American Uses of Japanese American Memory: How Internment Narratives are "Put into Discourse"

"The discourse of race and nation are never very far apart, if only in the form of disavowal." Etienne Balibar (1988: 37)

Scholars in both rhetorical studies and literary criticism have attempted to determine the effect of ethnic autobiography on American national ideology. Autobiography, like that of Franklin or Thoreau for example, is a deeply American literary genre. Such iconic stories of the American self wrote "a national script which tended to mythologize the nation’s early historical patterns and protagonists, promote a political philosophy of liberalism, and take for its system of values a virulent form of individualism" (Boelhower 1991: 127). What, however, is to made of Japanese American autobiography? A genre which, if its name is any indication, purports to unify occidental and oriental subjectivity through "writing one’s own life."

Many have argued that Japanese American autobiography is resistant because it tells the stories of oppression, and complicates the dominant national picture we have of ourselves (Lionnet 2001). Elaine Kim (1982), for example argues that Japanese American autobiography establishes a narrative of hybridity (1982: 80). On the other hand, the stories of hybrid selves which seem to succeed at all odds in the oppressive American social context prompts other to accuse autobiography of propping up American nationalism. Brian Niiya, for example, argues, "If one were trying to prove that the American system works for everyone and that, consequently, it’s their own fault if certain groups fail to achieve ‘success,’ then one could hardly come up with a better vehicle than the Asian American autobiography" (1990 127-8). Both of these readings fail to take into account how personal narratives are positioned to do certain political work. This paper argues that understanding the rhetorical effectivity of autobiography requires more attention to the ways in which the narrative is framed by other discourses than to the autobiography itself. Take for instance the two histories of Nisei Daughter.

In 1953, Monica Sone’s autobiography, Nisei Daughter, was published by Little, Brown and Company. Not only is it the first autobiography by a Japanese American internee, but it is also the first published internment account of any kind by an internee. The story’s opening provides a sense of its style, "The first five years of my life I lived in amoebic bliss, not knowing whether I was plant or animal, at the old Carrolton Hotel on the waterfront in Seattle. One day when I was a happy six-year old, I made the shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood. I was a Japanese" (1953: 3). The story details Sone’s childhood experiences prior to World War II, the reactions in her neighborhood following Pearl Harbor, her family’s evacuation to Minidoka, and, although very briefly, her post-war attendance at Wendell College. As if to reply to the opening lines, the book closes by noting, "I was returning to Wendell College with confidence and hope. I had discovered a deeper, stronger pulse in the American scene. I was going back into its main stream, still with my Oriental eyes, but with an entirely different outlook, for now, I felt more like a whole person instead of a sadly split personality. The Japanese and the American parts of me were now blended into one " (1953: 237-8). The text has been subjected to two very different reading protocols since its publication.

The book received mediocre reviews during the 1950s. It was often used as a cipher to understand the Japanese American individual and was often cited as proof of its desire for citizenship. One significant review of the memoir was the New York Herald Tribune’s full-page article on the case made by Sone for American values. Sone is quoted in the Herald Tribune as saying the purpose of publishing the autobiography was to make "a strenuous protestation against people who sneer at the words ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ because they have met with unpleasantness and frustration in the course of their lives as Americans" (Sampson 1953: 5). According to the Tribune’s portrayal of Sone, she is one of those "plucky" Asian Americans that 1950s white audiences had heard so little about. They had faced many hardships (including the internment), but managed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Georgianne Sampson, journalist of the Herald Tribune, explains the reactions of Sone’s mother to the internment by comparing it to the basic principle of American democracy which, according to Sampson, is "respect yourself because you are a human being" (1953: 5). Sampson concludes the review by analogizing the attitude of Nisei Daughter to the attitude of a young Nisei soldier in a letter to his father in camp. In the re-produced letter, the unnamed soldier opines that his father restored his faith in America. He writes, "You said wisely, ‘It is for the best. For the good of the many, a few must suffer.’ You who had never been allowed citizenship, showed me its value. That I retained my faith and emerged a loyal American citizen, I owe to your understanding. When the time came for enlistment, I was ready." (Sampson 1953: 5).

Despite these attempts to make the text applicable to an audience caught in the height of anti-communism and building for a foreign conflict in Korea, the book had little success. Without selling its entire first run from Little, Brown, and Company, the memoir sat on shelves in stores and went out of print within two years. Newsweek noted that the story seemed as if it was incomplete, as if the narrative of one little girl growing up in Seattle and her family’s displacement during the war could not possible relay the complex history of the period. Commenting on its ability for social inquiry, Newsweek noted, "The subject is interesting but the book has an unfinished air, and the reader feels that it does not do justice to the Japanese or to the Americans" (Farewell 1953: 82). In sum, it seemed to lack political punch. It was, to quote the Herald Tribune again, "warmly affecting and entertaining … composed more with love than with protest" (1953, 5). And perhaps its lackluster reception was due in part to that.

Twenty-six years later the University of Washington Press re-released Nisei Daughter. Monica Sone herself had become quite active in the redress for internment movement and old and tattered copies of her 1952 life story circulated among members of the JACL pressing for the government to address the "silenced" issue of internment. But the 1979 reprinting of Sone’s work did more than replace worn out copies in the hands of the relatively small Japanese American Community, it put the autobiography in the hands of a larger public. This time, the autobiography took off immediately. It met with critical acclaim as an archive of a lost American history and was the subject of popular discussion groups, book reviews, and academic critiques. In a peculiar way, the reasons suggested for Americans reading the account were very similar to the ones that were grounds for overlooking it in the 1950s: its partiality and apolitical nature. The Spring 1980 issue of the Kliatt Young Adult Paperback Book Guide recommends Nisei Daughter suggesting that for many millions of Americans the book will "strike a familiar chord" (28). Kliatt suggests that young adults will be able to identify with Sone’s story precisely because it is neither political nor fully autobiographical: "This rather brief account is more of a reminiscence than a full-blown autobiography, and therein lies its charm. Sone gives us only the episodes which speak to all of us as former children, as sometime victims, as rebels against the past, and as products of our various heritages. An ideal book for young adults, and it is highly recommended" (1980: 28). There is even an array of possible identification points for young adult readers: child, victim, rebel, and inheritor. The first run sold out and so did at least twelve more printings.

There is, of course, a commentary here on the difference in reception between two national audiences separated by time. One conclusion to be reached is that the story’s content was "waiting" for a period where it would " resonate" with a larger public. In the 1950s, despite attempts to turn it into hyper-patriotic vitriol, the lack of complexity of the story meant that the audience was unreceptive to internment histories because of its need to keep up appearances in the heated battle of ideologies with the Soviet Union. In contrast, the 1980s audience saw a civil rights story similar to that of African Americans. The growing desire to recognize diversity and difference thus prompted a reconsideration of the narrative as it gained new force in the era.

This understanding of the reception of Nisei Daughter, while compelling, oversimplifies the relationship between text and context that is brought up in the two eras: context forms background to a text that is stable and unchanging. The question that the different reviews of Nisei Daughter asks is, "Is this really the same text?" A text, especially in the case of autobiography (literally the writing of one’s own life), is a negotiation between object, audience, and a set of material conditions. Despite attention to the unfinished and apolitical references to the content, the reviews from different periods also display that the content itself has changed dramatically. The narrative Sampson reviews is a tale of American values and the value of citizenship, similar to the personal letters of a nisei soldier written to his father to express his willingness to sacrifice for his country. The Kliatt guide identifies a story specifically for young adults describing a coming of age journey in the midst of tragic circumstances. While the story itself for Sampson is a patriotic tale that reads like a soldier’s diary, the Kliatt guide recommends a tale that every young adult can understand as it is a series of "reminiscences."

Perhaps what is made visible by way of this example is the difference between a view of the text as stable and unchanging and Michel Foucault’s idea of the statement. For Foucault, the statement is the basic unit of discourse, but it is specified not by its content, nor by its materiality but by its existence as such. It is not the literal text of a discourse, nor a sentence, a proposition, or a speech act. Instead, the statement is "a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and upon the basis of which one may then decide, thr ough analysis or intuition, whether or not they ‘make sense’" (1972: 86). Thus the statement as a function of language cannot be separated from its introduction into the stated: its enunciation. Enunciation focuses analysis on the taking place of discourse. As Giorgio Agamben delineates, "enunciation is what is most unique and concrete, since it refers to the absolutely singular and unrepeatable event of discourse in act; but it is always repeated without its ever being possible to assign it any lexical reality" (2002: 138). Thus a sentence, or autobiography, may contain an entirely different set of words but function as the same statement(s), and the same words of a sentence, or autobiography, enunciated in two different times or places may be a completely different statement(s). In both places, it is the negotiation between context and text that defines the way sense-making occurs. Far from a concept constrained to Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, reading discourse through the concept of enunciati on is a line of interrogation that continued throughout his examinations. Thus, when examining a general economy of discourses on sex he notes that what is at issue is "the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’" (1978: 11).

This is an excellent departure for examining the general economy of discourses concerning Japanese American autobiography. Here, I examine the ways that Japanese American autobiography has been framed by other discourses to investigate the ways that internee autobiography is "put into" different times and places in American culture. Attending to the numerous book reviews, teaching guides and course curricula intended to tell American audience’s how to read Farwell to Manzanar provides a means of understanding the ways in which personal stories are turned into the lesson plans for what Will Kymlicka calls multicultural citizenship (1995). Examination of the cultural framing of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar demonstrates that Japanese American autobiography serves as a national pedagogy of race literacy. If Sone’s Nisei Daughter illustrates how internee autobiography can be inscribed or ignored in different politico-cultural contexts based on what statements are enunciated Farewell to Manzanar is the most dramatic example of the different values that internee autobiographical statements are made to uphold during different points of national crisis. Scholarly examinations of autobiographies have too often settled for reading the text of the autobiography and interpreting its correct or, in the case of Asian cultural groups, insider meanings. The situated rhetorical uses of autobiographies are seldom considered. Japanese American autobiography rhetorically functions as a technology of consubstan tiality or a technology of tolerance to foster national cohesion at different points in time. The story, however, has been far from stable. Since its initial publication in 1973, it has been taken into American culture in two different periods to serve two very different needs. In each case, the enunciative function of the autobiography makes visible the ways that American audiences are hailed by the reading protocols of ethnic autobiography.

Farewell to Manzanar was initially published just after the last American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam, the passage of civil rights legislation in the US Congress and the death of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. During this time, the recognition of racial difference challenged citizens of the United States. While there was division on what should constitute social order with regard to racial relations after segregation, riots, and civil rights marches, there appeared also the problem of personal propriety in defining race relations. In other words, not how should the government or social institutions such as schools define themselves as nationally raced, but how should individuals understand themselves and their neighbors, the racial others that were said to populate the nation around them. Incorporation of Japanese American autobiography, at this time, stripped the story of political content in order to construct lines of identification for the nation.

For example, one of the earlier reviews of Manzanar from Booklist notes that it is written, "not as political history, but as the story of one person’s life-altering experience." Houston reflects "without bitterness or blame on her life as a Japanese American" (Best 1975: 563). The New York Times Book Review comments that, "the deeper political and social implications of Manzanar are largely ignored. …The book provides an often vivid, impressionistic picture of how the forced isolation affected the internees." (Review 1974: 31). Barbara Bannon of Publisher’s Weekly calls it "a sober and moving personal account" (1973: 78). Saturday Review World explains that Farewell is "recorded in a straightforward manner, a tale remarkably lacking in either self-pity or solemnity. . . . Neither intemperate nor diffident about the experience of internment, this is a work of more than passing interest." (Books 1973: 34).

This personal element that creates lines of identification for white audiences with Japanese Americans comes at the expense of the story’s political punch. As far as multicultural citizenship during this time, identification can only work when political issues are erased from the story.

In an interview with Biography James Houston commented that they tried, "not to put the emphasis on the political" (Friedman1984: 53). Instead, they wanted to "keep the emphasis on the personal and family dynamic, " because "everyone can relate to that" (53). At one point in the interview, Anthony Friedson commented that, "Jeanne’s experience [was] not as a victim of Manzanar, so much, as a victim of humanity. Just that she had to mature as a prisoner of human factors which were more constant than the Manzanar setting" (62). James Houston’s reply is telling of the attempts to make the text applicable to all American’s lives:

That’s really the meaning of the title, and the point of the book. Jeanne’s experience through Manzanar becomes a kind of metaphor for a lot of experience, especially of minority Americans, who go through one kind of ghetto or another. Manzanar is a kind of highly focused ghetto situation. The ghetto pushed to the extreme. But millions of Americans are ghettoized that way, and they either survive it emotionally or they don’t. And Jeanne’s story is one of emotional survival, how she came to terms with her past, and to that extent I think there’s kind of a classic American dimension to it. I hope it doesn’t sound like we’re boasting about the book, but I think we kept the focus on the inner life, rather than the political life, and as you say, on the process of a young girl moving toward and through adolescence, coming to terms with the specific conditions of her life, handled in such a way that they speak to a lot of people who live other lives but under similar terms. (Friedman 1984: 62)

Within this period racial difference is de-emphasized along with the politics of internment. The multicultural citizen is required to recognize the similarity of every other citizen and the one constant of all American life: suffering. The reading protocols displayed here mark a new technology of assimilation. Rather than assimilating the immigrant to so-called American culture, this is a means of assimilating white audiences into multicultural Americana. In this case the "ethically incomplete subject in need of training into humanness" is instructed to recognize similarity over and against racial difference (Miller, T. 1993: xi). Thus at a time when social movements based on racial identity are seeking recognition based on difference, these book reviews mark the discursive displacement of racial politics.

Shift forward to a different time period. After the economic exuberance of the 1980s, the 1990s saw the reassertion of racial difference and the need to deal with past injustice. In this era Farewell to Manzanar has been hyperpoliticized and put to very different uses. During this time teaching the tolerance of difference takes precedence.

Let me start by describing one common way that the autobiography has been integrated into the classroom. Although there are many teachers’ guides and learning aids used to teach the autobiography, one of the most detailed examples is the Voices of Love and Freedom and Facing History and Ourselves a Teacher’s Resource for Farewell The Resource is part of the "Witnesses to History" series. Voices of Love and Freedom is an educational collaboration between the Judge Baker Children’s Center, Harvard Graduate School of Education, City University of New York, and Wheelock College. As the titles indicate, the "Witnesses to History" collaboration by Voices of Love and Freedom and Facing History and Ourselves marks an intersection in the educational apparatus where personal experience and memory is channeled into confrontation and sharing in order to produce a tolerant society on a national scale. That is, this collaboration is itself concerned with producing a multicultural citizenry using individual, ethnic and racial narratives as its vehicle. *2

The Teacher’s Resource is a ready-to-use unit plan for reading Farewell and investigating questions of memory, national and individual identity, and injustice. *3 The Resource suggests getting every class member to discuss injustice they have experienced in their lives and having the class do a mock trial in which they put the government on trial against internees. Handouts include the Bill of Rights and readers are suggested to look for the silences in FDR’s internment executive order.

According to the Teacher’s Resource, the central question of Farewell is "How do our confrontations with justice and injustice help shape our identity? How do those confrontations influence the things we say and do?" (Facing History and Ourselves 1999: xiv). I n asking these questions of a class, the Resource (or more accurately, the teacher using it) is asking a group of students to explore the ways in which injustices (and justices) impact individuals in the long-term.*4 What is interesting is the way that this question becomes a civics lesson in the Resource. For example, when discussing one of the questions of injustice, it is suggested that the teacher distribute a copy of the Bill of Rights from the Constitution to discuss what rights are granted and relationship between obligations the citizen has to the nation and the nation to the citizen.

The Teacher’s Resource is just one of the many attempts to bring Farewell into the classroom. The attacks of September 11th introduced another phase in the deployment of Farewell to Manzanar. The story has been put into post 9/11 culture in two ways that are worth mentioning here. First, California’s "Manzanar Initiative." In May 2001, in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of executive order 9066, Lt. Gov Cruz Bustamante set up a deal with Universal studios and the California Teachers Association (CTA) to distribute 10,000 "Farewell to Manzanar" educational kits that include copies of the autobiography and the 1976 CBS television film to "every public school and library in the state." The autobiography was chosen as the most educational story for the whole state to teach and the promotion of tolerance was set to go off even before the national attack of September 11th occurred.

In February of 2002, Bustamante commented on the kit that, "After completing the lesson ...our people can be more tolerant of our differences and understand that diversity if our nation’s strength, not its weakness." The autobiography’s author further elaborated by noting, "[the story] has new resonance in the world we live in today." California’ s reading initiative uses the autobiography to connect to the way we treat American minorities and instructs American citizens to embrace tolerance because, as the story apparently illustrates, Japanese Americans are ethnically different from other Americans.

The second reading campaign was more radical and effective. After the attacks, Missouri, or the state legislature at least, decided to embark on a historic project. Copying what Chicago had done on a citywide scale, Missouri wanted to promote the entire state to read a single work for the year in 2002. It began as an adult literacy campaign, but after the September 11th attacks, it took on new dimensions. In December 2001 the Humanities Council of Missouri implemented ReadMOre Missouri, the first statewide literacy program of its kind. ReadMOre Missouri’s first book chosen was Farewell to Manzanar.

Although it seemed a bit unusual for Missouri, the choice was based on the possibility of the novel to comment on issues facing Missourians after the attacks. Missouri First Lady Lori Hauser noted that Farewell "is not only excellently written, it is very relevant in the light of national events." The state funded distribution of extra copies to all of libraries in Missouri, various speaking events for the author, a traveling library exhibit from the Manzanar Historic Site run by the National Park Service, public and private reading groups, school activities, special discussions and lectures.

The response to Missouri’s program was tremendous, the state reported record attendance at library reading groups and many citizens commented in local newspapers that they enjoyed the presentations provided. Marking the poignancy of the story, one reader commented in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that:

It's about time we draw parallels to what happened after Sept. 11 and what happened after WWII. We try to ignore the similarities, but they are there. Arabs and Muslims are now the new scapegoats and until the media continues to acknowledge this, we've really lost focus on what this country is supposed to stand for, liberty and justice for all. (Sobh 2002)

Statements such as these mark internment’s integration into the post 911 American world. No longer relegated to a past history, the establishment of the analogy for Arab Americans is itself a goal of the ReadMOre project. In fact, in March of 2002 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a suggested list of discussion questions for readers. The fourth question reads, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," Eleanor Roosevelt said. However, Jeanne asserts that a feeling of inferiority is easy for "non-whites to acquire in America." Do you think this is a fair statement? How does it clash with the image of America as a melting pot or a tapestry?" In dealing with this question a division between whites and non-whites is established. Furthermore, the division is to be respected by Americans because of the political history of the internment. Thus the same novel that was used as personal, apolitical technology of similarity in the 1970s becomes the narrative par excellence of discrimination and ethnic uniqueness in the 1990s such that it becomes deployed as technology of tolerance.

It should not be overlooked that ReadMOre Missouri applies Farewell to adult reading groups. Adult reading groups themselves are technologies of the self in which adults interrogate their own subjectivity by sharing their interactions with a written text. Jean Bethke Elshtain has noted of reading groups, that:

The capacity for articulating your own understanding and listening to that of others, and for responding in a way that isn't defensive, is a very important habit to learn. It's one that we require if we're going to have an active citizenry. So although these reading groups are not in any way intended to be specifically political they certainly are civic in that sense. (2002: 4)

Of course, the interactive experience of ReadMOre is not entirely open, as the prompting questions above illustrate. However, the interaction of the groups intends to produce tolerance on a micro-level in the reading group. Missourians are pulled out of themselves through the reading and interrogating of Farewell and into discussions of tolerance, and respect, as well as the citizen’s duty to minorities.

Although national pedagogy has, even as recently as the last twenty years, supported two distinct modes of national identification (consubstantiality and tolerance), the acts of the multicultural citizen are at each time implicated with the reading protocols of ethnic narratives. Multicultural citizenship vacillates between pluribus and Unum at different moments in order to profess either unity or tolerance. In both of those moments, however, the use of the Japanese American internee autobiography remains crucial. Indeed the lines of identification are drawn and redrawn through recourse to this ethnic personal story. Carole Chung Simpson has commented that telling internment stories serves as a way to draw lines around the American nation by identifying outsiders who are subsequently turned into insiders: " the processes of remembering any aspect of internment are also acts designed to demarcate the boundaries of the postwar nation" (2001: 8). The instructions to readers of Farewell to Manzanar put Japanese American selves into discourse in ways that identify and deal with national crises whether they be witnessing the need to find similarities among Americans or respecting differences.

1. The instructions to Americans to read the book not as a political story, but as one that everyone can identify with did not detract from the autobiography’s appeal. In fact, by 1992, Booklist had included the Houston memoir in its recommendation to "reluctant readers" called "Books to read when you Hate to Read." They note, "To be included on the list, a book had to meet two criteria: it had to have been read and recommended by a reluctant reader, and it had to have been read and recommended by the adult adding it to the list." Other books on this list include Maya Angleou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Diary of Anne Frank, Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, Lee Harper’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring trilogy. (Miller 1992: 1101)

2. I wish to distinguish between ethnic narratives, those that seek to speak for an ethnic group, and racial narratives, those that seek to speak for an entire race. Although the terms are not mutually exclusive and overlap is common, stories are positioned differently between these two poles. As this essay argues, the same narrative may be positioned as either racial or ethnic depending on the particular needs surrounding its uptake. The difference in positioning, however, can have tremendous effects.

3. The Resource itself does not hide its role in linking personal narratives to national memory. The preface to the Teacher’s Resource states, "It has been said that memory is the imprint of the past upon us as individuals and as members of a family, and ethnic or religious group, a community, even a nation. Our memory is also the keeper of what is most meaningful to our deepest hopes and our greatest fears. Voices of Love and Freedom and Facing History and Ourselves have created teacher resources for six literary works that focus on the individual encounters with history in ways that deepen our understanding of the connections between past and present" (Facing History and Ourselves 1999: v).

4. In discussing the central question, the Resource returns again and again to one of Houston’s concluding remarks, "I had nearly outgrown the shame and the guilt and the sense of unworthiness. This visit, this pilgrimage, made comprehensible, finally, the traces that remained and would always remain, like a needle. That hollow ache I carried during the early months of internment had shrunk, over the years, to a tiny sliver of suspicion about the very person I was. It had grown so small that I’d sometimes forget it was there. Months might pass before something would remind me" (Houston and Houston 1973: 195).

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