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This chapter discusses the year when the prisoners of war (POWs) were freed from their Japanese oppressors. This seemed evident in the inability of the Japanese to protect and adequately feed their prisoners. Those POW who still remained in Japanese camps were shuffled from place to place due to the constant threat posed by the American air power. The end of the year brought freedom to the POWs and Internees, who were shocked by the skill, scale, and modernity of the fleets and personnel that had rapidly formed to carry them home.

This chapter discusses the Stanley internees' activities during internment at the camp. It describes how kindergarten and transition classes were set up in St Stephen's College Hall for children five to eight years old, as well as junior school classes for eight to twelve year-olds and senior school for those up to eighteen. It notes that for the first few weeks the American children received separate instruction, but beginning in April 1942, the schools were combined. It observes that with more than two hundred children in the Camp as well as teachers and administrators from the Education Department, the University of Hong Kong and a number of primary, middle, and other schools, it is not surprising that very early on internment plans were made for education. It reports that Lancelot Forster was the chairman of the Education Committee which was subsequently formed and held weekly meetings throughout internment.

Chapter 2 provides a social profile of the 343 Italian civilian internees. Persons who held leadership roles in their communities or possessed special knowledge that could be used against the United States were most feared by the government. This chapter traces the debate among President Roosevelt and his advisors, the War Department, the Justice Department, and legislative committees about whether to evacuate the entire population of Italian aliens from military areas. Italian American politicians and prominent members of the Italian community testified to the loyalty of their community toward the United States. Finally, this chapter shows the distinct variation in the military defense commands’ interpretation of Executive Order 9066 regarding the protection of military areas and policies of individual exclusion and restrictions upon enemy aliens, and explains the factors that resulted in stricter restrictions in the Western Defense Command as compared to those in the Eastern Defense Command.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book posits the importance of understanding the structural trauma of internment as located in the spectacularization imposed upon Japanese Americans by the U.S. government and mass media during World War II. By spectacularizing the disenfranchisement and imprisonment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, the U.S. government and mass media denied the gravity of what was taking place and disavowed the psychological suffering and material violence perpetrated against a persecuted ethnic minority. The book further argues that by framing the evacuation and internment as spectacles, the United States positioned the American public as passive spectators to the unconstitutional treatment of their ethnic Japanese neighbors and, simultaneously, cast the public as heroic “patriots” opposite Japanese Americans, who were cast in one of two thankless roles: expressionless automata or melodramatic villains.

This chapter explores the self-conscious construction of Japanese American identities and the internment experience in the internee-run Manzanar Free Press, which epitomized the camp newspapers independently published in each of the ten relocation centers. In the face of political spectacularization and racist media slander, internee journalists drew attention to a “spectacle-archive,” recording the ambivalent scrutiny imposed upon them from all sides. At the same time, internees staged intercultural performing arts festivals that defied the U.S. government’s mono-Americanist assimilation policy, which pitted second-generation Nisei against their “Japanesey” Issei parents and criminalized displays of Japanese culture. For internee audiences these intercultural performances made visible the contradictions of American racial performativity. Unfortunately, the fact that this performed resistance lives on mainly through embodied memory has meant that progressive narratives of America’s triumph over adversity—epitomized by the U.S. National Park Service’s celebration of internees’ festivity at Manzanar National Historic Site—have appropriated only the “model minority” interpretation of camp performing arts as rehearsals for assimilation and accommodationist endorsements of U.S. policy.

This chapter uncovers the transnational performing arts (theatre, dance, and music) of internees at the “other” California relocation center, Tule Lake, which served from 1943 to 1946 as a segregation center for Japanese Americans deemed especially “disloyal” to the United States and loyal to Japan. Manzanar and Tule Lake are generally understood to have very different, even diametrically opposed, histories of internee compliance and resistance, but closer examination of the performance histories of Manzanar and Tule Lake reveal the nuanced and similar ways that internees “talked back” to theatricalized stereotypes about Japanese culture, the spectacularization of Asian American assimilation, and the scrutinization of Japanese American loyalty. Significantly, these transnational performing artists rejected the myth of performative citizenship outright by denying that the enactment of either Japanese or American culture necessarily correlated with their loyalty to either nation.

For the political prisoners, for their families, and for those charged with managing them the period between the truce and the treaty (July to August 1921) was unsettling and marked by ongoing conflict. In truth, the truce was never effectively extended to the prisons and camps. While it did facilitate the release of the political elite among the prisoners, an agitated mass remained in detention. In examining this period this chapter broaches, in turn, three major issues. First, how did the Irish public and press react to the continued detention of prisoners (internees and convicts) in the period after the truce and did the leadership of the rebellion seek to manage this reaction? Second, how did the prisoners react to their continued detention and did this affect the relationship between the prisoners and their leaders? Third, how did the various systems of incarceration cope with the truce atmosphere?

This chapter looks at representative cases involving the mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees by Japanese camp personnel, as well as noninterned civilians who were mistreated while being interrogated by the Japanese police authorities. The chapter also looks at a war crime that was never prosecuted involving the murder of 900 Indonesian civilian laborers, who died as a result of a faulty medical experiment. A key case examined in this chapter is the prosecution of Army Captain Sone, who was the first Japanese national to be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for war crimes committed against prisoners and civilians.