Book Review: Infamy

Infamy:The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War IIby Richard ReevesHenry Holt, 2015The prickly, depressing subject of the ten U.S. 'relocation centers' established in the wake of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is at the heart of Richard Reeves' new book (with its groaningly cliché title) Infamy, and although the broader narrative here encompasses not only Japan's war with America but also the damning mechanics of race-hatred and ethnic profiling as they apply today, the focus is on those internment centers, where more than 120,000 American Japanese, more than 70 percent of whom were American-born, were herded and imprisoned for the duration of the war, in conditions Reeves wastes no time in characterizing as outrageously unjust:

Guarded by soldiers in machine-gun towers, none of them were charged with any crime against the United States In fact, there was not a single American of Japanese descent, alien or citizen, charged with espionage or sabotage during the war. These men, women, and children were locked up for the duration of the war because they looked like the enemy, the troops of Imperial Japan, a place most of them had never seen.

His story has heroes, like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, civil rights attorney Wayne Collins, and it has villains as well, two in particular: “Two army officers of the Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt and Colonel Karl Bendetsen, both bigots, the former a fool, the latter a brilliant pathological liar, drove the process, grossly exaggerating the dangers posed by West Coast Japanese.” But his engrossing account is drawn as much from first-hand accounts and diaries of the interned as from broader-scope histories of the clash between the U.S and Imperial Japan. He details every step of the iniquitous process, from the rounding up of Japanese Americans in their homes and businesses to their daily existence in the camps to their eventual release and return to their normal lives, and at every turn of the tale, Reeves matches a thorough command of the facts with an equally thorough disgust for them. No more angering general account of the WWII Japanese internments has yet been written, but Reeves obviously draws a certain amount of encouragement from the resilience of the detainees themselves:

This is an American story of enduring themes: racism and greed, injustice and denial – and then soul-searching, an apology, and the most American of coping mechanisms, moving on. Through it all, the desert heat and windstorms and bitter cold, the breakdowns and suicides, the overwhelming majority of the Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans remained loyal to the United States. Even as their country's government humiliated first-generation immigrants, or Issei, in front of their Nisei children, young people strove to resume some semblance of normal American life in the camps.

Reeves contends that his book is not about Japanese Americans but rather simple about Americans - “on both sides of the barbed wire.” It's intensely uncomfortable reading, and all the more valuable for that.