“INTENMENT” COMES from the Latin interrare—to bury or submerge in the earth, entomb. In a footnote on the first page of Shimoda’s almost true-crime account of the psycho-spiritual conditions that made it possible for the US government to enact Executive Order 9066, we learn that more than 125,000 Japanese Americans were buried alive this way, subject to what was sometimes referred to as “exclusion,” beginning in 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and ending in March 1946. One of the ten concentration camps was Topaz, in Delta, Utah, where one internedman was shot in the heart by guards, while leaning over to pick a flower. This incident provides the book’s opening image, unfurling like a noxious poison you don’t want to stop inhaling because it might give you a vision, divine insight, or just return you to yourself without the blindfold that renders all of your waking conversations preamble for the real and revelatory that you might otherwise never allow past the veil of small talk. Imagine not knowing that your own government encoded such a crime into law, that with the waging of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s blasphemous pen, entire families were disappeared, sent to a mass grave, surveilled, killed for affinities to gardens, targeted for being too good at agriculture and aggravating jealous white farmers (who, as Shimoda explains, prompted many to support the mass incarceration of Japanese citizens). Japanese Americans who weren’t interned were encouraged to evacuate the US voluntarily under the threat of their live burial, warned they might be next. Could American xenophobia and psychopathy induce the terraformation of an environment wherein the inventedother dissolved into mineral—stones on the landscape merging into unholy mountains, hidden places, secret rest stops on the path to acceptable modes of Americanism. Kill him before he learns how defiant it is to love beauty under fascism.
The Secret History
An investigation of the US’s mass internment of Japanese Americans.