Uprooted by Albert Marrin breaks many of the “rules” that I have, correctly or not, picked up from other nonfiction writers–or perhaps mostly from my critique group. I have been discouraged from shifting out of the historical narrative to refer to current events and from using first person to bring myself into the narrative. (That one goes back at least to my high school English teacher—and yours, too, I’m sure!) I have learned to avoid getting bogged down in backstory and to get right to the narrative. Yet Marrin, National Book Award finalist, does all three of these. His book doesn’t suffer. Indeed, he clearly has used them with intention and to good effect.

Backstory: The title of Marrin’s book is Uprooted, and, indeed, it serves as a refrain through much of the book. Japanese Americans were uprooted and suffered greatly as a result. The subtitle is also apt: The Japanese American Experience During World War II. Yet there are no Japanese Americans in the narrative (other than a single sentence reference in the prologue) in the first fifty pages of his dense text. The book begins appropriately enough with the attack at Pearl Harbor. But chapter 1 is titled “The Pacific Age,” in which Marrin examines Old Japan, late imperial China, and the conflicts between the two East Asian countries. The next chapter, “Dreams of Fortune,” examines immigration to the United States, first generally, then with a focus on Chinese and Japanese immigration. Japanese emigrants begin entering the United States on page 51.

My critique group would have had a cow with me if I had submitted to them, in monthly installments, ten 5-page drafts to critique with before beginning the main narrative of my book. (Marrin, more of a professional than I would have had weekly critique group meetings to get through his lengthy text.) Their critique is irrelevant for me as a reader. I loved the extensive backstory. His book was exactly what I needed to take in the full scope of the subject–a scope whose extent I understood but of which my knowledge and understanding was incomplete and not well connected. I agree with Marrin that understanding the removal and internment of Japanese Americans can only be understood in the context of the Pacific Age which had been taking shape for decades. (I imagine a reader who is primarily interested in the uprooting would use the table of contents and begin reading at page 67 or 92.)

Anachronism: When writing about a historical concept that may be new to readers, I am tempted to make analogy with something in the present. But someone in the business–I don’t recall who–told me to avoid such anachronisms. So I took note of the few times when Marrin did the same. He compared Japanese geta to “today’s flip-flops.” He explained the concept of euphemism, used perniciously by the War Relocation Authority, to more benign uses of today: “passed away,” “senior citizens,” “put to sleep.” When General DeWitt banned the use of the term “concentration camp” for being offensive, Marrin explained that it was “not ‘politically correct,’ as we might say today.”

First Person: I can fairly say that it startled me the first time Marrin inserted himself in the narrative:  “When I was a boy, my parents and their friends could read English perfectly. But after six decades in America, they still had Polish and Russian accents.” Where did he come from? I know the author has been telling the story, but I didn’t think he was part of the story. Did Marrin (or his editor) think the inclusion of this personal connection to Issei and Nisei experience would give him the necessary bona fides to write about an ethnic group to which he did not belong? I suspect it was rather to make the case more effectively that immigrant accents are natural and not a reason for making pejorative judgments. As in: I, the author of this book, your tour guide through this chapter of history whom you have come to trust, has had a similar experience. You wouldn’t judge my parents, would you?

A few pages later, Marrin enters the drama again the day after Pearl Harbor: “I was nearly six years old when he [Roosevelt] addressed Congress and the nation.” Again, it was startling and more than a little disconcerting. But then: “Besides the rich tone of his voice as it came over the radio, I remember the sound of breaking glass.” His parents and his neighbors were throwing their glassware, all cheap Japanese imports, into the street in protest. What a powerful image. What better way to show the state of mind of average Americans following the Date that Will Live in Infamy. Could he have referred to the event in the third person? Yes. There would have been newspaper accounts to use. But how much more effective to describe his own sensory memory of the event and to implicate himself, through his parents, in the event.

Other things need to be praised about Marrin’s book. First, of all the research. As stated above, he covers the entire topic which required readings in all its many corners. The extent and depth, too, of his research are impressive. (I was surprised that he did not include mention of the Harry Ueno incident and demonstrations at Manzanar and disappointed he did not refer to Santo Tomas when recounting the liberation Philippines—but, hey, this book is very complete.) The best part of his book is the many first person quotations he includes to tell the story from different points of view, especially the Japanese Americans’. Even when they come from secondary sources, the quotations are superbly chosen: telling in their detail, often moving or surprising in their content.

For all the content and detail, Marrin is a master of providing convincing expressions of the big picture, as well. His exploration of the Nisei experience: “Nisei faced questions we all must answer in growing up: What path should I take in life? How shall I earn a living?” On the need for wartime propaganda: “Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a nation’s strength depends upon its people’s willingness to sacrifice for victory. Doubts about a war’s conduct and morality can weaken national unity and the will to fight.” His rationale for the injustice of the uprooting: “The American ideal of justice is based on individual rights and equality before the law. It rejects any notion of group guilt.”

(It is interesting to note that when the racial generalizing goes the other way, it is allowed to pass unquestioned. A Nisei GI happened to be the one to free Yanina Cywinska from Dachau even as she stood blindfolded, awaiting her own execution for aiding a Jew. A Californian in 1991, Cywinska told a reporter, “To this day, if anyone says the word ‘Jap,’ I become a vicious woman. I adore Japanese people for giving me the chance to live.” Of course, it wasn’t the Japanese people who liberated her but one individual Japanese man (or, perhaps, his unit). We humans are prone to generalization, affinities and prejudices, that are primarily not rational. I write this after having watched the Olympics and found myself rooting for certain countries and their athletes and not others. Japan and France: yes. R.O.C. and Germany: not so much. I can identify my reasons easily enough, yet the bulk of sports fandom resides in the gut, as does nationalism more generally. Sportsmanship, though, means rooting for a team, not against the other. Positive generalizations are much preferred over negative ones. Nevertheless, we should be aware whenever we make them.)

I appreciated Marrin’s explanation for inaptness of the term “internment camp.” Internment during wartime, he explains, “is part of American and international law. …Except for the community leaders arrested in the days after Pearl Harbor, no other Issei had their cases heard by a special panel and thus were not interned.” They were, more accurately, imprisoned.

Marrin convinced me that the internment camp is not a legally accurate description of Manzanar et al., but I do not agree that it is (or even was) a euphemism. My online dictionary gives as its definitions: “1. a prison camp for the confinement of prisoners of war, enemy aliens, political prisoners, etc.; 2. a concentration camp for civilian citizens, especially those with ties to an enemy during wartime, as the camps established by the United States government to detain Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attacks.” Apparently, the meaning of the term has changed to more accurately describe its use of 75 years ago; “concentration camp” has been co-opted into its definition. Today, “internment camp,” used to describe Topaz et al., has a shade of meaning on the softer, euphemistic end of the continuum, but is still accurate. “Prison camp” is apt when a stronger shade of meaning is required or desired. “Concentration camp” is stronger yet, but no less accurate for being so.

Marrin points out that FDR, perhaps ironically, called the “relocation centers” (The WRA term and clearly a euphemism) by their “correct name”: concentration camps. As did, allegedly Harold Ickes who said, “We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps, nonetheless.” [131] Yet Ickes words come to us only after the fact, when the crisis had been resolved and the political situation had shifted. He may have held those very thoughts at the time, but he did not leave a record of them, at least that Marrin was able to include.

Marrin shows his readers clearly how the actions of individuals can have powerful and lasting impacts on entire nations. Navy Secretary Knox‘s imputation of fifth columnists at work on Oahu threw sparks on the tinder of Americans’ fears in December 1941. Ditto Earl Warren, California’s governor, and any number of columnists for Hearst‘s San Francisco Examiner. But the number one bigot, whose words and actions had the most power for good or bad was Franklin Roosevelt himself. Marrin shows how the president’s Delano family business in China pre-disposed him to anti-Japanese views. Combined with contemporary racialist thinking that he seems to have imbibed in full (See Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, et al.) his Nippon-ophobia turned outspokenly racist, at least as far back as the 1920s. The Rape of Nanking would only have confirmed his prejudice of the “baboons” and “damned Japs” (words he used in private). In public, Roosevelt spoke more high-mindedly in the weeks prior to Order 9066: asking Americans to be “particularly vigilant against racial discrimination in any of its ugly forms.” [84-86] Marrin lets us see hypocrisy—or just plain politics–in action.

Individuals can change, too, so Marrin shows a repentant Earl Warren at the end of the book. After becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he apologized for his actions during the war. “It was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty.” The confession goes a long way toward accounting for his and the nation’s illegal and dishonorable actions on 1942-1944.

Perhaps surprisingly, from the vantage point of our current jaundiced view of government, the Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians convincingly explained the travesty in a few cogent sentences of its 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied: “The broad historical causes which shape these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan.” Marrin has shown us in 200-odd pages that this was exactly so.

For the reader of Uprooted, the explanation of Hoichi “Bob” Kubo of the Allied Translator and Interpretation Section of the army to officers in the Japanese Imperial Army as they contemplated mass suicide of themselves and civilians in a cave on Saipan, seemed equally essential to the book. Kubo told the men who looked like him (as we might say today) but wore a different uniform: “You are the sons of Japanese parents. You were born in Japan and fight for your country, Japan. I am also the son of Japanese parents, but I was born in the United States. The United States is my country and I fight for it. The United States has honored me by making me a sergeant.” Kubo’s is not the final word, either literally in the book or figuratively in our understanding of how this global catastrophe divided loyalties of family, nation, “race,” and humanity. It does not answer every question we might ask. But it is a start. And it feels like the right place to end this post.

Source: Marrin, Albert. Uprooted: The Japanese American Experience During WWII. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2016.