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Camp Harmony: Seattle's Japanese Americans and the Puyallup Assembly Center, by Louis Fiset. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Xvi + 210 pp. $65.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03491-6. $25.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-252- 07672-5.
In Camp Harmony: Seattle's Japanese Americans and the Puyallup Assembly Center, Louis Fiset, author of the acclaimed Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple (University of Washington Press, 1997), provides another significant look at an understudied topic. The Puyallup Assembly Center was one of fifteen (xiii) or sixteen (5) temporary detention centers where, in 1942, Nikkei (people of Japanese ancestry) were forcibly confined prior to incarceration in War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps.
As Roger Daniels observes in his "Foreword," Camp Harmony is "the first detailed history of that place" (xiii). Although "mass resistance" never materialized (fortunately, considering the horrific consequences that might have ensued), the Puyallup Assembly Center's inmates were not "patient, passive victims"; instead, their active resistance involved subtly making their confinement "as tolerable as possible under the circumstances" (xiv).
Fiset's "Introduction" notes that by 1910, Seattle's increasing interaction with Japan led to a population of over 6,000 Nikkei as well as a thriving nihonmachi, Japantown. Marriages with women from Japan meant that, by 1920, women comprised a third of Washington State's Nikkei; one-quarter were children. Although the Nisei (second-generation, U.S.-born) were American citizens, U.S. racist laws still denied naturalization to their Issei (first-generation, Japan-born) parents. The increasing numbers of Japanese proved intolerable to bigots; in the 1920s, emigration from Japan was curtailed, then stopped entirely, but by the 1940s, Nisei numbered 60 percent of Seattle's 7,000 Nikkei.
Chapter 1, "Prewar Japantown," discusses the vibrant,...