Chapters: Season Five Introduction

·52 min·5 clips

A speaker reveals how their family's terms for WWII events hid the truth of mass forced removal and incarceration.

The frame begins with a vocabulary correction. Older labels such as evacuation, relocation, and relocation centers give way, under pressure from a later generation, to mass forced removal and mass incarceration. The episode treats that change as more than wording. It says the public has to understand that the people incarcerated were Americans, and that the U.S. government has admitted the wrong and apologized. Memory here has a job to do. The season remembers the life people made inside the camps: music, art, performances, moments of beauty passed between people who should never have been put there. None of that makes the injury gentler. It makes the waste and cruelty harder to dodge, especially when the removal was tied to race and aimed at citizens and permanent residents. The legal history gives the introduction its edge. Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi sit inside the later fight to overturn convictions 40 years after imprisonment. Gordon calls the case American. His question, whether it can happen again, keeps the season from feeling safely historical. Then the episode looks at the carceral system now. Ricardo García, Los Angeles County's public defender, links that past to punishment, retribution, and warehousing. Jail and prison may claim deterrence and rehabilitation, but the episode presses on what happens to the people kept in cages, and what society owes them when they leave. The guest list widens the record: Teresa Watanabe, Terrell Alvin McCraney, Kern Kim, Stephanie Takaragawa, John Matthews, Densho, the Geffen Playhouse, the ACLU, the Grateful Crane Ensemble, and the Japanese American National Museum. The close names Passed Forward, Chapman University, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program as the production and support structure behind the series.

As heard by us

A chapter opener links Japanese American incarceration, civil liberties, and prison reform through history, testimony, and art.

Passed Forward opens this chapter by replacing the softer language of "evacuation" and "relocation" with the harder truth of forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get an introduction to a 14-episode chapter where Japanese American incarceration opens into the larger question of how the criminal legal system cages people.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Past Forward