Morning Glory, Evening Shadow
Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942-1945
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present a biography of Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford University professor who was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. The second purpose is to present, through Ichihashi’s wartime writings, the only comprehensive first-person account of internment life by one of the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who, in 1942, were sent by the U.S. government to “relocation centers,” the euphemism for prison camps.
Arriving in the United States from Japan in 1894, when he was sixteen, Ichihashi attended public school in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford University, and received a doctorate from Harvard University. He began teaching at Stanford in 1913, specializing in Japanese history and government, international relations, and the Japanese American experience. He remained at Stanford until he and his wife, Kei, were forced to leave their campus home for a series of internment camps, where they remained until the closing days of the war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of letters, diary entries and essays constitutes, says editor Chang, "the only first-person contemporaneous record of an individual's entire relocation experience that exists in any language." Maybe, but that doesn't make it the best account. Ichihashi was an impressive man, but not a sympathetic one, which makes his account most useful as a historical document. A first-generation immigrant, he taught history at Stanford and was a consultant at the 1921 Washington Conference, among others. After his internment at Tule Lake in May 1942, he continued as a kind of minister-without-portfolio, receiving a long line of petitioners (a 1943 article in the San Francisco Chronicle called him "The Emperor of Tulelake"). His work is helpful in understanding camp politics and issues like the registration of aliens or the segregation of the internee population into "loyal" and "disloyal." But moving, he is not. For one thing, Ichihashi is a snob ("Boxes are poor... fit only kojiki moving. Damned!"). He was also a domestic tyrant, cutting off his only son, Woodrow, when he married a woman Ichihashi felt was beneath him ("Kid's wife sent the new year card and kid's photo with his baby; kept away from k "). Kei, whose letters are also included here, is the more affecting correspondent, describing hardships and attempts to create beauty with flowers made of shells or sweet potato sprouts. For many women, she writes, the camps provided an unexpected improvement. "Before they were evacuees they had to work very hard every day, so that most of them did not have enough time to learn anything." Kei herself seems torn as freedom approaches. "My `simple living and high thinking' life is ending rapidly."
