In May 2024, Penguin Classics published The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. Edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung, the anthology offers a comprehensive collection of literature on the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
For those who have followed recent publications on the camps, Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung should be familiar names. Abe is the lead author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse and a co-editor with Cheung and Greg Robinson on John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy. Others might know Frank for his groundbreaking documentary Conscience and the Constitution, which, when it hit screens back in 2000, alerted viewers to the lost history of the Heart Mountain Draft Resisters. Over the course of his career as a writer, actor, and activist, Abe has tirelessly researched the lost stories of Japanese Americans who resisted the incarceration orders despite pressure from within the community.
Floyd Cheung is a professor of English language and literature and American Studies at Smith College. In addition to his role as a professor, he is currently the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion for the college. Cheung is a prolific author whose work spans from poetry to literary criticism. He is the author of several poetry volumes, including Jazz at Manzanar, and several articles about Asian American literature and education. Along with working with Abe and Robinson as co-editor of On John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, he has edited several books including a anthology of Sadakichi Hartmann's poetry, H.T. Tsiang’s novels the Hanging at Union Square and And China Has Hands, and served as co-editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture.
I recently spoke with Abe and Cheung about the background for the anthology and the future of Japanese American history.
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Jonathan van Harmelen (JVH): Tell us about how your background influenced your work on this project.
Floyd Cheung (FC): I was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Las Vegas. I earned my BA at Whittier College and my MA and PhD in English at Tulane University. I’ve been teaching Asian American literature at Smith College since 1999.
Beginning in 2001, I’ve been teaching a course in American Studies on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and its aftermath. In addition to assigning texts like Okada’s No-No Boy and films like Rabbit in the Moon, I created a course reader that juxtaposed writings by Japanese Americans as they responded to the government documents related to each phase of their experience from Executive Order 9066 to various presidential apologies.
JVH: Frank, I understand that you went to UC Santa Cruz for college. Was there a moment when you were at UC Santa Cruz that inspired you to become an actor and activist?
Frank Abe (FA): Santa Cruz was great. Growing up in the sixties, television was my link to the outside world in Cupertino, California. For me, at the time, the Santa Clara Valley was a cultural wasteland. Just orchards and suburban tract houses. So books, television, and movies we my outlet since I didn’t have a really good public education in the arts from school. When I was at UC Santa Cruz, I started as a government major, but then discovered theater during my sophomore year and theater directing and switch majors and never, never looked back.
JVH: Turning to the anthology, something I noticed while reading is that you get a sense of resistance as a theme throughout, which I haven’t seen as much in previous anthologies.
FA: When you honestly look at the writings from camp and you apply a certain lens of looking for selections that directly address incarceration, you will find anger and resistance. The title book is The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, not the literature of Japanese Americans. And that’s a very specific period of time, and a very specific experience—one that was shared with a mass of people who had varying backgrounds, ages, experiences, but who all share the same experience because of only one thing: their race. And these 125,000 people were removed from the West Coast because of their race.
So when you look at the writings from the camps and after that address the experience of incarceration and the underlying causes and consequences that policy, there emerges a consistent position that opposed what was happening to them. They all knew it shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened to them, but it did.
If you picked up on that theme of resistance it is because that was a part of their experience. It was to contest injustice, and what emerges is a collective voice of a people who are unjustly imprisoned in time of war because of their race. We included the voices of 65 different authors who brought their perspective to this experience that gives you the sense of opposition to the government.
And I want to dispel any idea that we brought any biases in this project. We brought a lens to how we viewed this literature, but the material bears out a shared struggle against injustice and one to protect themselves from a series of government edicts that dehumanized them and divided the community.
JVH: Can you talk about how you selected these various pieces?
FA: For selecting which pieces to include, we had to identify important moments in the camp experience. For myself and Floyd, the selections really picked themselves. Excerpts like Toshio Mori’s Yokohama California naturally made sense because we wanted to show the Japanese America that was lost by forced removal. We wanted to show a view of Japanese America where Issei and Nisei lived together until December 7th. We thought the chapter from Shelley Ota’s novel Upon Their Shoulders beautifully illustrated the shock of December 7th in Hawai’i.
FC: I’ve always loved Toshio Mori’s “Lil’ Yokohama,” which provides a snapshot of a fictional Japanese American community enjoying a sunny day at the baseball field before the war. This exquisitely written short story gives us a sense of what was lost as the result of incarceration. The anthology is divided into three sections, “Before Camp,” “The Camps,” and “After Camp.” Of course, this story appears in the first section.
© 2024 Jonathan van Harmelen
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