The Salvage (book)

Dorothy Swaine Thomas received her B.A. degree from Barnard College in 1922 and two years later earned a Ph.D. from the University of London School of Economics. From 1924 to 1948, she worked at Yale University, the Carnegie Corporation, the Social Science Institute at the University of Stockholm, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and the University of California at Berkeley where she headed JERS. The collected data from the project was to be used to write three books on Japanese American removal, incarceration, dispersal, and return to the West Coast. The first book, The Spoilage (1946), focuses on the events that transpired at Tule Lake and examines the "disloyal" incarcerated population, many of whom renounced ties to America. The second book, The Salvage , analyzes the experiences of those who successfully resettled in the East and Midwest. The third book was to be based on the "residue," those who remained in the camps into 1945. ^[1]

Thomas was assisted by Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda in the writing of The Salvage . Kikuchi was one of the original JERS staff members and had completed a year of graduate work in social welfare at Berkeley before he was incarcerated. At Thomas' behest, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) transferred Kikuchi to Gila River to observe the events taking place. When Thomas opened the Chicago JERS office in the spring of 1943, Kikuchi and a few others were entrusted with the responsibility of recording and documenting the experiences of Japanese Americans who comprised a representative sample in age, occupation, communities of origin, and family backgrounds. Ultimately, Kikuchi wrote sixty complete and four partial life histories, fifteen of which Thomas published in The Salvage that fit the pattern of social and demographic change identified by the researchers. James Sakoda, another JERS staff member collected, evaluated, tabulated, and analyzed details of the approximately 24,000 individuals whose statistical histories are examined in Part I.

The Salvage is comprised of two distinct sections: "Patterns of Social and Demographic Change" and "The Course of Individual Experience." The first part describes the general historical context of Japanese immigration and settlement, including agricultural and urban endeavors as well as cultural aspects. It also examines the subsequent removal, incarceration, and resettlement of Japanese Americans. The second part, which comprises the majority of the book, focuses on Japanese American migration from the incarceration centers to the Midwest and East from 1943 to 1944. The information contained in these sections was based on census records, transcripts of segregation transfers and leave permits, participant observations, and interviews with Japanese Americans who resettled in the Chicago area. The interviews focus on the lives of Japanese Americans in the prewar period, their wartime incarceration, and finally their resettlement and adjustment to American life in the Midwest. According to the authors, "the selection of the fifteen histories was influenced most directly by sections on agricultural adjustments, urban enterprise, and occupational mobility, with particular reference to Nisei." ^[2] Three of the interviewees were Nisei who lived on farms in central California while the rest engaged in various urban careers. All but one had attended Japanese language school, and all were bilingual as they had attended and graduated from high school. The group included eleven males and four females, and the majority had some college education. At the time of the interviews, only three were over thirty years of age and none was less than twenty years old. According to the findings of the authors, Japanese Americans who had lived in the Pacific Northwest, which was considered to be a more racially tolerant area than California, were more commonly part of the "salvage." However, former California residents who experienced greater prejudice were often characterized as the "spoilage." Japanese American Christians and Nisei who had been educated at American colleges and universities were also disproportionately represented in the "salvage." ^[3]

Although Kikuchi was critical in the documentation of the resettlement phase, he was not a typical Nisei. As scholar Yuji Ichioka points out, "He fit the classic mode of a marginal man. Without any roots in his own cultural past, he had no positive self-identity. Kikuchi was so riddled with conflict that he was incapable of identifying with any group or institution. He was alienated from his own family, the Japanese immigrant community, his Nisei peers, as well as the larger society." ^[4] As a Nisei who had been orphaned at a young age, he could not speak Japanese and was unable to communicate with Issei or Kibei —a fact that likely influenced who he interviewed. Sociologist Forrest E. LaViolette who served as a WRA community analyst at Heart Mountain also takes issue with the interviews: "In spite of the statements of Dr. Thomas, the relationships between Parts I and II are not clear, chiefly it seems because there is no analysis of the 15 cases." ^[5] The life stories, however, offer invaluable insight to this period as noted by reviewer John Maki , who commends the "light they shed on the individual and group problems of the Japanese-American minority" during a critical transition period before many would return to the West Coast. ^[6] Although the interviews were concluded in 1944, Maki hoped that a "similar study can be made of the Japanese-American group in the period from 1945 to 1950 which, it seems safe to assume, witnessed the final rounding off of the crisis of war, evacuation and resettlement." This sentiment was shared by reviewer Tom Sasaki who notes that upon finishing the book, "one feels the need for another volume which would present the long-range study of the salvage, as well as of the residue" that was to be the last book of the series produced by JERS researchers, but was never written. ^[7] As the first study written of the resettlement period, The Salvage documents a critical time in Japanese American history.

Briones, Matthew M. Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

"Dorothy Swaine Thomas." American Sociological Association website. http://www.asanet.org/about/presidents/Dorothy_Thomas.cfm .

"Finding Aid to the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, 1930-1974 (bulk 1942-1946)." The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5j49n8kh/ .

Ichioka, Yuji, ed. Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1989.

Kikuchi, Charles. The Kikuchi Diary; Chronicle From an American Concentration Camp; the Tanforan Journals of Charles Kikuchi . Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Spickard, Paul R. and Blackie Najima. "Not Just the Quiet People: The Nisei Underclass." Pacific Historical Review 68.1 (Feb. 1999): 79-94.

Handlin, Oscar. American Quarterly 5.4 (Winter 1953): 376-77.

LaViolette, Forrest E. Social Force s 32.1 (Oct. 1953): 97.

Maki, John M. The Far Eastern Quarterly 12.4 (Aug. 1953): 437-38.

Sasaki, Tom T. American Anthropologist 55.4 (Oct.,1953): 598-99.