Authors: Maisie and Richard Conrat Paperback - $10.00 ISBN-13: 978-0-934052-19-1 ISBN-10: 0-9340-521-90 Product Details: 120 pgs, 9 x 8.5 in, with photographs Categories: Arts & Culture; Asian American; Civil Rights; History; Immigration and Migration; Internment; Japanese; Law & Politics; Race Relations; War and Peace Issues

Description

This publication is the latest edition of Executive Order 9066 (first released by MIT Press with the California Historical Society) and includes the original introduction by Edison Uno and the original epilogue by Tom C. Clark, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Retired, alongside new prefaces by Michael McCone of the California Historical Society, and Don T. Nakanishi of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. The Center Press released this edition to coincide with the re-exhibition of the Executive Order 9066 photographic show at UCLA in February 1992.

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The days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were dark days of the American spirit. Unable to strike back effectively against the Japanese Empire, Americans in the Western states lashed out at fellow citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry.

Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, was the instrument that allowed military commanders to designate areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Under this order, all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions to guarded camps in the interior. Former Supreme Justice Tom C. Clark, who represented the Department of Justice in the "relocation," writes in the Epilogue to this book: "The truth is - as this deplorable experience proves - that constitutions and laws are not sufficient of themselves... Despite the unequivocal language of the Constitution of the United States that the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and despite the Fifth Amendment's command that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, both of these constitutional safeguards were denied by military action under Executive Order 9066."

 

Excerpt

"Executive Order 9066 will always be with us. And so it should because it is an example of what injustice and havoc men and women have wrought upon each other. One lesson to be learned from such injustices is that regardless of the heat of the moment, we must never lose sight of the inalienable and civil rights which we owe each other, and that such rights, universally applied, constitute the strongest shield for our country and society. [...]

Executive Order 9066 was organized by Maisie and Richard Conrat. In their sensitive Forward they addressed the importance of "self-examination," which is so crucial in all fields of human endeavor, but especially so in the interpretation of history. They pointed out the universality of the Internment and the lesson therein: the Internment is as much a part of white America’s experience as it is of Japanese Americans. [...]

That Executive Order 9066 tore over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from their homes, their businesses, and farmlands, and threw them into concentration camps, cannot be erased from our history. The reprinting of this extraordinary publication will serve to ensure that this fateful period is never erased from our memory."

(From the "Prefaces to the New Edition" by Michael McCone)

"It is appropriate that this introduction to a book of photographs should take its inspiration from a photograph, as a kind of self-engendering phenomenon. For the photograph that I have in mind, and those that follow in tis work, speak more eloquently and with much more force than any words that I might ever write. These pictures, elegant in their simplicity and characteristic of the beauty and austerity of the people they seek to portray, are powerful reminders of my own experiences of over four years of camp life and of the experiences of my family and parents. […]

History must be written by those who lived it. We must give full recognition to the facts that were responsible for such an outrage against the United States Constitution. Racism, economic and political opportunism were the root causes of this crime that is now a part of our American heritage. This, our legacy, is a reminder to all Americans that it can happen again."

(From the "Introduction" by Edison Tomimaro Uno)

Table of Contents

 

 

Reviews

(For the first edition of Executive Order 9066)
"Edison Uno, an American-born Japanese active in American-Japanese organizations, writes an introduction to this collection of photographs, and former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark writes an epilogue on a seldom discussed, because little known, domestic scandal that took place in this country during World War II on the Pacific Seaboard.... The 62 photographs, most of them taken by Dorothea Lange, are in many cases accompanied by quotations from newspapers, the Congressional Record, and from books and treatises on the disgrace.... The landscapes pain the beholder's eyes, the portraits break his heart."
-Jean Stafford, Book World

"Ancestral pharaohs, I'm told, placed a mummy at the foot of their banquet tables to remind themselves of their mortality. Executive Order 9066 should be on every American's bookshelf: to remind him of the fragility of democratic justice."
-Nelson Algren, Los Angeles Times

 

Related Center Press Publications

Amerasia Journal 13:2 Japanese Americans in the 1930s and 1940s (1986-7).
Amerasia Journal 19:1 Japanese American Internment: Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Issue (1993).
Herzig-Yoshinaga, Aiko & Lee, Marjorie (2011). Speaking Out for Personal Justice: Site Summaries of Testimonies and Witnesses Registry from the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation & Internment of Civilians Hearings (CWRIC), 1981.
Higa, Karin (Ed.) (1992). Views from Within: The Japanese American Art from the Internment Camp, 1942 – 1945.
Ichioka, Yuji et al. (1974). A Buried Past: An Annotated Bibliography of the Japanese American Research Project Collection
Ichioka, Yuji & Aizuma, Eiichiro (1999). A Buried Past II: A Sequel to the Annotated Bibliography of the Japanese American Research Project Collection, 1973-1998 (1999).
Kochiyama, Yuri (2004). Passing It On: A Memoir.
Sakata, Yasuo (1992). Fading Footsteps of the Issei: An Annotated Checklist of the Manuscript Holdings of the Japanese American Research Project Collection.