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My grandfather, Tadamichi "Joe" Tsuboi, was second-generation Japanese American, born in Covina, California in 1921. Because of early twentieth-century exclusionary naturalization laws that forbade his first-generation parents from attaining U.S. citizenship statuses, my grandfather was educated in Japan to maintain roots in the United States and in Japan. Yet, when Pearl Harbor was bombed in ... read moreDecember 1941 and the U.S. entered World War II, in the eyes of the U.S. government, my grandfather's upbringing in Japan confirmed his status as potentially "disloyal" to his country of birth. During World War II, he was incarcerated at age twenty-one at a series of “Assembly Centers” and incarceration camps; he went from the Santa Anita Racetrack “Assembly Center” to the Jerome, Arkansas “Relocation Center” and from there to the Tule Lake, California “Relocation Center,” where he was kept under surveillance because of his status as second-generation Japanese American who were raised and/or educated in Japan, or kibei. Ultimately, at Tule Lake, my grandfather was forced to renounce his U.S. citizenship because he failed to meet the standards of American “loyalty” on the Loyalty Questionnaire. Through archival and ethnographic research, I analyze my grandfather's life: from his family's dynamic immigration history, their decision to send him to Japan for education, this incarceration experience as kibei and subsequent renunciation of U.S. citizenship, and, lastly, the legal battle he endured to restore a status that should have guaranteed him all civil rights.read less
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