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.

"[A]n engaging and deeply moving account of how remembering and forgetting the history of Japanese American internment have been fundamental to the postwar articulation of the United States as a democratic nation that was to prevail over its cold war enemies. . . . Beautifully written, with eloquence, deft and nuance, this book is a bold statement about the historical rootedness of cold war U.S. liberal ideology in the original violence of Japanese American internment." --Lisa Yoneyama," Journal of Asian American Studies"

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