Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. By Brian Masaru Hayashi. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. 328 pp.
Racial prejudice, the hysterics of war, and appalling government leadership are repeatedly used as the rationale behind Japanese- American internment during World War II. Brian Hayashi's book, "Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment, suggests the government was maybe not acting as adolescently as the previous excuses for internment rational would suggest but rather conducting the beginning stages of a much larger complex plan. Hayashi's suggestion that the governments decision for internment reaches beyond racism, wartime hysteria, and bad leadership is not a terribly new concept; but his induction of such specific domestic and international factors like land development and future foreign objectives of concerning an occupation in Japan is a more diverse approach when compared to other conventional writings or accounts of Japanese-American internment reasoning during WWII. Hayashi accurately brings to light the often overlooked origins of internment policy while not discounting the familiar justifications at the same time but rather evaluates their relationship to one another. Hayashi gathered such information from recently declassified documents and previously unreleased material that ultimately brings a better comprehensive understanding of the big picture for anyone desiring a better understanding of the fundamental causes of internment. Hayashi also discusses, as his title suggests, the teaching of democracy to Japanese-Americans and its long lasting affects on the internees and other groups of people throughout the world.
Hayashi's book contains seven chapters that feature the history of internment and then the unintended consequences of internment. In the first chapter, Governors and Their Advisers, 1918-1942, Hayashi investigates the prewar conditions of camp supervisors, officials in the... [continues]
Racial prejudice, the hysterics of war, and appalling government leadership are repeatedly used as the rationale behind Japanese- American internment during World War II. Brian Hayashi's book, "Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment, suggests the government was maybe not acting as adolescently as the previous excuses for internment rational would suggest but rather conducting the beginning stages of a much larger complex plan. Hayashi's suggestion that the governments decision for internment reaches beyond racism, wartime hysteria, and bad leadership is not a terribly new concept; but his induction of such specific domestic and international factors like land development and future foreign objectives of concerning an occupation in Japan is a more diverse approach when compared to other conventional writings or accounts of Japanese-American internment reasoning during WWII. Hayashi accurately brings to light the often overlooked origins of internment policy while not discounting the familiar justifications at the same time but rather evaluates their relationship to one another. Hayashi gathered such information from recently declassified documents and previously unreleased material that ultimately brings a better comprehensive understanding of the big picture for anyone desiring a better understanding of the fundamental causes of internment. Hayashi also discusses, as his title suggests, the teaching of democracy to Japanese-Americans and its long lasting affects on the internees and other groups of people throughout the world.
Hayashi's book contains seven chapters that feature the history of internment and then the unintended consequences of internment. In the first chapter, Governors and Their Advisers, 1918-1942, Hayashi investigates the prewar conditions of camp supervisors, officials in the... [continues]
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