Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II

In 1981, photographer Myers stumbled onto the dusty remains of the Japanese relocation camp of Manzanar in California. She set out to record the half-buried past of this and nine other camps, taking pictures of ruined barracks, tombstones, deserted gardens, moldering toys. Whispered Silences combines 65 of those stark duotone photographs of parched landscapes and forgotten objects with a smart, concise introduction to the Japanese American experience by Cornell historian Okihiro. Having survived horrifying conditions as plantation workers, indentured servants and picture brides, the first Japanese immigrants could only hope for better for their children, who, unlike them, could become citizens. But second-generation Japanese American citizens faced another hurdle in the paranoid racism that spawned a Bureau of Investigation report published in 1920 claiming that Japan was ""bent on a `program for world supremacy'"" and, some 20 years later, the interning of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Okihiro uses poetry and memoirs of internees who recall trying to create victory gardens from the sandy soil or paper flowers from orange wrappings, a resourcefulness that parallels the ""Spam sushi"" of their parents' plantation experiences. Okihiro's interwoven personal reminiscence is entirely apt, and his father's story in particular is a metaphor. The elder Okihiro left Hawaii to train in a segregated battalion ""knowing that his parents were in a little village just outside Hiroshima, that his brother was probably in Japan's military, that his own country distrusted him."" He would eventually earn a Purple Heart. (July)