Left in SF Book Club: Strawberry Days

I recently finished Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community by Dave Neiwert. It's an interesting book, about the history of the Japanese community in Bellevue, Washington, from its founding in the beginning of the 20th century to its demise, during World War II.

Neiwert is, of course, the man behind Orcinus, probably the best blog around for following the rise of hate crimes and the antics of the Far Right. His reporting on the Minutemen, for example, has been very good at pointing out their roots in various white-supremacist groups, and how their rhetoric echoes much of the hate groups' previous pronouncements.

As you might guess from Neiwert's background, Strawberry Days is strongest when it details the historical roots of anti-Japanese racism, and how that racism manifested itself after Pearl Harbor.

"This is a race war," proclaimed Mississippi Congressman John Rankin on the House Floor. "The white man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism...Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear...I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps...Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!" [125]

He's also good at showing the fatal effect internment had on many of the small Japanese farming communities in the West. Through neglect, ongoing racism, and economic changes, very few members of Bellevue's Japanese community returned after the war.

I did feel that the actual experience of internment was not particularly strong. There's some interesting stuff about the internal politics of the internees (particularly around whether the young men should join the US Army), and some discussion about the role splitting the Bellevue community's location in the camps had in the eventual destruction of the community, but since the author's primary sources all leave the camps in fairly short order to farm in Montana or join the army, there was less detail on the camps than I would have liked.

An interesting point about this book is its suddenly increased relevance. As Neiwert makes clear in the epilogue, there are a number of parallels between the treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the treatment of Muslims and Arab Americans after September 11th. Although the internment of people this time has not been as wholesale and indiscriminate as it was during WWII, there is the fundamental fact that many people are imprisoned, simply because of their race, religion, or ethnicity. And just as it did then, the government insists it is doing this to protect "our way of life". To justify this latest gulag (yes, I said it), several right-wing commentators, most notably Michelle Malkin, have attempted to rehabilitate our view of the WWII internment. Neiwert has done quite a good job on his blog of countering Malkin and others' arguments, but Strawberry Days is a book-length refutation of the idea that this kind of racial roundup can be based on anything but racism.

This book is worth reading, especially now. Despite all the strum and drang on the news about whether Guantanamo is, in fact, worse than a Soviet-era gulag, or whether after inflation it's only 70% as bad, it is sometimes necessary to take a step back and remember that even if Guantanamo does not reach Pol Pot level, it is still the imprisonment of (many) innocent people, based on their race, ethnicity and/or religion. It was wrong during WWII when the US did it, and it's wrong now.

It. Is. Wrong.