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This transcribed and edited wartime diary of Robert L. Brown—a trained journalist who served as public relations staff and assistant director at the Manzanar concentration camp—reveals the thoughts and perspective of the jailer, providing a window into the views of the local population around the presence and experience of a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in their community. In addition to the heavily footnoted diary, the book includes a prologue, introduction, and epilogue from Arthur A. Hansen, providing context for the journal as well as how Hansen came to transcribe the work with Brown’s blessing.
A departure from the typical recovered narratives from incarcerees, Brown’s diary is a historically significant primary source that provides insight into camp administration and local community relationships with Manzanar and a rich primary source for specialists in the field of Japanese American incarceration.
“Robert L. Brown’s personal account of his transition from a ‘booster’ for the California Owens Valley to a WRA camp administrator is an insightful look at an understudied aspect of Japanese American incarceration: the men and women who ran the day-to-day operations of the camps. While Hansen built a legacy on depicting the experiences of Japanese Americans held by the military and WRA in the camps, only by broadening the narrative to include the ‘perpetrators’ can historians (and the public) come to understand that this was not a program that ‘only’ affected the Nikkei population. Incarceration intertwined all levels of American society.”
—Stephanie Hinnershitz, The Air Command and Staff College
Arthur A. Hansen is emeritus professor of history, founding director of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program and the Center for Oral and Public History, and founding faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at California State University, Fullerton. He has been honored as both the Outstanding Teacher and the Outstanding Faculty Member in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at CSUF. He was senior historian at the Japanese American National Museum and received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2007 and the Sue Kunitomi Embrey Legacy Award from the Manzanar Committee in 2014. He is also the author of Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Social Disaster and Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America’s First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp and editor of Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omuraand Beyond the Betrayal: The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience.