OK, I said my first post on the subject of Michelle’s book would come in a couple of hours, and would be about the book’s goals and method. I lied.
I posted a message on my own blog yesterday that the cover of the book didn’t inspire much confidence that the book would be Fair and Balanced. I thought the visual equation of a Japanese American man with Mohammad Atta was a bit, shall we say, scandalous. Michelle disagreed.
Now I know who the Japanese American man on the cover is (Richard Kotoshirodo), and I still say that the cover is scandalous. Kotoshirodo was an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, educated in Japan (making him a “Kibei”–that is, a person born in the US to Japanese alien parents (a “Nisei”) and who was sent to Japan for his primary and/or secondary education) who, while employed by the Japanese consulate in Hawaii, was sent out by the consulate to observe various sites of interest to the Japanese consulate in the months before Pearl Harbor and told to report back on his observations.
The book’s cover compares this apparentlyly disloyal American citizen of Japanese ancestry who did some surveillance for his employers at the Japanese consulate before Japan’s surprise attack to Mohammad Atta, a Saudi citizen who piloted a plane into one of the World Trade towers, killing thousands of civilian innocents. A fair comparison? Not in my eyes. Maybe you see it differently.
One other thing: nobody who looks at this cover in a bookstore is going to have the faintest idea who the Japanese American face is; nearly everyone, it’s safe to say, will recognize Mohammad Atta. Coupled with the book’s title (“In Defense of Internment”) and its subtitle (“The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror”), which sits directly between the two photographs, this cover will, I think, suggest to the ordinary person that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today. If that’s not a scandalous aspersion on the loyalty and character of Japanese Americans, I don’t know what is.
Update: Folks are photoshopping the cover of “In Defense of Internment” over here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Comments are closed.