The Incarceration Of Japanese Ancestry In Okada

The indiscriminate round-up of people of Japanese ancestry demonstrated the dominant (white) American culture’s ability, through racial stereotyping, to strip minority groups of their individual identity. Throughout the preface of the novel, Okada uses the terms “Japanese-American,” “American-Japanese,” and “Japanese-Japanese” to emphasize how all people from a Japanese background were heaped together by the American government. Consequently, people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evicted from the West Coast and moved to what were euphemistically called “relocation centers.” Okada demonstrates an awareness of how misrepresentation by the government by the use of sanitized terminology subverted the realities of incarceration. In his preface
he writes about “…the removal of the Japanese from the coast, and the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers” (xxvi). He is illustrating the subversive nature by which the government operated the “resettlement” of Japanese Americans. Okada goes on to explore the repercussions of this convoluted portrayal of reality had upon release on defining Japanese Americans.