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Karen M. Inouye, Anne M. Blankenship. Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1646–1647, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1646
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Anne M. Blankenship’s book recounts the lesser-known story of the intersections between Christianity and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. As such, Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II complicates the more familiar story of Japanese American history, which has long focused on constitutional questions, on prison conditions, and on resettlement of former inmates immediately following the war. By contrast, Blankenship focuses on the role that religious belief played in community building during the war; in the process she addresses how both white and Japanese American Christians navigated the contradictions that unjust imprisonment produced: “The injustice challenged white Christian leaders and Japanese Christians as Americans and as people of faith” (3). Most ambitiously, perhaps, Blankenship describes those challenges as having ultimately informed the civil rights movement, suggesting that the sudden incarceration of an entire racial group required Christian leaders to respond more immediately to race relations, a forced early response that effectively laid the foundation for later political action.
