Gendered Interventions: Americanization and Protestant Evangelism under Japanese American Incarceration

In the vast scholarship on Japanese American "internment," with its ever more sophisticated attention to euphemism and doublespeak, the U.S. government's socalled relocation centers have often been characterized as concentration camps. This paper asks if they should also be considered as indoctrination centers. My essay first examines the vital role of camp schools in Americanizing imprisoned Japanese American children and adults. Second, I look at a particular set of popular representations that traded on a long‐standing American creation myth, the pioneer narrative, which was adopted and partially transformed by Japanese Americans inclined toward assimilation. Finally, I probe the more explicitly religious components of Americanization and the leadership positions held by Japanese American women in those campaigns. WRA officials and Japanese American Christians clearly saw incarceration as an unprecedented opportunity to evangelize on a grand scale. In the gendered hierarchies of church leadership, just below the male clergy, women lay leaders in particular led the charge.