The Japanese experience in America, as depicted in the 2010 drama 99 NEN NO AI~99 YEARS OF LOVE, is a story about a people who wished to keep to themselves. The great industrial drive of the late 19th century that helped to modernize their nation didn't suit every Japanese, and so small groups of mainly agricultural families began to arrive in California in the 1890s. Their numbers were so small, they had no intent to bother anyone such that no one should have even noticed they were around. But as the histories show, those with legal authority in California—the lawmakers in the branches of government, journalists, activist groups—began to harass Japanese as a threat almost as soon as they arrived.
The dominant image for me of the first of five two-hour episodes of 99 NEN NO AI is of the highly familiar Japanese family experience, one that I have come to know intimately, as it took root in the vast, rolling fields of the American West. As a boy, I greatly enjoyed reading and watching stories about the mythology that pervaded the experience of the American West. We had been taught in school about the Chinese immigrants, and I suppose the Japanese experience was meant to be blended in with the Chinese as all part of the same kind. Practically everyone nowadays views this mythology as the cesspool of everything crooked about the American experience, where lawlessness, American nativism and imperialism rules, but as this drama, and the histories show, the crimes perpetrated against peaceful Japanese living in the West didn't originate in the plains. I found the image of Japanese working at home within the American landscape a beautifully compelling one, because for most of us who would love to live within both cultures we imagine a space like this where the best of our two peoples can live free from national harassment.
The central trauma, though not the central meaning, of the drama was to show how these Japanese farmers and small-business owners were forcibly removed from their homes and placed into "concentration camps" as a result of the Japanese nation's attack on Pearl Harbor. Prior to watching this drama, I would have never referred to the internment of Japanese by the Democratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration as taking place in "concentration camps." That term should be reserved for the uniquely barbaric conditions the Nazis employed for their undesirables. The Japanese were kept within barbed wire fences, and had guns pointed at them from towers if they ever had any thoughts about leaving; still, these weren't death camps. But I will use that term, because after watching the drama, and looking up the history behind it, one sees that the American officials who set up such a cruel and unconstitutional program used the term "concentration camps" at the time it was happening.
I have had my fill in this life reading about traumatic history, and therefore was in no mood for this one. In fact, after the first episode, I almost dropped 99 NEN NO AI for its saccharine, television movie-style treatment of the subject, and though I was in no mood to defend the American treatment of Issei (first generation Japanese) and Nisei (second generation), I lost patience with the way the Americans were depicted as cartoonish in their race hatred. (It never helps that the foreigners chosen to play the part in Japanese television dramas invariably look like they have been scooped off the streets of Tokyo for having no acting experience.) But I stuck with it, mainly because Nakai Kiichi is one of my favorite actors, and it is impossible to turn away from anything that features the ridiculously pretty Nakama Yukie. Soon I got swept into the history the drama was based on, and then I couldn't look back.
The drama as drama was unique in many ways. It was a successful instructor of history without being didactic or ideological. The American men and women depicted in the drama looked cartoonish, but once you read the histories you also discover that the drama was being largely accurate. The Japanese family at the core of the story, the Hiramatsu, were ordinary people trying to survive, and educate their young, by working the land. They never had any desire to be tested by the choices history forced upon them. They weren't complex people, and the drama wasn't at any pains to show them as complex. 99 NEN NO AI was essentially a story about honorable people having to get by in dishonorable times.
By the end of the second episode I was eagerly searching for histories to see how accurate the drama was. The setting for the Manzanar concentration camp, which was where the Hiramatsu ended up, had an awful beauty to it. If you read the 1989 book Manzanar, with an essay by John Hersey (the reporter who broke the story about the effects of the use of atomic bombs, against the American government's will), and photographs by Ansel Adams, you will see that director Fukuzawa Katsuo chose not to fictionalize the reality. If you read the 1999 book And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps edited by John Tateishi, and I highly recommend that you do if the subject interests you, you will discover that the no-win decisions families like the Hiramatsu had to confront were taken directly from oral histories like these.
These decisions included the infamous loyalty questionnaire administered within the concentration camps. The men were asked whether they'd be willing to go to war for America. If you said "No" that didn't mark you as a coward; but it did help justify for the government why Japanese needed to be kept in concentration camps, because by a "No" you were showing that you weren't willing to defend your country's values, might even go out to undermine them, especially as descendants of the country that attacked it. One look at the "Yes" option however and you realize that the American government was asking those who answered "Yes" to be no more than cannon fodder. And yet many men said "Yes" so that they could prove their loyalty and valor to a country they loved. It didn't matter that the question was nonsensical. Those American values were meaningless if your constitutional rights were being suspended within the very home (the concentration camps) you were living. And it didn't matter to the men that they were being treated like animals racially by ordinary American citizens. They wished to prove their loyalty despite everything. It is impossible to know how one would have answered such a loyalty question, but by nature I sympathize most with that small minority who thought that both the "Yes" side and the "No" side had answered foolishly.
It being Director Fukuzawa, not exactly known for his subtlety, when two of the Hiramatsu daughters were sent back to Japan with knowledge that the war between Japan and America might break out at any time, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief that they had to be split up with one sent to Hiroshima and the other to Okinawa, two of the regions that would end up being the most ravaged by the war. Outside of that sadistic touch, 99 NEN NO AI was excellent for showing the kinds of choices the Issei and Nisei had to face for outcomes that history eventually proved to have been fruitless from the start. This is best explained by Hersey. Though the Japanese American community abided by the internment policy peacefully and with few if any signs of coordinated rebellion, maybe even worse than their loss of dignity, the internment program turned out to be a program of theft; by the 1960s, few of those interned had recovered the loss of property that they had been forced to sell within a week of the notice of deportation.
Eventually the Reagan Administration approved reparations for descendants of these families. As gestures go, this was probably one of the better ones the American government could have made, but I would much rather it never disobey again its constitutional pact with its citizenry, which most of these Japanese descendants were. It is fascinating to watch how in 2024, the political party most likely to denounce the American government's treatment of Japanese Americans during this time, the Democrats, for reasons of identity politics, mainly, is the one most eager to create a wall between the government apparatus and its citizenry through uses of censorship and the systematic destruction of free speech. Weeping for those Japanese Americans who were interned is meaningless if you wish to perpetuate the system that allowed it to happen.
The other book I would highly recommend is the 1972 Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II written by Roger Daniels. I feel that Daniels leans far too heavily on American racism as an all-encompassing explanation for how the America of that time betrayed the greatest thing about it, its Constitution. Racism, for it or against it, is politics for stupid people, and not worthy of a viable historical explanation for the past. The best part about Daniels's book is how he documents at the decision-making level how Japanese Americans were sent to concentration camps. If America was truly a hopelessly racist country there wouldn't have been any internal, government debate at all. But there was. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, California and the West was placed under military and not civilian jurisdiction. But America entire was still run by civilians. I won't detail the debate here—you should read it for yourself and form your own opinion—but the debate turned out to be a battle of wills between military and civilian leadership for who should have final say in a time of crisis. The military were cagier in that battle, to their eternal disgrace.
What the question is really about is whether expediency should ever be a determining factor for how wars should be fought. The decision to intern Japanese Americans was essentially one of efficiency. If any of these people living within our borders sabotage the war effort, the thinking went, or create an environment for terrorism where American citizens are killed and maimed as an aid to a belligerent nation, this will only serve to complicate and extend the war effort by forcing our government to divert extra resources to address these deadly acts of terrorism as they arise. But, as Daniels highlights, Issei and Nisei never committed a single act of terrorism, before December 7, 1941, and most notably after it. The debate shows why civilian control is absolutely necessary, for if the need for military control and expediency has anything going for it, it is most certainly not human rationality. Ordinary American citizens (those whose ancestry were Japanese) were punished en masse for what they might have done, not for what they ever did.
I would say without qualification that the drama was a success. Its low point was the depiction of graphic violence when we were shown the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team who fought fascism in Europe on the Italian front. We should all know by now how brutal the fighting was, depicted in countless movies and television shows. The drama could have removed the violence and we wouldn't have felt any less for the fate of the Hiramatsu family. But the drama was directed by the same Fukuzawa who last year felt it necessary to depict the terrorization of children for the sake of his drama VIVANT. An interesting director, but also one not unlike those many Hollywood directors and producers who are in the habit of transferring their taste for evil upon us.
The ugly and ubiquitous treatment of the "Japs" by ordinary American citizens, as depicted in the drama, was so awful that at one point it occurred to me that the concentration camps were built for the benefit of Japanese Americans, to spare them the cruelty meted out on a daily basis even by our lovely American girls wearing Bobby socks and ribbons in their hair. The coordinated effort even before 1941 to degrade and humiliate Issei and Nisei was very real, but not so real that any benefit could be seen in a concentration camp. If it was the drama's fault for giving me that impression, the drama's sin for it I would say was only in trying to play it fair, by not being as relentless in depicting a crime through a single theory as Daniels does with his otherwise important book.
The literary community likes to make the distinction between beautifully written books and important ones. Uncle Tom's Cabin was an important book because it taught a nation how to perceive the slavery within its midst, but as far as I'm aware, no one has ever called it a beautifully written one. No shame in that. I would put 99 NEN NO NAI among those Japanese television dramas that are most definitely important.
[Photo: 99年の愛 〜JAPANESE AMERICANS〜, promotional photo. Courtesy of TBS.]
A Selection of Photos from Manzanar by Ansel Adams (originally posted by the Milwaukee Independent)
