Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming their own history. For decades, victims of the United States' mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II were kept from understanding their experience by governmental coverups, euphemisms, and societal silence. Indeed the world as a whole knew little or nothing about this shamefully un-American event. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition, America's Concentration Camp: Remembering the Japanese American Experience, with the twin goals of educating the general public and engaging former inmates in coming to grips with and telling their own history. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy.… (more)