"Making Home From War"

In 1999, my USF colleague, writing professor and poet Brian Komei Dempster, was asked to lead a writing workshop for former Japanese World War II internees in the United States, so that they could share their stories. In 2001, he edited a collection of their stories, “From Our Side of the Fence: Growing up in America’s Concentration Camps.” Now, ten years later, the same 12 writers, after a renewed time in their writing group, have told the follow-up stories of their resettlement after the war in a new book, also edited by Dempster, “Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement” (Heyday, 2011). The editor, whose own grandfather, a Buddhist priest, was interned, has done a great service to history and to justice, as well as to literature, in working with these writers, many of whom had no prior experience in writing for publication, to preserve their stories. An excellent foreword by Greg Robinson explains the historical context, and both Robinson and Dempster point out that although there has been much written about the internment (which Dempster and his writers decided to call, more accurately and less euphemistically, “incarceration,” “imprisonment,” and “confinement”), there has been much less written about the resettlement afterward. As the writers are now mostly in their 80s, it became essential for them to write and publish their stories now. These stories are very moving. We cannot help but admire the way the writers and their families, despite great difficulties and injustices, got on with their lives. Many of them earned advanced degrees and had estimable careers. Yet the years of confinement left their scars; one of Dempster’s points is that the resettlement process –- economic, geographic, logistical, social, emotional, psychological, and more -- took place not just during the traditionally defined period of 1945-1955, but for many years afterward, even into the present. This book is beautifully produced, with an evocative cover, many photographs of the authors and their families in the past and in the present, and useful “migration charts” showing where and when each family moved before, during, and after the war. “Making Home from War” makes an enormous contribution: it is informative, it reminds us of the grave injustices perpetrated on Japanese Americans, and it gives us the great gift of the authentic voices of those who experienced this sad chapter in American history.
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A personal note: This is my 400th post on this blog!