Reflecting on the recent lifting of the military exclusion zones that had barred Japanese Americans from the West Coast for most of World War II, Disciples of Christ United Missionary Society President Robert Hopkins reflected in January 1945 that “there are some wrongs that cannot be atoned for and some losses that cannot be made good” (News Bulletin, Folder 18, Gordon K. Chapman: Protestant Church Commission for Japanese Service Collection, Sylvia Lamson Hewlett Library Special Collections, Graduate Theological Union). Much recent scholarship on the incarceration of Nikkei (Japanese Americans) during World War II stands at the cutting edge of academic methodologies and conversations, including work by Jasmine Alinder, Cherstin Lyon, Eric Muller, and Greg Robinson. Anne Blankenship joins this group with a new work that addresses the religious experience of Christian Nikkei in the camps and the relationship of incarcerees with Christian religious groups outside of the camps.

Blankenship considers how white and Japanese American Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Quakers negotiated the challenges and injustices of mass incarceration. She follows the Seattle Nikkei community from pre-war congregations into the Minidoka camp in southern Idaho, the resettlement of some in Midwestern communities, and their return to the West Coast in order to “show how war and church policies changed their secular and social lives” (12). She places this history in the spectrum of the “long civil rights” history in an effort to broaden its purview, positing the relevance to the civil rights narrative of efforts by white and Nikkei Christians to fight massive race-based exclusion. Basing her research on the rich trove of documents at repositories across the country, including several denominational archives, and on memoirs like Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, Blankenship weaves the perspectives of white and Nikkei Christians through what she calls “parallel narratives” of Protestant, Quaker, and Roman Catholic experiences (3).

The book tracks the development of Christian responses to the incarceration of all West Coast Nikkei. As other authors like Allan Austin have noted, the Quakers stepped out front immediately to denounce the government's action and express their own complicity in a racist society. Quakers grappled with whether or not to help incarcerated Nikkei; to do so might seem to be giving aid and approval to unjust government policies. Ultimately, Quakers took the lead on many fronts, including helping students get into colleges outside the exclusion zone and providing temporary housing for resettled Nikkei. Protestants worked together in ecumenical organizations and closely with the federal government. Roman Catholic priests and sisters found they sometimes had to work around their hierarchical system in order to serve their parishioners and former students who had been moved to inland camps. Through these different faith groups, a multiplicity of organizations emerged to assist the many needs of the displaced Nikkei.

Blankenship illuminates the challenges faced by the well-intentioned white volunteers who had to learn to “begin to work with” the Nikkei instead of for them (69). She also shows the difficulties inherent for Nikkei aware of their relative powerlessness in the context and expected to express gratitude instead of critique for church aid that was not always what they wanted. Less developed is an exploration of the many ways that the federal government gained from its partnership with faith-based groups.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the forced development of an ecumenical Protestant church in each of the camps and the experiences of Christianity in the camps. Religious worship and fellowship became space for solidarity and meaning-making for many individuals in the camps. Youth developed lived theologies of their experiences that Blankenship claims developed later into Asian American liberation theologies and led Christian Nikkei to become involved in the civil rights movement. She counters arguments for a fatalist understanding of “shikata ga nai” (“It cannot be helped” or “That's life”) with explorations of the subtle forms of resistance expressed by Nikkei through their faith.

Chapter 5, “The End of Japanese Ethnic Churches?,” is arguably the strongest chapter in an excellent work. Both Nikkei and white Protestant leaders found themselves working at cross-purposes as they spun visions of a post-war church and society. For some, the elimination of ethnic enclaves and ethnic churches was the means to a racially unified and just society. For others, only ethnic churches could fill the language needs of Issei (first generation) and help heal the spiritual, emotional, and psychological wounds instilled by incarceration in a whole generation. Focusing primarily on how these arguments played out in Seattle, Blankenship emphasizes the complexity confronting the various groups who all sought justice for Nikkei with different paths to that end. She argues that the integration experiment failed, both on the West Coast and in the Midwest resettlement areas. Many Nikkei reclaimed their pre-war ethnic congregations. Others, Blankenship argues, simply left the church, turned off by integration efforts that failed to address their needs. Interestingly, she points to Howard Thurman's intentionally interracial Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples as an alternative example of successful integration; Thurman and Albert Fisk started this congregation in 1944 in a church building “borrowed” from a Japanese American congregation then incarcerated.

There are minor errors in the book; for example, my research suggests that no camp congregation ever had more than a made-over barrack for a church (see the reference to the Gila River church, 106) due to the wartime shortage of building material. Occasionally, the book requires background knowledge of church history and a previous overview of Nikkei incarceration history. Blankenship refers in passing to the creation of six emergency camps in the fall of 1945 (190) without discussing the War Relocation Authority's decision to close all of the camps and “resettle” the remaining elderly, ailing, and young in the camps by the close of 1945. However, these are small concerns for a work that brings to the forefront of Nikkei, American religious, and civil rights scholarship an aspect of the incarceration experience that has been too long overlooked.