Item No: #362062 [Report to My Compatriots from an American Prison] Amerika gokuchu yori doho ni tsugu. Ken Nakazawa.

The First Internment Memoir, Published in Japan in 1943

[Report to My Compatriots from an American Prison] Amerika gokuchu yori doho ni tsugu

Notes: Arguably the first published internment memoir, a little known book with just two holdings in OCLC. Nakazawa (1886–1853) was arrested on December 7, 1941, and placed in detention on Terminal Island, in Los Angeles. He was then sent to Fort Missoula. The rest of Nakazawa's family—his wife, Tomiko, and their three sons—were soon interned as well, along with other Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. In August 1942, Ken and Tomiko Nakazawa were repatriated to Japan as part of a civilian prisoner exchange between the US and Japan. Their American sons who did not speak Japanese stayed behind.

According to the introduction, Nakazawa kept a diary during his detention, but converted it to "ink on the heart" before burning the pages as his departure from Missoula loomed. This account comes from that "ink on the heart" (translation by your cataloguer). Nakazawa's memoir is unique in the internment literature. He had a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oregon. He had published a book of short stories in English, Weaver of the Frost, and he was the first professor of Japanese descent at a major US institution, teaching at the University of Southern California for sixteen years. He was also a vice-consul with the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, and gave speeches and wrote articles promoting Japanese culture and politics, particularly the Japanese invasion of China in the late 1930s. For this reason he was on the FBI's list of potential threats and was arrested hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Amerika gokuchu yori provides a day-by-day account of Nakazawa's internment, with descriptions of substandard conditions, humiliations, and the resilience of his compatriots. Nakazawa is very critical of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, supportive of the Japanese Imperial Army, and disappointed by how far America diverged from its ideals of equality and justice by rounding up Japanese Americans. Nakazawa, a skilled writer and careful observer, offers a clear example of the contradictory feelings many interned Japanese citizens felt—belief in their adopted country, despite their inability to become citizens, and affection for their native land.

Two of the Nakazawas's sons enlisted in the US Army, Karl with the 442nd Japanese American infantry unit in Italy, and Albert as part of the occupation force in Japan at war's end. Albert located his parents living outside of Tokyo after several years without any word from them.

In 1952, the Nakazawas were allowed to return to the United States. Ken planned to resume teaching but fell ill and died soon after he arrived. Tomiko became a US citizen almost as soon as Japanese nationals were allowed to do so and her oral history is on deposit at UCLA.

3, 6, 262, [5] pages.

For more on Ken Nakazawa, see Japanese American History: An A to Z Reference... His obituary ran in the Los Angeles Times on September 29, 1953. His son Albert O. Nakazawa has a brief entry about his military service in the DiscoverNikkei.org oral history project. Yuji Ichioka, in Before Internment, explores Nakazawa's wartime experience in Japan and is the only scholar I could find who cites this work.

OCLC: 55997627 (Oregon), 673585286 (NDL)

Edition + Condition: First edition. Pages tanned, else a very good copy in wrappers (paperback).

Publication: Tokyo: Masu Shobo (or Sonshobo), 1943 (Showa 18).

Item No: #362062

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