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'The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award–winning The Grave on the Wall.'—Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's'Big Indie Books of Fall 2024''Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how'exclusion zones'proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.'—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary NotesIn a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government's forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

A “sweet, touching” memoir about animals, loss, and finding a home in the world by the author of Shizuko's Daughter and Yarn (Kirkus Reviews).Cat and Bird, a “memoir in animals,” is anchored around Kyoko Mori's relationship with the six house cats who defined the major eras of her life as a writer: Dorian, Oscar, Ernest, Algernon, Miles, and Jackson. As she details the rhythms and routines of their days together, she weaves a narrative tapestry out of her past: the deep family tragedy and resilience that marked her childhood in Japan, her move to the American Midwest as a young adult, her experiences as a bird rehabilitator and cat trainer, her marriage and divorce, and the joys and profound heartbreaks that come with pet ownership. Full of razor-sharp observations and generous prose, Cat and Bird whirls into a moving meditation about grief, writing, the imagination, the solitary life, and the wonders of companionship with creatures both domestic and wild.

Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities. The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.

This study is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II as it assisted VI Corps in the push through the Vosges Mountains in northern France. The 442nd RCT was composed mostly of Japanese-Americans, or Nisei, who volunteered to join the U.S. Army. Behind their contributions were U.S. government policies which precluded Japanese immigrants from citizenship and land ownership, and culminated in the relocation of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast of the United States.This study briefly examines the Japanese in America, the formation of the 442nd RCT, and its exploits. Its involvement in the campaign through the Vosges Mountains began with its attachment to the 36th Infantry Division on 13 October and ended on 9 November 1944. This study examines the four battles during the campaign to take Bruyeres, Biffontaine, the Rescue of the “Lost Battalion,” and the follow-on mission.This study examines the combat and environmental conditions in the Vosges Mountains. It shows military decision-making from the corps level to regiment level and, in some cases, to company level. It provides a balanced review of events to promote historical accuracy.

Leslie D. Helm's decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family's 140 years in Japan, beginning with his great-grandfather, who worked as a military advisor in 1870 and defied custom to marry his Japanese mistress. The family's poignant experiences of love and war help Helm overcome his cynicism and embrace his Japanese and American heritage. This is the first book to look at Japan across five generations, with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great-grandfather's unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life. Leslie D. Helm is a veteran foreign correspondent, having served eight years in Tokyo for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times. Currently, he is editor of Seattle Business, a monthly magazine that has won multiple first place excellence in journalism awards in the Pacific Northwest. Helm earned a master's degree in journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism and in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, where his family has lived since 1868.

Commander Leighton is a psychiatrist and anthropologist who was assigned to go to the Japanese Relocation Center at Poston, Arizona, and'apply the methods of social science'to that community-find out in terms of human relationships what was working well and why, what was going wrong and why, and attempt to draw general principles from that experience. He fulfilled his mission brilliantly, and his manuscript account was immediately hailed by those who read it as one of the most thoughtful and truly literate government reports ever written. Under the sponsorship of the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, Commander Leighton has prepared this fascinating book from the material which went into his report. The first part, illustrated with striking photographs, is a dramatic yet genuinely “clinical” account of the strike at Poston and the attitudes tensions and frustrations of both administrators and administered. It inquires deeply into the motivations and reactions of the people who made up the Poston community. In the next section, general principles and recommendations are presented- and this material is drawn from other sources as well as Poston.The book thus appeals to a wide variety of readers: Army and Navy officers facing problems of civil administration, citizens interested in minority groups and race relations in the U.S., students of public opinion and of industrial relations in government, industry, and labor, sociologists, psychiatrists. Moreover, it is written with such skill, and is so rich in dramatic illustration of how man's mind works, that it is also unreservedly recommended to the general reader, whether or not he has any active concern either with Japanese-American problems or with “the governing of men.”Originally published in 1945.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.