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Book Review: The Moved-Outers
Jul. 11th, 2023 06:59 pmIn 1946, Florence Crannell Means was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal with The Moved-Outers, a children’s novel about the Japanese internment camps during World War II.
I was startled when I realized this, because I’m sure that I’ve read that no one was writing about the Japanese internment camps till decades later, the sixties or seventies. And yet here we are! The book evidently fell down a memory hole, for all that it was a runner-up for the most prestigious literary award in children’s literature in 1946. It was also, as per my copy, reprinted in 1992.
The 1946 award date means The Moved-Outers was published in 1945, which means that it must have been written very close to contemporaneously with the events that it describes. This gives it a slightly different tone than later authors writing about the same events. Like later authors, Means is appalled by the injustice, but there’s also a certain level of horrified incredulity which arises from watching this injustice unfold in real-time, the sense that this is happening but it can’t be happening. We know better! We’re better than this! And yet, somehow, we’re not, because it is happening.
Or perhaps I just recognize this feeling now that I’ve experienced it myself, in watching almost every decision of the Trump administration, most especially their policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.
Anyway. Our heroine is American-born Sue (Sumiko) Ohara, who is looking ahead to her high school graduation in a few months when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Although the local community largely rallies around the Ohara family, overnight America as a whole turns hostile. First Sue’s father is detained for questioning and shipped off to be interned by the FBI. (There is suspicion that a rival florist, a Caucasian, may have denounced him in order to have the town’s floral business all to himself.) Then Sue and her mother and her brother are sent to an internment camp, as indeed are all the Japanese-Americans who live within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean.
But Sue’s sister Amy studying on the east coast and her brother Tad in the army are exempt, which really shows the arbitrary stupidity of the whole policy. Surely if the U.S government genuinely believed that some large proportion of Japanese-Americans were spies, the last place they would want them is the army? Means suggests that, although certain hysterical voters may have believed the spy rumors, the actual powers behind the internment were businessmen with government connections, who stood to make money if they could get their Japanese neighbors out of the way, and encouraged racist spy hysteria for their own vicious ends. Mr. Ohara’s florist rival writ large. I have no idea if the current historiography agrees with this assessment; the characters discuss it as a possible theory, not a proven fact.
Quite a lot of the book consists of the characters discussing their predicament: why they ended up here, how they should behave now that they are stuck here. Sue’s mother keeps a stiff upper lip. (Many of the older generation, Means notes, considered it a badge of honor never to complain.) Sue’s brother Kim alternates between crackling fury and dull despair. Sue tries to keep her spirits up, most especially with the happy fact that she can now see her crush Jiro every day, but sometimes she can’t believe this is her life. How can she be graduating high school behind barbed wire? Her old principal shows up to deliver Sue and Kim’s diplomas personally, which is a kind gesture, but Sue’s still trapped in this desert camp, when she’s supposed to be going to college with her best friend Emily.
And what does this mean for her attitude toward America going forward? Sue decides that, horrible though internment is, America is her country, and not just because throwing in with Japan would mean condoning the despicable behavior of the Japanese army in its occupied territories. Her brother Kim is not so sure, but ultimately he joins the U.S. Army, if only because it seems like a better option than killing himself. As he comments, he can already see the headlines about hara-kiri, and he won't give them the satisfaction. (Sue, meanwhile, gets a college scholarship, which enables her to leave too.)
A fascinating historical snapshot. I never would have found it without the Newbery project, and I love it when the list throws up books like this.
I was startled when I realized this, because I’m sure that I’ve read that no one was writing about the Japanese internment camps till decades later, the sixties or seventies. And yet here we are! The book evidently fell down a memory hole, for all that it was a runner-up for the most prestigious literary award in children’s literature in 1946. It was also, as per my copy, reprinted in 1992.
The 1946 award date means The Moved-Outers was published in 1945, which means that it must have been written very close to contemporaneously with the events that it describes. This gives it a slightly different tone than later authors writing about the same events. Like later authors, Means is appalled by the injustice, but there’s also a certain level of horrified incredulity which arises from watching this injustice unfold in real-time, the sense that this is happening but it can’t be happening. We know better! We’re better than this! And yet, somehow, we’re not, because it is happening.
Or perhaps I just recognize this feeling now that I’ve experienced it myself, in watching almost every decision of the Trump administration, most especially their policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.
Anyway. Our heroine is American-born Sue (Sumiko) Ohara, who is looking ahead to her high school graduation in a few months when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Although the local community largely rallies around the Ohara family, overnight America as a whole turns hostile. First Sue’s father is detained for questioning and shipped off to be interned by the FBI. (There is suspicion that a rival florist, a Caucasian, may have denounced him in order to have the town’s floral business all to himself.) Then Sue and her mother and her brother are sent to an internment camp, as indeed are all the Japanese-Americans who live within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean.
But Sue’s sister Amy studying on the east coast and her brother Tad in the army are exempt, which really shows the arbitrary stupidity of the whole policy. Surely if the U.S government genuinely believed that some large proportion of Japanese-Americans were spies, the last place they would want them is the army? Means suggests that, although certain hysterical voters may have believed the spy rumors, the actual powers behind the internment were businessmen with government connections, who stood to make money if they could get their Japanese neighbors out of the way, and encouraged racist spy hysteria for their own vicious ends. Mr. Ohara’s florist rival writ large. I have no idea if the current historiography agrees with this assessment; the characters discuss it as a possible theory, not a proven fact.
Quite a lot of the book consists of the characters discussing their predicament: why they ended up here, how they should behave now that they are stuck here. Sue’s mother keeps a stiff upper lip. (Many of the older generation, Means notes, considered it a badge of honor never to complain.) Sue’s brother Kim alternates between crackling fury and dull despair. Sue tries to keep her spirits up, most especially with the happy fact that she can now see her crush Jiro every day, but sometimes she can’t believe this is her life. How can she be graduating high school behind barbed wire? Her old principal shows up to deliver Sue and Kim’s diplomas personally, which is a kind gesture, but Sue’s still trapped in this desert camp, when she’s supposed to be going to college with her best friend Emily.
And what does this mean for her attitude toward America going forward? Sue decides that, horrible though internment is, America is her country, and not just because throwing in with Japan would mean condoning the despicable behavior of the Japanese army in its occupied territories. Her brother Kim is not so sure, but ultimately he joins the U.S. Army, if only because it seems like a better option than killing himself. As he comments, he can already see the headlines about hara-kiri, and he won't give them the satisfaction. (Sue, meanwhile, gets a college scholarship, which enables her to leave too.)
A fascinating historical snapshot. I never would have found it without the Newbery project, and I love it when the list throws up books like this.
