Susan H. Kamei's When Can We Go Back to America? is a work of civics education. Writing under Simon & Schuster's teen imprint with a style befitting all, Kamei covers the broad sweep of Japanese American history. Kamei's work is explicitly political, enlivened by her personal involvement in the redress movement. She argues readers should “care when our government behaves in unconstitutional ways,” as it did toward Japanese Americans during the 1940s (p. xxiii). Yet her call to “vigilance” filters through Japanese American (or Nikkei) contributors, whose personal testimonies attest to the injustices of removal, camp life, and delayed restitution (pp. xxiv, xiii, xi).The book—alternately survey, testimony, primary source compendium, and educator resource—is organized into six parts. It opens with a forward by Norman Y. Mineta (former congressman and transportation secretary under George W. Bush) and an introduction, proceeds through twelve chapters, then closes with an epilogue, contributor biographies, and appendices. Chapter 1 begins in December 1941, with Pearl Harbor and mass FBI arrests. Chapter 2 explores the relationships between wartime racism, nineteenth-century nativism, and pre-war immigration restrictions. The following chapters approximate a chronology, covering the political and social histories of detention in assembly and relocation centers. Other chapters treat discrete topics between 1942 and 1945. These include the early-1943 loyalty questionnaire (chapter 7), second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) military service (chapter 8), the Supreme Court cases of Korematsu, Endo, and Hirabayashi (chapter 9), and efforts to resettle Nikkei eastward from War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps during and after 1942 (chapters 7 and 10). The book's final chapters address incarceration's legacy. Chapter 11, one of the book's strongest sections, explains how the redress movement during the 1970s and 1980s reckoned with wartime traumas while obtaining financial restitution from the federal government. Here Kamei shares an insider's perspective, while also deflecting attention to other movement figures like Fred Korematsu, Norman Mineta, and her father, Hiroshi Kamei. Finally, chapter 12 details Nikkei advocacy for Muslims after 9/11 and Latinos during the first Trump administration.Kamei foregrounds Japanese American voices through the use of block quotes. Each excerpt includes details about the respective contributor: their name, gender, generation, hometown before the war, and age at incarceration, as well as their wartime assembly and relocation centers. These quotes comprise one of the book's great strengths. Readers feel Hisaye Yamamoto's anger when FBI agents “ran their hands through our rice and sugar bowls looking for guns and radios” (p. 8). They witness courage when Takashi “Dwight” Uchida, seized without charges, reminds his family “to prune the roses in January . . . and take my Christmas offering to church” (pp. 9–10). Such sources capture incarceration's weight, build empathy for its victims, and prompt moral reflection in the present. Yet some readers may find this approach challenging, since contributor sources often intervene without introduction. Key details about provenance are relegated to endnotes—such as whether a quote is taken from a distant diary or recent interview. Contributor biographies would likewise benefit from page numbers that lead back to quotes in the main text. While most quotes are apt, Kamei's approach often leaves readers with a series of otherwise de-contextualized impressions.Indeed, Kamei embraces an impressionistic approach. In chapter 5 (“Gaman in the Wasteland”), for example, Kamei describes various aspects of life in WRA concentration camps. She moves from pets to marriages, to landscape art, to poetry, to Dorothea Lange's photography, to camp demographics, finally settles on the Office of Indian Affairs’ management of the Poston relocation center in Arizona, then carries onto other matters. This associative approach may help explain certain errors. Chapter 2, titled “Executive Order 9066,” begins in January 1942. It never reaches February, when the notorious order was signed. Instead, Kamei diverts to a necessary but misplaced discussion of nineteenth-century anti-Asian nativism and its impact on prewar Nikkei. Likewise, Kamei says that the civilian War Relocation Authority chose assembly center sites, which were actually chosen and operated by the military (p. 95). While Kamei tells gripping stories of life within those centers, their relationship to the military's Wartime Civil Control Administration is obscured.When Can We Return to America? leaves strong impressions, though. Kamei's vivid prose renders removal, camps, Nisei military service, and the fight to redress federal transgressions in memorable detail. While such stories remain fragmented, their impressions may be enough. Indeed, Kamei's book is useful for civics educators at all levels. Teachers may assign chapters while using contributor biographies, appendix timelines, and glossary terms to build strong lessons. A specialist might encounter certain discontinuities, but Kamei's readers cannot miss Japanese American incarceration's significance for contemporary America.
Samuel J. Klee (Thu,) studied this question.