Brandon Shimoda Delivers Talk on Japanese Internment for Inauguration Day

For Inauguration Day, Brandon Shimoda delivered a talk at the Holocaust History Center at the Jewish History Museum, in Tucson, Arizona; and the Asian American Writers' Workshop has published it. Titled "State of Erasure: Arizona’s Place, and the Place of Arizona, in the Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans," this piece (Shimoda's first public presentation in 40 months) provides a prehistory of internment camps: "[I]t did not begin with Pearl Harbor," he writes, and explores the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans as a "wartime exploitation." Importantly: "Often forgotten is that the exclusion zone also included southern Arizona."

One defense of internment was that it kept the Japanese safe during the war. There is an element of truth in this otherwise dubious defense, but only because it exposes a much darker truth. If the treatment of the Japanese Americans outside the camps was more hostile, more reactionary, more openly threatening than their treatment inside the camps, then where exactly was internment located? Internment was a facet of an even more pervasive and more barbarous national disposition. Which is why I locate the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the heart—conceived and constructed, in the end, by the human heart, which is superlatively, endlessly capable of manifesting, out of inexpressible, often corrosive feeling, the longest, most convoluted, yet most comprehensive path to the grave.

Please read it all at AAWW.