Reclaiming Mobility: Japanese American Travel Writing after the Internment

‘Reclaiming Mobility: Japanese American Travel Writing after the Internment’ argues that Japanese American writers have infused various forms of literature from memoir to autobiographical poetry with images of mobility and the discourse of travel writing in order to assert and comment upon their status in a country that once saw ft to incarcerate them en masse and without due process. While other literary critics have said much about Japanese Americans and the history, memory and social consequences of internment, this essay concentrates on movement (or its opposite, stasis), since movement or the lack thereof is central to every aspect of the internment from relocation to incarceration to resettlement and, in some cases, return to the site of internment. To this end, writers including Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Wataru Ebihara and Munio Makuuchi have echoed and referenced John Steinbeck's novel about a family escaping from the Dust Bowl, Michel de Certeau's concept of the walker, and Pico Iyer's observations about global travel.