THE ARCHAEOREADER
WHERE A LOVE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND READING MEET
WHERE A LOVE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND READING MEET
"At nine o'clock they were marched on board the Kehloken, with the white people gaping at them from the hill above, and Gordon Tanaka's daughter-she was eight years old-fell on the dock and began to cry. Soon other people were crying, too, and from the hill came the voice of Antonio Dangaran, a Filipino man who had just married Eleanor Kitano just two months before. "Eleanor!" he shouted, and when she looked up he let go a bouquet of red roses, which sailed gently toward the water in the wind and landed in the waves below the dock pilings." --David Guterson, Chapter 15 A few weeks back I finished Snow Falling on Cedars and it sparked all kinds of thoughts and feels for my nerd brain. I'm just gonna jump right in and start off with the scene in the excerpt above; talk about heart breaking. Like most Japanese living in the U.S. during WWII (including any American-born children (aka nisei) & grandchildren (aka sansei)), the fictional island of San Piedro's own Japanese immigrant community (aka nikkei), here, were forced out of their homes to be incarcerated in one of 69 detention sites . As we follow Hatsue Imada, her mother, and sisters--her father having already been arrested and sent separately to a Montana labor camp-- 1000+ miles to Manzanar, California, Guterson helps the reader imagine what an awful existence living in prison camp barracks were like. "Everyone wandered around like ghosts beneath the guard towers with the mountains looming on either side of them...The camp was only half-finished; there were not enough barracks to go around. Some people, on arriving, had to build their own in order to have a place to sleep. There were crowds everywhere, thousands of people in a square mile of desert scoured to dust by army bulldozers, and there was nowhere for a person to find solitude."--David Guterson, Chapter 15
Archaeological interpretation & analysis varies across these sites and runs the gamut of daily life, the intersections of gender, ethnicity, childhood, and resistance/resilience. If you were incarcerated for simply looking like the enemy how might you have persevered? Would you have brought heirlooms, special dishes (china), or foods? Perhaps you would have turned to graffiti as an outlet? Maybe like Hatsue's mother Fujiko, you feel a compunction to post a letter with the stamp intentionally placed upside-down. Or tried to adapt your surroundings by gardening or playing games and sports. These are the many research avenues archaeologists have taken. The duality of being both Japanese and American is something archaeologists and Guterson explore. For example, archaeologists have found evidence of internee-built baseball diamonds and basketball courts at relocation camps (Burton et al 2002). Hatsue's conflicted sense of identity is masterfully portrayed by Guterson as she struggles with being the nisei daughter of issei parents, publicly pretending to not be friends let alone dating a white classmate, and later struggling with post-war prejudice throughout her husband's trial. A few of my favorite material cultural studies have been: Brewing Behind Barbed Wire, a Master's Thesis by Christian A. Driver, explores the production and consumption of saké at Amache. The Role of Toys in the Archaeology of Self, a blog post by Thomas Carr who was influenced by April Kamp-Whittaker's Masters thesis "Through the Eyes of a Child" (which is also worth reading!) Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps by Jane E. Dusselier Further reading into other material culture and landscape studies of Japanese internment camps can be found in the Society for Historical and Underwater Archaeology journal Historical Archaeology. Insitu: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword The (Archaeo)reader might be interested in learning more about how American cultural anthropology played a role in the war effort facing Japan. Published in 1946, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a hallmark ethnographic study (of and for its time) into Japanese culture. For the professional American historical archaeologist, mentioning this nonfiction book may come as no surprise but I'll be the first to admit I hadn't thought about this classic--that's still assigned to Cultural Anthropology 101 students--in years. After reading Snow Falling on Cedars it was interesting to skim through some of Ruth Benedict's analysis. One of the most fascinating things about The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is that fieldwork in Japan could not be conducted. With the war on and only one prior ethnography conducted (by John Embree), Benedict turned to government intelligence about the Japanese, history books (authored by both Japanese and non-Japanese alike), autobiographies, and interviewing Japanese internees (Vogel 1989: ix-x). The modern reader will immediately pick up on 1) the intended audience are U.S. government policymakers and 2) the use of such language as "primitive" and "simpler" in regards to societies. As I say, it is a study of and for its time but there's a reason it's still taught in anthropology courses across the States. Although Guterson does not appear to have consulted Benedict's research for his novel, according to the acknowledgements, it is easy to draw parallels to some aspects of his character's behavior. While I could point out examples, specific behavior isn't really what I'm aiming for here since the same parallels could be said of other sources; sources actually consulted by Guterson. My main point in bringing up The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is to highlight one avenue for contextualizing what the U.S. government understood (and arguably misunderstood as well) about Japanese culture during the WWII-era. The reader will find Benedict toeing a delicate line in informing American policymakers of Japanese culture while comparing and contrasting American culture. "One of the handicaps of the twentieth century is that we still have the vaguest and most biased notions, not only of what makes Japan a nation of Japanese, but what makes the United States a nation of Americans, France a nation of Frenchmen, and Russia a nation of Russians. Lacking this knowledge, each country misunderstands the other. We fear irreconcilable differences when the trouble is only between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and we talk about common purposes when one nation by virtue of its whole experience and system of values has in mind a quite different course of action from one we want. We do not give ourselves a chance to find out what their habits and values are. If we did, we might discover that a course of action is not necessarily vicious because it is not the one we know."--Ruth Benedict
Sources and More Links: I have hyper-linked to sources where appropriate/available. All links and sources were electronically accessed between January 2 and January 4, 2019. For a one stop, in-depth overview of "Archaeology of the Japanese American Incarceration" look no further than Mary M. Farrell's article on the Densho.org** encyclopedia. Burton, Jeffery, Mary Farrell, Florence Lord, Richard Lord, and Tetsuden Kashima 2002 Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. University of Washington Press: Seattle. Vogel, Ezra F. 1989 Forward. In The Chrysanthemum in the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Ruth Benedict; Houghton Mifflin: Boston. Manzanar National Historic Site Minidoka National Historic Site Japanese American Life During Internment Digital Public Library of America: Prisoners at Home Exhibit Manzanar Committee ** Amache Preservation Society ** Kooskia Internment Camp Project Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i ** Asian American Comparative Collection at the University of Idaho ** Idaho Japanese Association** Japanese American National Museum** If you enjoyed the information in this post please consider donating to the above "**" (they're non-profits!) and help support our shared global heritage!
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