive Insinuation": Remembering Internment and the Dawn of the Postwar		12
2		The Internment of Anthropology: Wartime Studies of Japanese Culture		43
3		How Rose Becomes Red: The Case of Tokyo Rose and the Postwar Beginnings of Cold War Culture		76
4		"A Mutual Brokenness": The Hiroshima Maidens Project, Japanese Americans, and American Motherhood		113
5		"Out of an Obscure Place": Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s		149
		Epilogue		186
		Notes		195
		Bibliography		216
		Index		226

"This impressive and well-written book presents important new historical and cultural material in an understudied period within Asian American studies."--David Eng, author of "Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America"

 Be the first to write a customer review