Identity disruption and the observing-narrating self in Stanley Hayami’s internment diary

ABSTRACT

Among the tens of thousands of young Japanese Americans imprisoned in internment camps during World War II, teenager Stanley Hayami decided to chronicle his thoughts and experiences in a diary. Hayami’s diary provides both a fascinating glimpse into the everyday experiences of teenage internees and, as we argue, an opportunity to learn more about how the process of journaling can reveal the profound and complex challenges involved in re-constructing an identity disrupted by a heightened recognition of one’s marked, racialized body and the phenomenological displacement of the self in time and space. Integrating theoretical work in narrative, diaries, and multi-modal identity, we illustrate how Hayami used his diary to observe and narrate his self-identity during internment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Hayami stopped writing in his diary upon joining the U.S. Army. He wrote letters home, which can be found in Oppenheim (2008), during his time in the service.

² All references to Stanley Hayami’s diary will provide page number and an indication, when necessary, of whether the cited material is on the verso (v) or recto (r) side of the page. The diary is available through the Online Archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf687004zq/.

³ Barcellos (2018) noted that this quotation came from his 2011 publication (in Spanish): Barcellos, S. (2011). O Corpo nos diários pessoais: presença e latência, in M. C. Monteiro, A. C. Chiara, & F. V. Dos Santos, Escritas do Corpo (pp. 76–86). Editora Caetés.

⁴ We wondered, for example, if Japanese traditions of self-discipline and/in diary writing (Moore, 2009) may have contributed to Stanley Hayami’s focus on being “good” and/or if the Japanese traditions of gaman, which “means ‘to endure or persevere with dignity,’ and shikataganai [which] translates to ‘it can’t be undone’ or ‘it can’t be helped’” (Rosario, 2020, para. 5) influenced the tenor of his entries. We lacked direct evidence of these possible influences, but they point to the possibilities of grand narratives that scholars should consider when doing this kind of identity research.