Past Wrongs, Future Choices Background resources

 

 

About Past Wrongs, Future Choices

SUMMARY

Across the globe, reactionary leaders are seizing the opportunity presented by present global circumstances to polarize conflict about the past, including the contested history of ‘race.’ If our institutions are to serve equality and justice, we need to learn, not hide, from the past. Past Wrongs, Future Choices (PWFC) takes on this demanding task by mobilizing and extending the knowledge of a particularly instructive twentieth-century history: the racialized uprooting, internment, dispossession, and deportation of civilians of Japanese descent (Nikkei) in allied countries throughout the Americas and the Pacific. Working with partners in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the United States, PWFC will foster social and political accountability, pushing publics across the world to grapple with the question of what we owe to one another, especially in times of crisis.

Inspired by SSHRC’s objective to maximize the “influence, benefit, and impact” of research, PWFC is primarily dedicated to the goal of Connection. We will integrate historical understandings of the mistreatment of Nikkei people during WWII, particularly in (but not limited to) Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States, and mobilize public knowledge of that history. Working with museum professionals, in-service teachers, archivists, and librarians, as well as partner institutions with mandates in Nikkei communities and those with broader public missions, we will produce diverse research dissemination, catalyzing research and public discussion through four clusters of activity:

1. *Exhibitions Cluster*: Four coordinated exhibitions (in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States), will pair newly integrated research with contemporary Nikkei art, engaging this history as a case study of global injustice with contemporary resonance. Integrated digital exhibitions will draw these stories together and permanent exhibitions telling this history will be refined and revised in response to our work.

2. *Archives Cluster*: An international archival ‘Spotlight’ series will ignite research on the transnational mistreatment of Nikkei civilians by drawing together global records. Community-based events will provide access and ensure that the digitized record of internment make enduring and profound impacts.

3. *Teacher Resources Cluster*: Resources will be developed to allow teachers in Canada and abroad to teach Nikkei wartime experiences as a case of global racism, while illuminating the institutions that are crucial to civics Hundreds of teachers will gain access to these resources and receive training through professional development, public programming, and an intensive field school.

 4. *Film Initiative*: A four part documentary series will integrate global and local stories, while connecting Nikkei experiences with those of other descendants of racialized injustice.

In addition to our clusters, PWFC’s Scholars Network will produce 3 books: (1) Integrating, for the first time, the global history of Nikkei Internments; (2) Analyzing the challenges of mobilizing history at a global scale; and (3) examining the opportunities and challenges of engaging historical injustice to foster democratic accountability today.

PWFC includes over 100 members on 5 continents, 52 of whom are co-applicants. 40 institutions, including the Host, University of Victoria, have joined in partnership, representing large and small organizations, with mandates within, and beyond Nikkei communities. Partners and the team have been meeting since June, presenting to one another, refining our plans, and developing relationships. We are committed to and prepared for unprecedented research integration and powerful public engagement on this vital topic. 

 

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Democratic societies need to choose to learn from history. Across the globe, reactionary leaders distort the past to bury difficult truths and stoke conflict. In the United States, Republicans denounce history educators for teaching children “to hate their country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes.”1 European governments have introduced “memory laws” to criminalize “insulting the nation.”2 In Brazil, controversy erupted when an “anti-victimist” historical revisionist became head of a key cultural foundation.3 Japan’s populist right- wing emerged in part as a reaction against public acknowledgement of the country’s WWII atrocities.4 In Canada, far right claims that new immigrants threaten a supposed history of “social cohesion” have gained influence in the Conservative Party.5 In this context, history is both an essential resource and a site of intense conflict.6 “For its own survival,” writes De Baets, democratic society must foster critical public history: to forsake historical awareness is also to abandon the responsible supervision of power.7 Confronting ignorance and weaponized historical distortions, our partnership will engage difficult histories to promote civic learning and democratic deliberation.

Past Wrongs, Future Choices [PWFC] is primarily a knowledge mobilization partnership. The SSHRC Connection Program inspires us to maximize the “influence, benefit, and impact” of research beyond the academy. Working with partners on four continents, we will mobilize a particularly instructive historical case: the injustices perpetrated against civilians of Japanese descent (Nikkei) in allied countries across the Americas and the Pacific in the 1940s. This history constitutes an analogy for our times, vital to the path forward. In allied countries across the globe, innocent Nikkei civilians— their loyalties deemed inscrutable, their rights alienable—were spuriously associated with a foreign threat, placed on government registries, rounded-up, interned, and deported.8 Our diverse but integrated forms of research dissemination on this topic will foster social and political accountability, engaging the premise that democratic societies can improve upon past choices.9 Supporting these aims, about 25% of our budget will be dedicated to Insight Program goals: building knowledge through both syntheses of existing scholarship and primary source analysis, to integrate and fill present gaps in the scholarship on this transnational injustice.

Mobilizing this knowledge on a global scale, PWFC will transform present understandings of Nikkei civilian internments. Landscapes of Injustice, a SSHRC partnership project that ended in March, 2021, consolidated the Canadian case as one of the best-studied in the world. Still, analysis at the level of the nation cannot address transnational expressions of racism. With dozens of new co-applicants and partner organizations from Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and the United States, we propose transformative, multifaceted knowledge mobilization to create and share the global history of Nikkei internments as a complexly connected story of world-wide injustice that requires attention today. Present challenges of migration, racism, and security are global in scale; so too is the history necessary for public understandings of how we came to this point and how we can forge new paths forward.

Why focus on the mistreatment of Nikkei civilians? Across three continents, internal divisions exacerbated by international crises gave rise to policies that, in the words of a US Supreme Court Justice, fell “into the ugly abyss of racism.”10 While the policies varied by country, they all conflated ethnicity with citizenship and demonized supposed “fifth columnists.” Other 20th century injustices (especially genocide) are rightly seen as archetypes of state wrongdoing. That acknowledged, the echoes of Nikkei experiences in present-day political challenges make engagement of this particular global history urgently important today. As a result of our project, the 1940s mistreatment of Nikkei civilians will emerge into a global discussion alongside other major twentieth-century injustices.

We see democratic societies once again edging toward a precipice. Human Rights Watch observes that white supremacist organizations across the world “latched onto the Covid-19 crisis” to “demonize refugees, foreigners,” and political opponents.11 Public health scholars describe racism as a “secondary contagion” of the crisis, with potential long-term impacts.12 In Canada, police and community organizations have reported alarming increases in anti-Asian hate crimes, a trend that has affected Japanese Canadians directly.13 A member of our project, born in internment in British Columbia, was confronted by a stranger in a supermarket yelling: “you’re a killer, you’re all killers! . . . go back to where you belong!” Such attacks reflect anxiety, deep-seated racism, and ignorance of the past. If democratic institutions are to serve equality and justice, we need new ways of doing public history.

Our project is inspired by the Partnership Program’s deepened commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), as will be conveyed across this application. From its inception, PWFC has been an anti-racist project, collaboratively conceptualized by scholars and members of Nikkei communities. It emerged from a burgeoning global network of Nikkei communities and organizations. Germinated therein, PWFC could never be undertaken without the core involvement of the communities marginalized within the history we will study and tell. While other EDI principles will also shape our partnership, we are fundamentally committed to the principle that Nikkei communities and organizations must benefit from this project. In turn, the partnership deepens the connections among these organizations and communities by bringing them together in joint discussion and activity. Our theoretical approach is also inspired by the responses of Nikkei to the injustices they suffered, in particular their belief in public knowledge and education and their understanding that their internments emerged from the distorting politics of race.14

Literature review: Existing scholarship is insufficient to address the topics raised by an international abrogation of civil rights in the name of security. Civilians of Japanese descent were uprooted, interned, dispossessed and displaced in allied countries across the Americas and the Pacific, with the specifics varying significantly by locale. In the United States, over 115,000 people were incarcerated; in Canada, 22,000 were interned and dispossessed.15 Brazil, with the largest Nikkei population in the Americas (190,000), forced only 4,000 civilians from their homes, but others suffered draconian regulations, including the freezing of their assets and the removal of Japanese nationals from positions of authority.16 An estimated 80 percent of Japanese Mexicans were uprooted and dispossessed. The Nikkei in Peru were the targets of racism, mass deportation, and theft.17 Australia was a regional internment hub, with Nikkei civilians interned among people displaced from the future Indonesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and nearby islands; almost all were deported to Japan after the war.18

Despite the manifest connections among these events, there has been no integrated analysis of Nikkei dispossession, internment, and expulsion. A robust scholarship has emerged in some contexts (especially in Canada and the United States).19 In other settings the literature is sparse. Few studies are comparative or transnational, integrating only in limited ways the wartime experiences of Nikkei in either Latin or North America.20 Scholars have failed to bring the events in the Americas into sustained conversation with those of the South Pacific.21 Public institutions have never partnered to mobilize knowledge across these divides. We lack summative analyses of this important example of transnational injustice and thus have impoverished explanations of its local variations.22 Integrating and extending what is known of these histories, PWFC will reveal their place in a global history that has pressing relevance for an international community facing shared challenges of migration, citizenship, and security.

Cutting across borders, our approach aligns with global and transnational analyses of migration and racism. The interconnectedness we now term “globalization” is not new; it has deep colonial roots.23 We draw inspiration from a critical scholarship that reveals the “mutually constitutive processes of homogenization and differentiation” that linked the global circulation of Asian migrants and labourers in the 19th and 20th centuries with the emergence of broadly shared principles and technologies (passports, visas, refugee boards, etc.) of border control.24 This scholarship has included trenchant analyses of racism, including in relation to “illegal aliens,” a key category of marginalization within regimes of modern citizenship.25 Our work will be the first to bring a similar perspective to another key transnational category of unbelonging: “enemy aliens.”26 As Caglioti (a co-applicant on this partnership) observes, “the dilemma of balancing security and liberty” has been one of the most difficult challenges of liberal-democratic societies since the 18th century, particularly in times of crisis.27 Our project will draw that scholarship into connection with the global history of Asian migrations, while also extending efforts to place Canadian history and Japanese migration in a global frame. None of this work, has previously grappled at depth with the of 1940s violations of Nikkei civil rights.28 Integrated analysis of Nikkei civilians during the 1940s will thus make novel contributions by drawing specific attention to policies that violated the rights of racialized Asian civilians in the context of international crisis.

Theoretical framework: This project requires, and will reinforce, a critical conceptualization of racism and racialization. As Emirbayer and Desmond argue, “common sense” understandings of race take for granted “conventional systems of racial classification and categorization, which far from being natural vary by societal context.”29 Instead, they define race as a “symbolic category based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts.”30 Racial classification has complex and historically dynamic relations with systems of inequality.31 Race is made and inequalities reproduced within institutional processes (including, in the case of Nikkei internments, legislation and bureaucratic administration), and racism exerts influence within them.32 It also shapes, is reflected in, and is an effect of, a wide array of social interactions, from organized social movements to quotidian daily experiences.33 Scholars working on racialization at a global scale have sought to balance “macrolevel” explanations of race with “analyses of local responses, translations, and innovations.”34 We understand this balance as emerging, in part, from recognition (reflected in EDI principles of research design) of racialization as intersectional and relational: as HoSang and Molina argue, “racialized meanings, identities, and characteristics . . . are never produced in isolation.”35 Histories of racialized internment and dispossession cannot be adequately conveyed without the “relationships and articulations between and among subordinated groups” or an understanding of the internal complexity of Nikkei populations.36 Following these theoretical leads, we aim to engage the complexity and contingency of racialization in ways often overlooked in studies focussed on any single context, and, in so doing, to draw related categories of citizenship and nation into critical historical scrutiny.37 To break out of common sense understandings of these categories, we will engage with and analyze the global connections, similarities, and variations that enabled, for example, the deportation of virtually all Nikkei civilians from Australia, versus a quarter of prewar Japanese Canadians, fewer than 1 percent in the United States, and almost none in Brazil. In so doing, we will draw into critical question the historical meaning of “Japanese race” and, relatedly, Australian, American, Canadian, and Brazilian in each place, as well as the uneven and unequal global system through which Nikkei migrants travelled between the late 19th and mid-twentieth centuries. PWFC examines how “racial meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies are co-produced through dynamic processes.”38

Our theoretical approach also begins from the view that public engagement with histories of injustice can catalyze social and political accountability, by which we mean processes of public learning and introspection aimed at promoting the responsible use and supervision of public power.39 Lerner observes that “history is not a recipe book” for the present, but we can “learn by analogy.”40 Tosh elaborates: historical analogies draw attention to “contrast and convergence. Provided we are open to both, the effect is to liberate our thinking from the rigidities of current discourse.”41 Despite the inherent dissonance and dynamism of collective memory, public knowledge of the institutional structures and the individual and collective choices that caused mass harm, the sources of convergence and difference across locales, and the enduring legacies of social and political failure, can foster cultures of active citizenship and accountability.42 These convictions underpin our approach. Thus we will contribute to new permanent exhibitions at the Royal BC Museum (RBCM), participating as part of a broad and diverse constituency that will require curators to convey the province as a site of complex and multidirectional racialized conflict. Similarly, our film cluster will situate Nikkei alongside other “inheritors” of racial injustice. Our archival cluster will focus on the internal complexity of Nikkei communities, including divisions of generation, gender, sexuality, and class. Our teacher resource cluster will allow students to grasp the social and political processes of racialization by observing their historical and global dynamism.

Methods/approach: Our international partnership draws scholarly research, community-based knowledge, and professional expertise into ongoing reciprocal exchange. Past work on Nikkei in the 1940s suffers from various forms of isolation, as people in different countries, at different kinds of institutions, and with varied individual expertise conducted their work separately. Transformative new understandings of this history and its implications will thus emerge from our integrative methods of knowledge production and mobilization.

Scholarship, produced in sustained connection with community and in dialogue with Knowledge Mobilization (KM) professionals, is a cornerstone of our approach. The PWFC Scholars Network (SN – chairs Audrey Kobayashi and Jordan Stanger-Ross) is comprised of academics at all career stages and from a variety of disciplines with expertise in (i) Nikkei history and (ii) the critical study of knowledge mobilization (e.g. scholars of history education, museology, film, and information sciences). The SN will play four vital roles in the partnership by (1) producing a series of integrative analyses that draw together the disparate existing scholarship (supplemented as needed with targeted primary research) to produce a global history of the infringement of Nikkei civil rights in the 1940s. Our internal consultations have identified key areas of analysis: global Nikkei migratory experience and culture, comparative constitutional and legal histories, the global colour line and its local variations, and legacies and memories of historical injustice. At our first September Institute (2022), the collective will specify three studies within these areas, and SN members and their students will embark on research, maintaining dialogue with KM leaders. At the second Institute (2023), these studies will report, and the process will repeat, with three new studies identified and undertaken in the following year. Each study will produce a working paper to share on the project website. This process culminates in a 2024 symposium, Nikkei Internments in Global Perspective, hosted by the Prince Takamado Centre at the University of Alberta, where scholars, student RAs, and other participants will present the results of their research (these will become chapters for a peer-reviewed book, edited by Stanger-Ross, Aya Fujiwara, and Kobayashi). Workshop sessions at the event will allow the KM specialists in exhibitions, teacher resources, film, and archives to refine shared themes for the international facets of their work. SN members will also (2) address ad hoc research questions and new research themes that emerge from KM initiatives; (3) review KM outputs for factual precision and analytic clarity; and (4) produce (in the last four years of the project) a series of primary research studies, critically examining our own KM initiatives. Working papers produced in this series will serve as a foundation for a second multi-disciplinary book (edited by Stanger-Ross) that will address the processes and outcomes of our KM and critically analyze our effort to engage historical wrongdoing to foster social and political accountability. A key EDI goal of both books is to ensure that scholars of diverse origins, disciplines, and career stage have an opportunity to contribute.

In ongoing dialogue with members of the SN, four KM clusters will pursue PWFC’s goal to transform public knowledge of Nikkei internments: (1) Exhibitions, (2) Archives, (3) Teacher Resources, and (4) Film. The approaches of each activity have been specified by the chairs, in dialogue with the Project Co-Directors, co-applicants, and partner organizations. Some of the clusters (particularly Exhibitions and Archives) separate their international initiatives (focussing on global integration) from those in Canada (to institutionalize permanent public memory in this country). However, in practice, all our activity will cross-pollinate within clusters, team-wide meetings, and via the Integration Board. As a result, the telling of this history in each country will be transformed by engagement of its global context.

Notably, from an EDI perspective, women chair three of our four clusters and initiatives. This reflects historical patterns of cultural and heritage work within Nikkei communities (including in Canada, where, for example, the Nikkei National Museum has never had a man as Director|Curator). Our project supports women’s professional leadership. At the same time, PWFC must avoid burdening women and people of colour with additional service obligations. All cluster activities have been developed to meet the professional ambitions of the chairs and are carefully supported by project resources. This issue will also be an ongoing topic of review by our Governance Board (GB), sustaining focus on the careers and experiences of Nikkei women leaders, while meeting our objectives.

  • The Exhibition Cluster is led by Sherri Kajiwara, Director|Curator, Nikkei National Museum [NNM], and supported by the Project Office. PWFC exhibitions will ensure that public audiences across the globe engage in a history of injustice with pressing implications for the ongoing challenges of racism and state-perpetrated injustice. Kajiwara will lead the International Curatorial and Archival Forum, comprised of museum and archival professionals, as well as scholars and partner representatives with special interest in these areas of activity. Under her leadership, the Forum will coordinate and integrate four simultaneous exhibitions on global violations of Nikkei civil rights in the 1940s. This approach enables the cluster to optimize global integration and local impact by curating exhibitions that share global synthesis while also tailoring each exhibition to local This work involves three stages: Stage 1 (2022-2024): Forum members meet with the SN to finalize studies that will integrate research knowledge. Members of the Forum will attend the September Institutes and the 2024 symposium on Nikkei Internments in Global Perspective. Thus, the curators will help to steer the direction of research and maintain ongoing connection with researchers. Stage 2 (2024-2027): Four curating teams (each in a participating country: Canada, Brazil, Australia, and the United States) will be finalized. Working in coordination with each other, and in connection with the SN, they will formulate interpretive plans and develop exhibitions. Each exhibition will combine global synthesis with local concerns and interests; while final plans will be developed collaboratively and in connection with research, our curators each plan to integrate contemporary art with historical interpretation, an approach successfully used in a 2019 Royal Ontario Museum exhibition by collaborator Heather Read, who will consult with curators in all countries on this project.43 All interpretive plans, development, and design materials will be shared by the curating teams. This stage culminates with the 2027 launch of four coordinated exhibitions, which will tour in each country. Stage 3 (2027-2029): An integrated digital exhibition will be developed and launched, under the leadership of Kajiwara. Meanwhile, the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) will examine the feasibility of integrating all four national exhibitions into a single physical exhibition on global themes which, subject to budgetary and curatorial considerations, will serve as the capstone of the global exhibitions work.

At the same time, the Exhibitions cluster will lead initiatives to institutionalize permanent public memory in Canada, at local, provincial, and federal institutions, contributing to the development of enduring exhibitions at (a) a major historic landmark, (b) the RBCM, and (c) the CMH and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). The cluster will collaborate with partners to create a new permanent exhibition in Esquimalt, BC, where the country’s first Japanese teahouse and gardens were destroyed by looters in 1942.44 Second, at the RBCM, the cluster will participate in the planning and development processes of a new permanent exhibition, to be launched in 2028, which will also include South Asian, Chinese Canadian, and Indigenous communities. Third, the cluster will participate in a revision of panels conveying Japanese Canadian history at the CMH and the CMHR. These initiatives will take place in dialogue with the international facets of the cluster’s work, ensuring that they tell a new history of Japanese Canadian internment and dispossession that understands it as a manifestation of global anti-Asian racism, rather than as an exceptional moment in a national trajectory toward multiculturalism. This approach will pose difficult questions to Canadian audiences: for example, if they accept that the country participated in a global colour line in the 1940s, how should they understand racism in Canada today? Can Canada offer a just home for all?

  • The Archives Cluster, is chaired by Masumi Izumi, Doshisha U., Theressa Takasaki, Archives and Collections Manager at the JCCC (who together will lead its international work), and by Lisa Uyeda, Collections Manager at the NNM, who will focus on Canada. Internationally, records of Nikkei experiences during WWII are uneven, but materials exist in every location and share key themes, including processes of migration and settlement; internal complexity of the community (including gender, class, and generational divides); and the wartime experience and its Working with partner participants in the International Curatorial and Archival Forum, Integration Board, and the SN to focus on key topics, the cluster will identify and analyse records in each locale that converge to support integrated analysis and curate 7 digital Archival Spotlights, each featuring materials from at least 3 countries and emphasising the transnational questions that they raise. Highlighting primary sources (and translated transcripts in at least English, Portuguese, and Japanese), the series will integrate diverse collections. Especially suited to postsecondary students and researchers, the cluster aims to ignite new transnational research on Nikkei civilians.

Working with Library and Archives Canada, the NAJC and local organizations across the country, Uyeda will lead the cluster’s mobilization of archival materials for transformational learning in Canada. Since its launch in 2021, the Landscapes of Injustice research database has had over 40,000 visitors; online sessions have supported community members to access its contents. These sessions have revealed the importance of hands-on sessions with descendants of injustice, which help them to understand and engage with voluminous archival records. Working with partners in the community, PWFC will convene both digital and in-person sessions in sites across Canada (at least 16 sessions in total), helping Canadian families and individuals to access and interpret archival materials, and workshopping with them the international collections that our work will draw together. As part of this outreach, the cluster will also provide training in collections management, supporting the preservation of the historical record of Nikkei experience. As with the exhibitions, this effort to institutionalize memory in Canada will intersect with the cluster’s efforts to build an international understanding of Nikkei experience. By the end of our work, Canadians will know the sources through which to learn and tell this history, and they will have a new, transnational, perspective on them.

  • The Teacher Resources Cluster is chaired by Mike Perry-Whittingham, Richmond School District, who will oversee digital teaching resources for primary and secondary school teachers. This cluster is supported by an International Educators’ Forum, comprised of 5 classroom and museum educators from Canada, United States, Brazil, Australia, and Japan. Working together (and drawing upon the analyses produced by members of the SN), the cluster will create transnational digital resources that will allow educators, for the first time, to teach Nikkei wartime experiences as a case of global racism, while illuminating the legal structures and institutions that are crucial to civics and social education. This multi-lingual resource will be completed by the project’s fourth year (2026). Then members of the Educators’ Forum will customize, for their own local contexts, the import of these transnational learning materials into their own educational environments. In some cases (such as Australia and the United States, where teachers have flexibility to choose topics for classroom instruction), the cluster will support classroom teaching, in others (Japan and Brazil, especially), we will target instead museum-based educational programming, with a longer-term aim of integrating these materials into school teaching.

At the same time, the cluster will expand on an existing pilot program to build a network of teachers committed to this history and capable of sustaining its teaching over time. A Field School program, already developed and piloted with the NNM, will provide an opportunity to train teachers intensively. We will take teachers on tours of BC internment sites while mobilizing research directly to practitioners by distributing teacher resources and supporting participants in adapting them for their classes.

Participants will share the resources at professional development events in their home districts, serving as ambassadors for teaching this history. PWFC will run five field schools (project years 3-7) for elementary and secondary teachers, training 75 educators (15/year) intensively, including at least 25 international educators (5/year), and thus fostering a transnational network dedicated to teaching Nikkei history while building capacity in countries with current deficits in this area. This approach complements the extensive broadcast of our resources through professional development events, social media, and the circulation of ‘museum in a box’ kits. The cluster will thus have transformative impact, in Canada and abroad, on the teaching of the history of internment and dispossession.

  • The Film Initiative, chaired by professional documentary filmmaker Susanne Tabata, integrates the global with the It will create a series of four short films that situate Nikkei communities and organizations in context, exploring the present legacies of the 1940s injustices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Japan. It will spend two years in pre-production and then production, building (in connection with local partner organizations) relationships in each locale, casting, and then shooting footage. In year 3 of the project (2024-2025), this cluster will enter post-production sound and film editing, crafting four episodes in a cohesive series on Nikkei internments from a global perspective. Each installment will draw upon our research to convey the local history of Nikkei civilians (sketching the history of each local community and the events of the 1940s) and then explore the mobilization of historical injustice by its descendants today. In year 4, the cluster will translate, screen, distribute, and exhibit, aiming for distribution through the Knowledge Network, or a similar venue. This timeline ensures that the films will be ready for screening when the four museum exhibitions open at venues in participating countries; select screenings will be organized by Tabata as part of the programming to accompany the openings. The cluster will support and train students and recent film graduates, as well as students at partner universities, who will support archival research and permissions processes. The film initiative will be a powerful vehicle for reaching wide audiences and challenging global publics to mobilize historical learning for justice today.

EDI in Research Design: EDI is central to our partnership’s conception of its research and knowledge mobilization missions. We adopt an anti-racist and intersectional approach. Our research methods are multi-disciplinary and multi-sector, incorporating a wide range of approaches to creating and mobilizing knowledge, which will draw upon varied sources and reach diverse audiences. Further, in building partnership between community-based organizations and major public cultural institutions to co-produce exhibitions and educational resources in the history of racism, we offer a path forward within a field that has struggled to decolonize, to tell more complex stories of diversity, and to attract diverse audiences, challenges that Royal BC Museum acknowledges in their partnership letter and which have been noted of the field more broadly.45

Impact: PWFC will have enduring impact in the current “moment of danger,” when democratic culture is being challenged by nativist nationalists working to rewrite histories and obscure past injustices for political ends.46 We will mobilize public engagement of historical injustice in opposition to this trend. We will stimulate enduring transnational public engagement with a critical historical topic, using varied platforms to present audiences with diverse, previously disparate material, encouraging public learning from past wrongdoing. We will impact public history and heritage, elementary and secondary schooling, and family memories permanently; we will reach students, museum goers, film audiences, and community groups. We will connect stories across international borders, integrating histories of racism and training a new generation of scholars in the skills to bring history alive for public audiences. We will demonstrate the power of engaging histories of injustice for just societies today.

Progress indicators: Our partnership monitors progress via: (i) Detailed projections for each cluster will be assessed in a system of semi-annual milestones and reporting to the Governance Board, ensuring that clusters accomplish their short-term goals and build toward outputs. Semi-annual face-to-face meetings (a mix of virtual and in person) will allow the larger team to discuss milestones, report progress, and support each cluster in accomplishing our aims. (ii) Following best practices for assessment of success, we will measure our progress against an explicit mission and a detailed pathway toward its achievement.47 In our first major project meeting, our team will create a concise mission statement, based on this Project Description, and chart a pathway to success. All project meetings will revisit these documents, refine them, assess our progress toward our goals, and identify new opportunities for impact. (iii) In the last 4 years of the project, the self-study supported by the SN will generate annual reports on our progress, from the perspective of multi-disciplinary expertise on knowledge mobilization. At our annual team-wide meetings, these reports will be followed by a project- wide debrief, using the results of specialized critical reflection to steer the project toward success.

Timelines: Our work is both ambitious and feasible within a 7-year partnership. Here we specify the cluster timelines, corresponding to the methods above. The KM attachment contains additional timelines, including team meetings and SN milestones. Our cluster planning distinguishes multi-year activities from those that operate on annual/repeating cycles (only Teacher Resources includes both kinds of activities). Semi-annual milestones will be created for each activity, with the multi-year activities also including customized longer-term plans.

Exhibitions

Multi-year activities:

International Exhibitions research phase (2022-2024)

Canadian Museum of History (CMH) and Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) panel revision (2026)

Esquimalt Teahouse Exhibit (2026)

International Exhibitions Development and Launch (2024-2027)

New Permanent RBCM Exhibit and Programming (2028-2029)

Integrated Digital (and perhaps physical) International Exhibition (2029)

Teacher Resources

Multi-year:

Museum in a Box’ kits (2024)

Transnational Resource (2026)

Translation and Mobilization to all

participating countries (2026-2029)

Annual cycle:

Field Schools

Annual review and revision of resources to ensure connection with evolving curricula;

translation and refinements for accessibility

Archives

Annual:

Family case file sessions in local communities and online

Nikkei Worlds ‘Archival Spotlights’ (2/year for first 3 years; 1 in year 4)

Film

Multi-year:

Documentary films released and distributed (2026)

 

EDI in Research Practice: Our partnership emerged from, and is fundamentally committed to, the principle that the people most affected by this injustice must lead our work and benefit from its results We are cognizant of the opportunities and special considerations created by the leadership of Nikkei women in our clusters and attuned to diversity within our research team.

Past outputs of participants PWFC integrates academic and non-academic co-applicants into a team capable of inspirational scholarship and public learning. In addition, some examples convey the range and capacity of the rest of the team, which has been assembled with attention to EDI in research practice to include diverse members, in terms of career stage, gender, and race as well as sector. Whenever SSHRC guidelines permitted, we invited members as co-applicants, to increase equity and inclusion. Examples: Eiichiro Azuma is professor of History and Asian American Studies at University of Pennsylvania; his two award-winning monographs focus on Japanese transpacific migration, including in relation to settler colonialism.48 Daniela Caglioti is professor of History at Università di Napoli Federico II and author of War and Citizenship.49 Lindsay Gibson is assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC, specializing in history and social studies education.50 Melissa Miles is professor Art History and Theory and Associate Dean Research, Monash University.; her publications include books on the role of photography in reconciliation and in the Japan-Australia relationship.51 Jeffery Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor, Emory University is author of four books on the history of national identity and ethnicity in Brazil.52 Timothy Steains, is lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at U. of Sydney; an early career scholar, his work includes a chapter on the ambivalences of Japanese Australian identity.53 Gustavo Taniguti is an early career sociologist with a PhD from Sao Paulo U. working in inclusive education; his publications include analyses of Japanese immigrant political participation in Brazil.54

Past Knowledge Mobilization of participants (examples): Tzu-I Chung is Curator of History at the Royal BC Museum and an Exemplary Diversity Scholar (National Centre for Institutional Diversity, University of Michigan); her major projects have included the Punjabi Canadian Legacy Project. Antonio De Almeida Santos is Executive Director of the Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo, where current programs include a residency for immigrant and refugee artists engaging the topic of structural racism in Brazil. Rebecca Haimowitz is assistant professor of documentary filmmaking at the TISCH School of the Arts at NYU; her award-winning documentaries include “Made in India,” on global and racial inequalities in medical tourism. Lai-Tze Fan is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo; her recent research creation includes the digital exhibition, Masked Making (2021).

Moya McFadzean is Senior Curator at Melbourne’s Museums Victoria, with ~2 million visitors/year.55 Yoko Nishimura is project manager, of Discover Nikkei, a multifaceted online platform that includes multi- media community-based reporting on Nikkei throughout the world.56 Susanne Tabata has three decades film, digital media, and broadcast television credits including, Survivors Totem Pole, based on her three-year collaboration with Downtown Eastside advocates, First Nations, members of the LGBTQ community, and Japanese, Chinese and South Asian survivors of racism.

Contributions to training of participants (examples): Eric Adams is Vice-Dean and Professor of Law, U. of Alberta, where he is responsible for planning, supervising and training all instruction; he has received the two major U. of Alberta awards for teaching excellence. Ethan Blue, Senior Lecturer, History, U. of Western Australia, has received awards for research supervision and teaching and supervised 13 PhD and 30 honours students. Sachiko Kawakami is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Global Engagement at the Kyoto U. of Foreign Studies; she supervises ongoing student projects at the Mio Canada Museum, including research, community engagement, and publicity. Holly Recchia is Associate Professor, Education at Concordia, where she has supervised 17 MA and 3 PhD students. Rayner Thwaites is Senior Lecturer of Law at the U. of Sydney, where, for example, one of his current PhD students is studying the 1948 Australian nationality and citizenship act.

PWFC integrates a global team that shares a passion for research that makes an impact. Together, we will unearth and mobilize a history of vital present-day importance to publics across the world.

 

KNOWLEDGE MOBILIZATION

KM Methods/Approaches: Past Wrongs, Future Choices is primarily a knowledge mobilization (KM) Connection project. We integrate cultural institutions and scholars into a team that will communicate to large and diverse audiences. PWFC’s KM approaches will foster and sustain (1) exchange among previously isolated scholars and professionals, (2) creative synergies across sectors and disciplines, and (3) mobilization of outputs to scholarly and public audiences.

  1. Exchange within sector/discipline: The Scholars Network (SN) draws academics into productive engagement with one another. Focused teams will produce 6 thematic working papers on each of two themes (a) Nikkei internments in global perspective (e.g. Aya Fujiwara, Monica Okamoto, and Jessica Fernandez de Lara Harada on global variations in internment experience); and (b) our knowledge mobilization activities (e.g. Melissa Miles, Cynthia Milton, Eric Muller, Heather Read, and Timothy Kazuo Steains on the approaches to merging art and history in our exhibitions). The SN will thus mobilize local and national academic expertise into two related global syntheses: the first on Nikkei internments and the second on public engagement of those histories. Similarly, networks developed within Clusters (e.g. the two international forums), facilitate co-productive professional transnational exchange. For example, educators in Canada and the United States (who must generate resources that appeal to teachers with significant flexibility in what they teach) will exchange ideas and approaches with those in Brazil and Japan (where curricula are much more restrictive), while creating common resources for use across these diverse contexts. PWFC is also structured to mobilize (2) Synergies across sectors and disciplines. The Integration Board is central to cross-fertilization within PWFC, as scholars, cluster chairs, and representatives of institutional partners will meet to exchange progress, plan future directions, and integrate knowledge. Semi-annual meetings of this board will allow, for example, the archives cluster to exchange knowledge of key global repositories of materials with scholars working on thematic syntheses, and for both to reciprocally influence and draw from work on teacher resources, film, and exhibitions. Major team meetings (September Institutes [virtual] and Project Symposia [in-person, 2024 & 2027]) allow still wider mobilization of knowledge, as the entire project will be invited into co- productive exchange and discussion and international partners will build networks and relationships to support the mobilization of all outputs. In addition, more specific initiatives focus on cross-fertilization. For example, the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS), Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives (CAPI), and Faculty of Fine Arts at UVic will co-sponsor, in the first two years of the project, 3 scholars in residence and 3 artists in residence, invited in pairs into the shared intellectual and physical setting of CFGS. Thus, scholars developing thematic working papers will connect with creative artists working toward the PWFC exhibitions, mobilizing different ways of seeing and interpreting historical injustice in conversation with one These forms of KM within and across PWFC will culminate in (3) diverse and mutually-reinforcing major outputs. At the two Project Symposia, select sessions will allow research and artistic work to be presented to the public. PWFC will publish 3 peer-reviewed academic books, in which McGill- Queens Press has expressed interest: Nikkei Internment in Global Perspective; Past Wrongs Future Choices: Mobilizing Histories of Internment to Global Publics [both edited volumes to which a wide array of PWFC members will contribute]; and, finally, a monograph by Stanger-Ross (tentatively entitled, What Good is Bad History?) conveying analysis of the public mobilization of histories of racism to encourage progressive and resilient democratic culture. Major outputs are the organizational purpose of the Clusters, which will create exhibitions, digital archival collections, films, and teacher resources. KM professionals leading each cluster will tailor these resources for general publics and Nikkei communities in participating countries, scholars and university students, mass media audiences, and classroom teachers and their students at elementary and secondary levels. In addition, outputs will reinforce one another: for example, school trips to our museum exhibitions will be enriched by teacher resources, scholarly talks, film screenings, and archival spotlights, all supplemented by Op Ed publications and media interviews, in which team members have significant experience.

EDI will be fully integrated into KM management, research practice and design. Co-design strategies will be used to develop formal project protocols that facilitate cultural safety, partner benefit and ambitious outcomes. This requires recognizing the value of distinct Nikkei experiences across region, gender, class, age and migration generation (yonsei, sansei, nisei), as well as identifying common values and priorities for integrating KM globally, building global connections among marginalized communities through residencies and communities of practice, enfolding younger generations into the project as well as respected senior figures to ensure intergenerational perspectives and lasting benefits, and developing shared protocols for visual, verbal and written communication across the project. Co-led by Melissa Miles, Kaitlin Findlay, Audrey Kobayashi, and Carolyn Nakagawa a team will draft KM protocols in ongoing exchange with stakeholders and the Integration Board. The process will be assessed in a foundational chapter in the second of the project’s two major edited collections and provide a toolkit for future transnational projects addressing racism, intercultural connection, historical trauma, and resilience.

  1. Schedule of KM Activities: Integrative and project-wide KM activities supplement the ambitious mobilization of knowledge within the KM Clusters [see Project Description].

2022-

2023

September Institute (project-wide):

3 global perspectives working papers & KM protocols working group initiated.

Clusters and partners present plans and integrate

Boards meet

Two 4-month residencies for artists and scholars at CFGS

April Integration Board meeting:

Clusters and partners report progress and integrate

Protocols working group reports progress

2023-

2024

October Institute:

3 working papers presented

Protocols group presents draft for feedback

Clusters and partners present and integrate

Boards meet

3 working paper studies initiated

Final pair of 4-month residencies for artists and scholars at CFGS

April Integration Board meeting:

Clusters and partners report and integrate

Protocols presented

2024-

2025

Project Symposium 1:

6 global perspectives working papers presented

Clusters and partners report progress

Meet to advance initiatives, integrate

Artist-in-residence works exhibited

Sessions for public audiences

Book 1, Nikkei Internments in Global Perspective

Revision and submission, w/ introduction by Stanger-Ross and Kobayashi & revised working papers.

April  Integration Board meeting: Clusters and partners report progress and integrate

2025-

2026

October Institute

First 3 KM study working papers initiated

Clusters and partners present and integrate

Boards meet

Book 1

Revised and published & Stanger-Ross

begins monograph

April Integration Board meeting

Clusters and partners report and integrate

2026-

2027

October Institute:

3 KM working papers presented

Clusters and partners present and integrate

Boards meet

3 new KM working papers initiated

April Integration Board meeting

Clusters and partners report progress and integrate

2027-

2028

October Symposium:

6 KM working papers presented

Clusters and partners present and integrate

Boards meet

Book 2, Past Wrongs Future Choices: Mobilizing Histories of Internment to Global Publics,

Revision and submission, w/ introduction by Stanger-Ross

Protocols final document

Revised KM working papers (6)

April Integration Board meeting: Clusters and partners report and integrate

Plans for project conclusion and integrated KM launch

2028-

2029

October Institute:

Clusters and partners present plans and integrate

Boards meet

Plans for project conclusion and integrated KM launch finalized

Book 2: Past Wrongs, Future Choices published

Book 3, What Good is Bad History?

Revision and submission (Stanger-Ross)

Integrated virtual KM launch and project conclusion

Possible capstone physical exhibition

       

Justification: Our KM approach is premised on the conviction that the global history of racism requires both new scholarly knowledge and creative, multifaceted mobilization of that knowledge to the public. The combined KM approaches of PWFC will foster global expertise and public conversation about the internment of Nikkei civilians in the 1940s, drawing that history into engagement with contemporary concerns about global and local citizenship, racism, civil rights, and social justice.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

The Past Wrongs, Future Choices partnership will mobilize knowledge to achieve significant scholarly and social benefits.

Scholarly Benefits: Our partnership’s three books will have significant scholarly impact. The first will advance scholarly knowledge of the violations of the rights of people of Japanese descent (Nikkei) in countries across the Americas and the Pacific in the 1940s, particularly in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States, situating these internments within global histories of Asian migration, racism, and violations of liberty at times of war. The second and third books will contribute to understandings of how such historical analyses reach diverse global public audiences. They will present interdisciplinary analyses of our public mobilization activities through museum exhibitions, teacher resources, digital archives, and film. They will catalyze and contribute to discussions among academics and public history professionals (museum staff etc.) about how to tell histories of injustice to foster public accountability today.

Social Benefits: Through its diverse but integrated forms of knowledge mobilization, our partnership will foster historical literacy and political accountability. (1) Four coordinated travelling museum exhibitions (in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States) will require audiences across the globe to engage with the history and legacies of injustice where they live, the connection of their localities with global histories of racism, and the implications of this knowledge for questions of migration, citizenship, and security today. (2) Research-based contributions to four permanent exhibitions (Royal BC Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and the Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion) will institutionalize this history’s public memory in Canada and encourage Canadians to consider from a new perspective the country’s participation in a global colour line in the 1940s, and the realities of racism in Canada today. (3) A trilingual (English, Japanese, Portuguese) digital archive of historical materials related to Nikkei people and their experiences of the 1940s in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States will enable scholars, trainees, and publics to embark on research at a global scale. (4) Online and in-person sessions with Nikkei communities across Canada will enable their access to archival resources that (a) contain materials related to their own families and (b) situate those files within national and transnational contexts. (5) Teacher resources will allow elementary and secondary school teachers to teach Nikkei wartime experience as a case of global racism, while illuminating legal structures and institutions. (6) A training program for 75 Canadian and international teachers will foster a community of teachers knowledgeable in, capable of, and dedicated to teaching these materials. (7) A series of 4 professional documentary films will reach wide public audiences and challenge global publics to mobilize historical learning for justice today. 

 

                  LANDSCAPES OF INJUSTICE PUBLICATION

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold.

The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians’ diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security.

In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.

 

REFERENCES

[1] Valerie Strauss, “Trump’s newest assault on America’s public schools: They teach kids to ‘hate their own country,’” Washington Post (July 5, 2020); Michael Crowley and Jennifer Schuessler “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians,” The New York Times (January 18, 2021);

[2] Antoon De Baets, “Laws Governing the Historian’s Free Expression,” in Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters eds., The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 39-67; Marta Bucholc, “Commemorative lawmaking: memory frames of the democratic backsliding in Poland after 2015,” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 11, 1 (2019): 85-110; Tomasz Tadeusz Koncewicz, “On the Politics of Resentment, Mis-Memory, and Constitutional Fidelity: The Demise of the Polish Overlapping Consensus?” in Uladzislau Belavusau and Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias eds., Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 263-290.

[3] Katy Watson, “The racism denier in charge of defending black rights in Brazil,” BBC News (February 15, 2020).

[4] Yuka Kitayama, “The Rise of the Far Right in Japan, and Challenges Posed for Education,” London Review of Education 16, 2 (2018), 250-267.

[5] Jordan Stanger-Ross and Oliver Schmidtke, “Why the People’s Party of Canada election result shouldn’t be underestimated” CBC Opinion (November 19, 2019); Alexander Panetta, “Major partisan divide over immigration in Canada” Politico (October 14, 2019).

[6] Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Memory Studies in a Moment of Danger: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Contemporary Political Imaginary” Memory Studies, 11, 3 (2018), 355-367; Ken Jowitt, “After Leninism: The New World Disorder,” Journal of Democracy 2,1 (1991), 17; Jowitt, New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 310; Daniele Caramani and Luca Manucci, “National past and populism: the re-elaboration of fascism and its impact on right-wing populism in Western Europe,” West European Politics 42, 6 (2019), 1159-1187; Ivan Krastev, “The Spectre Haunting Europe: The Unravelling of the Post-1989 Order,” Journal of Democracy 27, 4 (2016), 90-91; Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[7] Antoon De Baets, “Democracy and Historical Writing,” Historografias 9 (2015), 43.

[8] Masumi Izumi, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).

[9] Mark E. Warren, “Accountability and Democracy” in Mark Bovens, Robert E. Goodin, and Thomas Schillemans eds., The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2003).

[10] Korematsu v United States, 323 US 214 (1944), 65 S Ct 193 [Korematsu].

[11] “Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide,” Human Rights Watch (May 12, 2020). Accessed at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide.

[12] Justin A. Chen, Emily Zhang, and Cindy H. Liu, “Potential Impact of COVID-19-Related Racial Discrimination on the Health of Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 110, 11 (2020), 1624-1627.

[13] Vancouver Police Department, “Report to the  Vancouver Police Board,” October 13, 2020 (accessed at: https://vancouver.ca/police/policeboard/agenda/2020/1029/2001P01-Q3-2020-KPI-Report.pdf); Fight COVID Racism, COVID-19 Racism in Canada Incident Reporting (accessed at: https://www.covidracism.ca/); Project 1907, Racism Incident Reporting Centre (accessed at:   https://www.project1907.org/reportingcentre).

[14] Art Miki and Audrey Kobayashi, “The Road to Redress: A Presentation to the Landscapes of Injustice Spring Institute, 2018,” Landscapes of Injustice, 425-453.

[15] Roger Daniels, Concentration Camp USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rineart, and Winston, 1971); Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976).

[16] Daniel M. Masterson with Sayaka Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 130-140; Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Akemi Kikumura, “Japanese Latin Americans During World War II: A Reconsideration,” in Nobuko Adachi ed., Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents and Uncertain Futures (London: Routledge, 2006), 159-171; Marcia Yumi Takeuchi, O Perigo Amarelo: Imagens do Mito, Realidade do Preconceito, 1920-1945 (São Paulo: Humanitas, 2008); Priscila Ferreira Perazzo, “O confinamento de Acará: Japoneses na Colônia de Tomé-Açu no Pará durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial,” in Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro and Marcia Yumi Takeuchi eds., Imigrantes japoneses no Brasil: Trajetória, Imaginário e Memória (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2010);  Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808-present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 6; Fernanda Cristina Covolan and Melissa Pinheiro Almeida, “Repúdio aos ‘Súditos do Eixo’: Legalização dos Campos de Concentração na Era Vargas,” Revista Opinião Jurídica 17, 25 (2019), 13-36.

[17] Masterson and Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America, 122-130; 149-178; María Emilia Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Jerry García, Looking Like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014);  C. Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).

[18] Kay Saunders and Helen Taylor, “The Enemy Within? The Process of Internment of Enemy Aliens in Queensland, 1939-45,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 34, 1 (1988), 16-27; Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, Internment in Australia during WW2 (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1993); Makoto Tanabe, “Senji nyujirando ni yokuryusareta minkannihonjin [Civilian Japanese interned in New Zealand during the war], Sonoda Gakuen Joshi Daigaku Ronbunshu, 30-II, (1995); Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1996); Kay Saunders, “‘The Stranger in our Gates’: Internment Policies in the United Kingdom and Australia During the Two World Wars, 1914-1939,” Immigrants and Minorities 22, 1 (2003), 22-43; Judith A. Bennett, “Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand”, The Journal of Pacific History 44,1 (2009), 61-76; Mary Nakashiba, Beyond Borders, (, Sunnybank Hill, Qld.: Bookpal, 2010); Ismet Kurtovitch, “L’Arrestation du Japonais’ [the Arrest of the Japanese], in Les Comedies Broussaredes (Madrepores, New Caledonia, 2013); Rowena Ward, “The Internment and Repatriation of the Japanese-French Nationals Resident in New Caledonia, 1941-1946,” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 14, 2 (2017), 55-67; Christine Piper, https://lovedayproject.com/.

[19] Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New  York: William Morrow, 1976); Daniels, Concentration Camp USA and Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of Japanese American Internment Cases (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Eric Muller, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of  the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Greg Robinson, By Order of  the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Stephen Fugita and Marilyn Fernandez, Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember their World War II Incarceration (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Karen Ishizuka, Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 2011); Gary Y. Okihiro. Encyclopedia of Japanese American Internment (Greenwood, 2013. http://publisher.abc-clio.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/A3691E); Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978); Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War (Toronto: James Lorimer and Co, 1981); Audrey Kobayashi, “The Japanese-Canadian Redress Settlement and Its Implications for ‘Race Relations,’” Canadian Ethnic Studies 24, no. 1 (February 1992): 1-20; Roy Miki, Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004); Patricia E. Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-1967 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); Pamela Sugiman, “‘Life is Sweet’: Vulnerability and Composure in the Wartime Narratives of Japanese Canadians,” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 186-218; Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Christian Roy, “Histoire de la communauté japonaise du Québec, 1942-1988,” (PhD Thesis, UQAM, 2016); Stanger-Ross and Sugiman eds., Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (McGill-Queens Press, 2017); Jordan Stanger-Ross ed., Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2020);

[20] Masterson and Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America; Hirabayashi and Kikumura, “Japanese Latin Americans During World War II”; Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Stephanie D. Bangarth, Voices Raised in Protest: Defending Citizens of Japanese Ancestry in North America, 1942-49 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008); Karen M. Inouye, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

[21] Tadao Kobayashi, Les Japonais en Nouvelle-Calédonie: Histoire des émigrés sous contrat (Publications de la Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1992); Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds., Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000); Iyko Day, “Alien Intimacies: The Coloniality of Japanese Internment in Australia, Canada, and the US,” Amerasia Journal, 36, 2 (2010), 107-24; Patrick Haid, “Reformulating Citizenship: The Nikkei in Canada and Australia” (PhD Thesis, University of New South Whales, 2011); Philippe Palumbo, La présence japonaise en nouvelle-calédonie (Université Européenne, 2012

[22]Daniel Masterson with Sayaka Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura eds.,  Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Canadians in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Stephanie Bangarth, Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-1949 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008); ).

[23] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

[24] Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the US-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2016); Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

[25] Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jeremy C. Martens, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888-1907 (Perth, Australia: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2018);

[26] James R. Carruthers “Great War and Canada’s Enemy Alien Policy,”Queen’s Law Journal 4 (1978), 43-110; Lubomyr Luciuk, A Time for Atonement: Canada’s First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians 1914-1920 (Kingston: The Limestone Press, 1988); Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914-1920 (Portland, Ore.: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain During the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1991); Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten Im Krieg: ‘Feindliche Ausländer’ Und Die Amerikanische Heimatfront Während Des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens During World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); James Farney and Bohdan S. Kordan, “The Predicament of Belonging: The Status of Enemy Alien in Canada, 1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 39, 1 (2005), 74-89; Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World at War (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Andrew Francis, ‘To Be Truly British We Must Be Anti-German’: New Zealand, Enemy Aliens, and the Great War Experience, 1914-1919 (Oxford-New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Daniela L. Caglioti ed., “Aliens and Internal Enemies: Internment Practices, Economic Exclusion and Property Rights During the First World War” Journal of Modern European History 12, 4 (2014); Lubomyr Luciuk, ed. Germans as Minorities During the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Bohdan S. Kordan, No Free Man: Canada, the Great War, and the Enemy Alien Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016); Mahon Murphy, Colonial Captivity During the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, and Matthew Stibbe, eds. Internment During the First World War. A Mass Global Phenomenon (Milton Park-New York: Routledge, 2019); Matthew Stibbe, Civilian Internment During the First World War: A European and Global History, 1914–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Nicholas Mulder, “‘A Retrograde Tendency’: The Expropriation of German Property in the Versailles Treaty,’” Journal of the history of International Law (2020), 1-29; Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire During the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Caglioti and Catherine Brice, “Property Rights in Wartime – Sequestration, Confiscation and Restitution in Twentieth-Century Europe” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 28, 2 (2021); Caglioti, War and Citizenship: Enemy Aliens and National Belonging from the French Revolution to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[28] Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Karen Dubinsky, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Laura Madokoro, Francine McKenzie, and David Meren, Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, The Racial Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 335. Mara Loveman, “Making ‘race’ and nation in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil: Taking making seriously,” Theory and Society 28 (1999), 903-927.

[30] Emirbayer and Desmond, Racial Order 51; Desmond and Emirbayer, “What is Racial Domination?” DuBois Review 6, 2 (2009), 335-355; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

[31] Rogers Brubaker, Grounds for Difference (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), Chapter 1.

[32] Stanger-Ross ed., Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020); Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[33] Emirbayer and Desmond, Racial Order, chapters 3-6.

[34] Deborah A. Thomas and Kamari Maxine Clarke, “Introduction” in Clarke and Thomas eds., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 9.

[35] Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race,” in Molina, HoSang, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 6; Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

[36] HoSang and Molina, “Introduction,” 7.

[37] Rogers Brubaker, Grounds for Difference.

[38] HoSang and Molina, “Introduction,” 8.

[39] Antoon De Baets, “Democracy and Historical Writing,” Historiografías (January-June, 2015), 31-43; Stanger-Ross and James, “Social Accountability after Political Apologies,” in Stanger-Ross, Landscapes of Injustice, 454-484.

[40] Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 202-3.

[41] John Tosh, Why History Matters (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 62.

[42] Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006); Stanger-Ross, “Introduction” in Landscapes of Injustice, 38; Stanger-Ross and James, “Social Accountability after Political Apologies.”

[43] Kate Taylor, “At the ROM, haunting Japanese Canadian history hides in plain sight,” Globe and Mail, February 4, 2019.

[44] Richard Watts, “Righting a historical wrong, by rebuilding a Japanese teahouse in Esquimalt,” Times Colonist (August 26, 2018); Laura Sciarpelletti, “‘It’s a miracle story’: Vancouver’s Japanese Hall designated a national historic site,” CBC News (November 13, 2019).

[45] Rose Paquet Kinsley, “Inclusion in Museums: A Matter of Social Justice,” Museum Management and Curatorship 31, 5 (2016), 474-490; Wendy Ng, Syrus Marcus Ware & Alyssa Greenberg, “Activating Diversity and Inclusion: A Blueprint for Museum Educators as Allies and Change Makers,” Journal of Museum Education 42,2 (2017), 142-154; Alexandra Olivares and Jaclyn Piatak, “Exhibiting Inclusion: An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Museum Participation,” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-021-00322-0.

[46] Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Memory Studies in a Moment of Danger: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Contemporary Political Imaginary” Memory Studies, 11, 3 (2018), 355-367.

[47] Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, “Approaches to Assessing Impacts in the Humanities and Social Sciences” (2017), accessed at: https://www.ideas-idees.ca/sites/default/files/impact_report_en_final.pdf.

[48] Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[49] Caglioti, War and Citizenship.

[50] Lindsay Gibson and Roland Case, “Reshaping Canadian history education in support of reconciliation,” Canadian Journal of Education, 42, 1 (2019), 251-284; Gibson, “Ethical judgments about the difficult past: Observations from the classroom,” in Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra, eds, History and Social Studies Education in a Context of Intolerance: Imagined Communities and Collective Memory (New York: Routledge, 2019), 81-104, and “The ethical dimension of Canadian commemoration controversies,” Canadian Social Studies 49,2 (2017), 15-19.

[51] Melissa Miles, Photography, Truth and Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2019); Miles and Robin Gerster eds., Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship (Canberra:

Australian National University Press, 2018).

[52] Jeffery Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2013), A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[53] Timothy Kazuo Steains, “Nikkei Australian identity and the work of Mayu Kanamori,” in David Chapman and Carol Hayes, Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connections (New York: Routledge, 2020), 130-148.

[54] Gustavo Takeshy Taniguti, “Candidatos de Origem Japonesa na Política Municipal Paulista, 1947-1964,” Estudos de Sociologia (Araraquara) 26, 50 (2021), 445-472.

[55] Museums Board of Victoria, Annual Report 2019-2020 (Melbourne: Victoria Museums, 2020), https://museumsvictoria.com.au/media/15391/museums_board_of_victoria_annual_report_2019-20.pdf.

[56] http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/.