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Beyond the visible forms of resistance, between the occasional petition, strike or riot, is the true nature of Japanese resistance to white control.
(Okihiro, "Japanese" 32)
I sought to seed the barren earth
And make wild beauty take
Firm root, but how could I have known
The waiting long would shake
Me inwardly, before I dared
Not say what would be gain
From such untimely planting or
What flower worth the pain?
(Toyo Suyemoto, qtd. in Schweik 100)
Gaman shite
gaman shite iru
hifu no iro
[Endure! / We are enduring / by the color of our skin]
(Sanada Kikyo, qtd. in Hayashi and Yamanaka 116)
In spring of 1942, a few months after the United States officially entered World War II, the American government forcibly relocated 110,000 of its residents of Japanese ancestry to what has been called, at different times by different people, internment, concentration, or incarceration camps. Since this time, incarcerated Japanese Americans have often been written of as "The Quiet Americans" (Hosokawa), implicitly suggesting that they both passively consented to the mass incarceration and fully succumbed to the cultural oppression brought about by the war's racist hysteria. However, activist-scholars in both Asian American studies and the Nikkei (of Japanese ancestry) community itself have argued for a different picture of the past. Basing their work on the oral histories and memories of former incarcerees and written documents donated to archives, scholars have pointed to a long legacy of resistance in our communities (for example, Okihiro, "Religion" and "Tule Lake"; Hansen; Weglyn; Hirabayashi; Ichioka; Kashima, Judgment). Through their findings, we have come to know that many incarcerated Nikkei did in fact resist and redress the racist logics of their imprisonment, and often used writing to do so (Shimabukuro; Wu).
What is perhaps less understood, though, are the ways in which cultural rhetorics inherited by incarcerees may have shaped such politically resistant uses of literacy. As writer Hisaye Yamamoto, herself a formerly incarcerated Nisei (second-generation Japanese American), told literary critic King-Kok Cheung, "[M]ost Nisei" were "brought up . . . with Japanese ideas like gaman [. . .]. I imagine my writing has been influenced by such behavior patterns-it would be strange if it wasn't" (qtd. in Cheung 31). Although Cheung embeds this comment...