I'm glad that the story didn't come off as a guilt trap. I was concerned about that specifically, to some extent -- I don't think it impacted the actual writing, but I did want people to have a 'pure' experience however possible and not to cross that boundary into proselytizing, or even get near it if I could avoid it.
There were ten camps; my family was sent to the second largest, and the story is set in the third largest. In total they interned about 110,000 people. There were two camps in Arkansas -- Rohwer and Jerome. All of these camps are also distinctive from POW or DOJ detention camps, which more specifically housed suspected spies (though you could be a suspected spy based on relatively little evidence) in higher security environments. Another interesting bit is that Japanese Americans were not blanket interned in Hawaii -- which Japan had of course actually attacked and which you would think represented a bigger 'risk' since it was so close to Asia and so strategically important. The difference was that there was a long, long history of racism against Asians on the mainland west coast, and that in Hawaii interning the Japanese Americans there (about 150k) would have meant locking up about a third of the population.
I had a history professor at a community college US history course I took in high school who was a little nutty but was also adamant about the agricultural dimension of the story, which is very true, and partly why I used that quote from the Grower-Shipper Association. One way to look at the internment is just as a flat-out land grab. The west coast had a history of running Asians out of town when they became too good at working the land there. Many (certainly not all and perhaps not even a majority, but enough) white farmers were insanely jealous of the success of Asian farming techniques, which, in the case of the Japanese, had an advantage because they were accustomed to getting a LOT out of a very small amount of land (farmland being a premium in Japan). One particularly moving thing to see illustrating this pattern in a different industry is the demographics of sardine fishing in Monterey, CA. (The famous Cannery Row immortalized by Steinbeck.) The first fishing industry there was established by Chinese fishermen, and if you look at the demographic chart over time, there's a sharp drop where suddenly all the Chinese leave, and Japanese fishermen replace them -- until 1942. (Only of course the Chinese didn't just leave -- they were run out of town in a common west coast Chinese immigrant story.) Then all the Japanese disappear (interned), replaced by white fishermen, which keep the place running until the 50s when it collapses due to over-fishing. But the very first cannery on Cannery Row was co-founded by a Japanese American businessman, if my memory of the museum there is correct...
I'm glad that the story didn't come off as a guilt trap. I was concerned about that specifically, to some extent -- I don't think it impacted the actual writing, but I did want people to have a 'pure' experience however possible and not to cross that boundary into proselytizing, or even get near it if I could avoid it.
There were ten camps; my family was sent to the second largest, and the story is set in the third largest. In total they interned about 110,000 people. There were two camps in Arkansas -- Rohwer and Jerome. All of these camps are also distinctive from POW or DOJ detention camps, which more specifically housed suspected spies (though you could be a suspected spy based on relatively little evidence) in higher security environments. Another interesting bit is that Japanese Americans were not blanket interned in Hawaii -- which Japan had of course actually attacked and which you would think represented a bigger 'risk' since it was so close to Asia and so strategically important. The difference was that there was a long, long history of racism against Asians on the mainland west coast, and that in Hawaii interning the Japanese Americans there (about 150k) would have meant locking up about a third of the population.
I had a history professor at a community college US history course I took in high school who was a little nutty but was also adamant about the agricultural dimension of the story, which is very true, and partly why I used that quote from the Grower-Shipper Association. One way to look at the internment is just as a flat-out land grab. The west coast had a history of running Asians out of town when they became too good at working the land there. Many (certainly not all and perhaps not even a majority, but enough) white farmers were insanely jealous of the success of Asian farming techniques, which, in the case of the Japanese, had an advantage because they were accustomed to getting a LOT out of a very small amount of land (farmland being a premium in Japan). One particularly moving thing to see illustrating this pattern in a different industry is the demographics of sardine fishing in Monterey, CA. (The famous Cannery Row immortalized by Steinbeck.) The first fishing industry there was established by Chinese fishermen, and if you look at the demographic chart over time, there's a sharp drop where suddenly all the Chinese leave, and Japanese fishermen replace them -- until 1942. (Only of course the Chinese didn't just leave -- they were run out of town in a common west coast Chinese immigrant story.) Then all the Japanese disappear (interned), replaced by white fishermen, which keep the place running until the 50s when it collapses due to over-fishing. But the very first cannery on Cannery Row was co-founded by a Japanese American businessman, if my memory of the museum there is correct...
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How's the story being received so far?
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