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Last Witnesses
Edited by Erica Harth
Palgrave, 320 pages, $24.95

What a timely release: "Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans" is being published at a time when Americans need most to be reminded - or perhaps informed for the first time - about the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage during World War II, under the guise of "national security."

The internment "was not bad enough," as several writers note in "Last Witnesses," when compared to the crime against humanity that, say, the holocaust perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazis. But the experience was bad enough, and ripped deeply enough into the Japanese American population's psyche, that an entire generation - the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans - avoided talking about it for decades.

Now, 60 years later, Erica Harth has compiled an often moving, sometimes disturbing collection of essays and memoirs about the internment form the points of view of those who suffered through it, those who were touched by it, and in the case of younger writers, those who have to deal with the implications of it, generations later.

Harth herself was touched by it - along with several other writers in the collection, she is a Caucasian who lived with internees. She writes about attending classes with Japanese students in Manzanar, the camp located in the desert of California.

Many of the other entries in the book look at specific aspects of the internment experience: The first essay, Toyo Suyemoto's "Another Spring," is an autobiography that also recalls the schools organized within the camps. Suyemoto became a teacher and librarian while at camp.

She recounts her own family's upheaval - a common story for many -- forced to live in hastily converted horse stalls at a racetrack for months until they were sent to the dusty Topaz camp in the middle of Utah.

"However clean and new our barracks looked compared to the Tanforan hoirse stalls, they were far from the place we once called home," she writes. "We arrived in Delta, Utah and were taken by buses to the Topaz site where we were greeted by a band of young Boy Scouts playing 'Hail, hail the gang's all here' on their brass instruments. The Scouts carried a banner that read "Welcome to Topaz," the Jewel of the Desert."

Such horrible ironies and inequities abound throughout in the stories told by those who lived through the ordeal, though to be fair, several writers who were kids in camp also remember having fun and years spent playing.

One recurring theme among those who came in the next generation, the Sansei or third generation Japanese Americans, was the phrase "How come you never told us?"

The mother and daughter essays of Mitsuye and Jeni Yamada dance around this topic. Stewart David Ikeda, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian writer whose terrific "Mixing Stories" is far and away the best-written submission in the book, intertwines his life as a professor of creative writing in Asian American studies with his research into his grandfather's life, including his years of internment.

Other chapters deal with several writers' personal treks to and research about the camps where they were born, where they lived for a time or where their parents worked. Several chapters deal with the reflection of internment in the arts.

If there is one nit to pick, it is that Harth's kaleidoscopic approach to collecting the myriad perspectives on the issue leads to some academic treatments.

But perhaps the most chilling is Allan Wesley Austin's "Loyalty and Concentration Camps in America." The essay is dry but enlightening, about Title II of the McCarran Act of 1950, which for years left open the possibility of interning any group of people in the U.S. if they were perceived as posing a threat to the country. The act, based on the Japanese American internment, was repealed - with help from Japanese Americans - in the 1970s.

But, as the writer warns, "…the potential for the future establishment of concentration camps in the United States remains."

And with a new war being fought, hate crimes committed and racial profiling already institutionalized, "Last Witnesses" leaves you thinking.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 2001.