Inside the Japanese American Internment

by tfickle

2013
Historical
quest

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Review

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
History Project, March 22, 2015
by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)

A school-project-feeling piece about an important topic; incomplete. At least in the early game, the writing has a tone of terse, bored diligence about it:

You step off the bus and are greeted with a sign: “Central Utah War Relocation Center.” There’s barbed wire everywhere, and a bunch of barracks. This is it. You’re now a prisoner in an internment camp.

However, once you get past the relatively weighty decisions during the war itself, the experience shifts somewhat; you develop a host of connections to family and friends that were never mentioned before, and the writing takes on a more descriptive (sometimes over-wordy) quality.

It occupies that uncomfortable space in between first-hand personal account and impersonal factual account. I found myself uncertain about lots of details of accuracy; I think it would have been stronger with inline quotes from primary sources, or at least a bibliography. The author suggests that they’re aiming to expand the work with (among other things) a parser-based section of the camps themselves, which may go some way to explaining why this section is so minimal.

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