Abstract
The government manages the Hanford facility in southeastern Washington, where plutonium was processed for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the Minidoka National Historic Site in south central Idaho, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated. Both welcome tourists. Because Hanford still has “radiological and chemical hazards,” tourism there is circumscribed and managed. Minidoka teaches the history of Japanese American incarceration as a national disgrace. The open spaces of the West define the different roles of race in these sites. Japanese are memorialized differently from Japanese Americans. Whites can clear their consciences by confessing at Minidoka to racist intentions against Japanese Americans so that they might continue to ignore at Hanford a history of anti-Japanese racism that predates the war. What Streamas calls “Frontier Orientalism” is thus constitutive of the idea of the West, of Westness.
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Notes
- 1.
A standard history is Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). For an example of cultural criticism, see Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
- 2.
For an overview of Minidoka under NPS, see https://www.nps.gov/miin/index.htm and Chapter 9 of Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites, by Jeffery F. Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord, and Richard W. Lord (Tucson: Western Archeological and Conservation Center, National Park Service, US Dept. of the Interior Publications in Anthropology 74, 1999), 203–14.
- 3.
Hanford Site history: www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/hanfordhistory. See also Kate Brown’s Plutopia, cited below.
- 4.
Hanford Site history.
- 5.
Richland High School Bombers Cheerleading: bombercheer.wixsite.com/richland-high-cheer.
- 6.
I had planned to take the tour myself, but the May 2017 collapse of a radioactive tunnel there changed my mind.
- 7.
For a history of the Memorial and the controversy surrounding the selection of Lin’s design, see Frieda Lee Mock’s film A Strong Clear Vision (1995).
- 8.
For example, Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
- 9.
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 5.
- 10.
Ibid., 11.
- 11.
Carl Boggs, Origins of the Warfare State: World War II and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 80.
- 12.
Ibid., 119.
- 13.
Ibid., 114.
- 14.
United States War Relocation Authority, quoted in Streamas, “Frontier Mythology, Children’s Literature, and Japanese American Incarceration,” in Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, ed. Susan Kollin (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 173.
- 15.
Murat Halstead, The Story of the Philippines (Chicago: Our Possessions Publishing, 1898), 16–17.
- 16.
Minidoka National Historic Site Web page.
- 17.
See Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988).
- 18.
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 44.
- 19.
C.J. Mitchell, interview, “Our Hanford History,” Northwest Public Broadcasting, https://www.nwpb.org/c-j-mitchell/.
- 20.
For a study of the stereotype, see John Kuo Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014).
- 21.
Quoted in Daniels, 200.
- 22.
Ibid., 225.
- 23.
Ibid, 225.
- 24.
“Japanese Relocation.” US Office of War Information, 1942. YouTube, uploaded by Mary Mahoney, 11 Aug 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja5o5deardA.
- 25.
Brown, 59.
- 26.
News Items, Topaz Museum. http://www.topazmuseum.org/news-events.
- 27.
Video. The First Manzanar Pilgrimage, 1969. Manzanar Committee. https://blog.manzanarcommittee.org/2017/02/25/video-1st-pilgrimage/.
- 28.
Jennifer K. Ladino, “Mountains, Monuments, and Other Matter: Environmental Affects at Manzanar.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), 136.
- 29.
Reagan Jackson, “Accomplices versus Allies,” The Seattle Globalist, July 14, 2016. http://www.seattleglobalist.com/2016/07/14accomplices-vs-allies/53654.
- 30.
See my essay “How We Lost Our Academic Freedom: Difference and the Teaching of Ethnic and Gender Studies,” in Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom, eds. Philathia Bolton, Cassander L. Smith, and Lee Bebout (Evanston IL: Northwestern UP, 2019).
- 31.
See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).
- 32.
See Ken Burns, dir., The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (PBS, 2009); and Jedediah Purdy, “Environmentalism’s Racist History,” The New Yorker online, 13 Aug. 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history.
- 33.
See the reissue of Adams’s 1944 collection Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans (New York: Spotted Dog, 2002); but see also Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
- 34.
Ladino, 138.
- 35.
Max S. Power, America’s Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2008). 86.
- 36.
Daniels, 225.
- 37.
William S. Wilbert, “The Chinese in Whitman County.” Bunchgrass Historian 10.1 (Spring 1982). 15, 24.
- 38.
See Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 124–25.
- 39.
Kevin Hannam and Dan Knox, Understanding Tourism: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2010), 143.
- 40.
In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), Connie Y. Chiang finds that, when war ended and camps were dismantled, “the physical remnants of the incarceration were at least partially erased from the landscape,” but later interest in pilgrimages and attentions of the NPS restored sites partly to their wartime states (203, 207). Blank spaces were selectively filled.
- 41.
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986), 168.
- 42.
Beard, The Atomic City Girls (New York: William Morrow, 2018); Church, The Atomic Weight of Love (New York: Algonquin, 2016); Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (New York: Touchstone, 2013); Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of American’s Shining Women (2016, Naperville, IL, 2017).
- 43.
Brown, 52.
- 44.
Evan Bush and Hal Bernton, “Agreement Reached in Lawsuit Over Safety of Workers at Hanford Nuclear Site.” The Seattle Times 19 September 2018. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/settlement-reached-in-lawsuit-over-safety-of-workers-at-hanford-nuclear-site/.
- 45.
Melvin R. Adams, Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2016). 59, 123, 17.
- 46.
Brandon Shimoda, “The (Ongoing) Ruins of Japanese American Incarceration: Thirty Years After the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.” Densho Blog. densho.org/the-ongoing-ruins-of-japanese-american-incarceration-thirty-years-after-the-civil-liberties-act-of-1988/. Emphases in original.
- 47.
Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), and Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in US Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
- 48.
The B Reactor National Historic Landmark. https://manhattanprojectbreactor.hanford.gov.
- 49.
Hanford, WA Site—Manhattan Project National Historical Site. https://www.nps.gov/mapr/hanford.htm.
- 50.
Adams, 109, 112.
- 51.
Ibid., 110.
- 52.
Brown, 4.
- 53.
Minidoka National Historic Site. Friends of Minidoka. www.minidoka.org/minidoka-national-historic-site/.
- 54.
National Park Service, US Department of the Interior. 2011: A Year in Review—Preserving and Interpreting World War II Japanese American Confinement Sites. Lakewood, CO: National Park Service Intermountain Region, 2011.
- 55.
Kathleen Flenniken, “A Great Physicist Recalls the Manhattan Project.” Plume (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 8.
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Streamas, J. (2020). East by Northwest: Preserving Pacific War Memory at Hanford and Minidoka. In: Dawes, J. (eds) Dark Tourism in the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5_4
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