Introduction: an age of possibility -- Before Pearl Harbor: taking the measure of a "marginal" man -- "A multitude of complexes": finding common ground with Louis Adamic -- "Unity within diversity": intimacies and public discourses of race and ethnicity -- "Participating and observing": Dorothy Swaine Thomas, W.I. Thomas, and JERS -- The Tanforan and Gila diaries: becoming Nikkei -- From "Jap Crow" to "Jim and Jane Crow": Black and Blue (and Yellow) in Chicago and the Bay area -- "It could just as well be me": Japanese American and African American GIs in the Army diary
Summary
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy
