Lost And Found: Reclaiming The Japanese American Incarceration

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming their own history. For decades, victims of the United States' mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II were kept from understanding their experience by governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence. Indeed, the world as a whole knew little or nothing about this shamefully un-American event. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition, "America's Concentration Camp: Remembering the Japanese American Experience," with the twin goals of educating the general public and engaging former inmates in coming to grips with and telling their own history. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of this groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also ponders how the dual act of recovering--and recovering from--history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent. By embedding personal words and images within a framework of public narrative, Lost and Found works toward reclaiming a painful past and provides new insights with richness and depth.