Novelist Karen Tei Yamashita wasn’t sure there were more stories to tell about the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“When I started the project, I thought, ‘This is old,’” the author recalls. “For [the Japanese American] community, this is the story we keep telling, and I think everyone’s tired of it. I thought, ‘Haven’t we fleshed out every little piece of it? Isn’t this enough?”
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But then she recalled a conversation with her late friend and associate Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, a UCLA professor who specialized in studying the incarcerations. Hirabayashi told Yamashita that the JERS (Japanese Evacuation Resettlement Study) archive at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library contained 355 boxes.
“Lane said, ‘I only opened three boxes in the JERS archive,’” Yamashita recalls. “He said, ‘I think it’s the tip of an iceberg. If anybody goes in there, you’ll find something to understand or discover.’ I thought, ‘Maybe he’s right. Let’s go revisit it. Let’s just think about all this [to] help us understand what happened.’”
The material Yamashita discovered in the JERS Archive helped inspire “Questions 27 & 28,” recently published by Graywolf Press.
Much like “I Hotel,” Yamashita’s critically acclaimed novel from 2010, “Questions 27 & 28” contains a large cast of characters and spans genres. The book is not quite a novel and not quite nonfiction, but rather an amalgamation of stories that come from both real history and Yamashita’s imagination, playing with fonts and typesetting and incorporating oral history and occasional verse.
The book tells the story of incarcerated Japanese Americans who were forced to answer questionnaires that contained the questions of the book’s title: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” and “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?”
Yamashita discussed “Questions 27 & 28” via telephone from her home in Santa Cruz.
Q. How did the idea for this novel come to you?
When I started working on “I Hotel,” I had been in contact with some Nisei professors, second-generation Japanese Americans. They had been through World War II, but they were very young then. When they got out of the camps, they got their PhDs and became professors, and all of a sudden, they were faced with this idea of Asian American studies. Many of them were in sociology, because that seemed to be the field of choice for Japanese Americans coming out of the camps, because sociology would maybe tell them what had happened to them. I thought, “Maybe this is something that I want to look at.”
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At the same time, I had read a book called “The Spoilage,” by Richard Nishimoto and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, and edited by Lane Hirabayashi, the first book in this project called JERS, which was funded and conducted out of Cal Berkeley. Dorothy Swaine Thomas was the principal investigator. She made the proposal to study these communities and camps. As the war was approaching, some sociologists maybe knew that this was going to happen, and thought, “Here’s an opportunity to look at a group of people who are confined and then moved from where they lived into another place; let’s study what happens to them.”
There was a huge archive, mostly from Poston and Gila River and Tule Lake [camps], and maybe some from Manzanar, of people sending in their reports and reporting on everything. They were reporting on how people were organizing and how education was being achieved, and what they were eating, how they were organizing their clubs, and how they were creating democracy.
That was what I was thinking about, and then I thought, “Why don’t we look at it over the generational patterns from the first generation, the Issei who came at the turn of the century, and then the building of the second generation, who are citizens, and then the third generation, which is my generation.” I was trying to think about, “Let’s take a look at where this study began and who the Issei were, and then what do we become as a community, with this very traumatic war, incarceration and racism?”
Q. Did you find it difficult writing in a kind of patchwork of different styles?
It was difficult. It was harder than I thought, because even though I mapped out the characters and the chronology and the ideas that moved through the book, every time I got to one, I thought, “Wait a second, I have to study all of this, and then I’m going to have to figure out what narrative I choose.” My thought about the book is that the narrative will be chosen by the subject, not the other way around. I’m just not going to impose a genre or a narrative voice on this. I’m going to look at what the material is and then find my way to the form that will best tell this story. That took me a long time. It wasn’t as if I already had something in place, and I just could move to the next story. I had to invent the form for each chapter, and it was a big headache.
Q. As with “I Hotel” and some of your other books, you can tell that a ton of research went into it. Are you drawn to projects that require a lot of research and reading?
Those were two subjects that I thought I knew something about. And when I started to study it, I realized I knew nothing. I knew things about the 120,000 [people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated]. I knew about questions 27 and 28. But I didn’t know the nitty-gritty, and I didn’t know the way in which the government and the military just went with the lies in order to make it happen. I thought, “Maybe it’s about time I knew. What happened to my folks?”
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Q. Did you have family members who were detained?
My mother came from a family of nine, and her parents were alive, so they all were taken to camp. A couple of her brothers were married in camp, but I don’t think any of my cousins were born in camp. On my father’s side, he was one of seven, and his oldest brother was married and had one child, and then had two more children in camp. So two of my cousins in his family were born in camp, and then there was also a sister, and she was married with two children, and they were older, and they went with her to camp.
My mother’s family is from Nihonmachi in San Francisco, and my father’s family is from Oakland, and most of the people who were in the Bay Area were sent to a camp in Utah called Topaz. And so they went whole hog, these communities, and everybody knew each other, and there were neighbors and friends and people who went to the same church, and they all went to camp together. Of course, there were scattered other people who came from more rural places, but those communities all went to camp together.