Judgment Without Trial

"Kashima's much-needed and well-received volume examines, in well-documented details, the complex, and often insidious, military and governmental bureaucratic jostling for power and position, and the decision-making process that forced thousands—17,477—of Japanese Americans to be imprisoned.."

"This book lucidly delineates the complicated history of these camps that held Japanese Americans, alien Italians and Germans, and Latin American Japanese. . . . Judgment Without Trial, by telling how it happened 60 odd years ago, reminds us of the government’s ability to harm people by subverting the liberties Americans hold dear."

"This dense scholarly exploration of the experiences of World War II internees, and in particular of the directives and procedures that governed the internment process, is of particular interest because, unlike many books on the subject, it contains a detailed study of the process as it occurred outside the contiguous United States."

"This is a rich, meticulously researched, and vitally important book. Combining what might be called standard political history with social history and case studies, he explains, in considerable detail, the administrative process for determining who would be relocated and where and the operations of the federal agencies responsible for turning these plans into reality. . . . Kashima’s prodigious research and well-honed arguments speak for themselves—and speak to recent developments and the question of when justice for all is justice only for some."

"Readers familiar with the literature on the imprisonment will appreciate both Kashima’s painstaking research and his ambitious effort to describe the imprisonment in all its dimensions. Judgment Without Trial proves that the imprisonment was not an act of wartime hysteria. Instead, it was thoroughly planned. . . . Kashima’s book also makes clear that Nikkei had to confront—usually without legal counsel—a bewildering array of federal agencies in their efforts to secure their rights."

"The materials contained in this book are extraordinarily valuable. The author, using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, has uncovered a heretofore hidden dimension of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. His theory of the ‘bureaucracy of incarceration’ guides the reader through the maze of agencies and personnel who established and maintained thousands of Japanese from 1941 to 1945 and beyond. . . . As a contribution to Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and the sociology of organization, this study is likely to be hailed as a landmark."

"Tetsuden Kashima has fashioned a work that is accessible, absorbing, measured, and suffused with significance. The culmination of years of painstaking and conscientious research and writing, this estimable book is seminal within an already crowded field of study, not merely for what it covers in the way of new data but rather because it situates the subject of the Japanese American Evacuation [JAE] into an analytical framework that is both larger and more meaningful than that extant. It ushers in a new paradigm for the scholarly study and public understanding of the JAE."