Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile

Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai‘i’s Japanese in World War II By Gail Y. Okawa. Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile is a composite chronicling of the Hawai‘i Japanese immigrant experience in mainland exile and internment during World War II, from pre-war climate to arrest to exile to return. Told through the eyes of a granddaughter and researcher born during the war, it is also a research narrative that reveals parallels between pre-WWII conditions and current twenty-first century anti-immigrant attitudes and heightened racism. The book introduces Okawa’s grandfather, Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Protestant minister, and other Issei prisoners—all legal immigrants excluded by law from citizenship—in a collective biographical narrative that depicts their suffering, challenges, and survival as highly literate men faced with captivity in the little-known prison camps run by the U.S. Justice and War Departments. Okawa interweaves documents, personal and officia