History And Trauma ——Fictional Representation Of Japanese-Canadian Children In Internment During World War ?

This thesis investigates the traumatic internment experiences of Japanese-Canadian children during World War ? in Canadian fictional writings.Undoubtedly,during this war fascist Japan caused unforgivable and unforgettable harm to people all over the world,especially nations in the Asia-Pacific region.At the same time harm was also done to residents of Japanese descent who lived in the allied countries such as the U.S.,Canada,Australia,and Britain—the internment of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans is an example.After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941,many Canadian-born children of Japanese origin,together with their families,began to endure deeper racial prejudices and discrimination than what they had suffered in the past in Canada.Concentrating on the treatment of these children during World War ?,this thesis examines the trauma these children have suffered as represented in three adults' novels,Joy Kogawa's Obasan(1981),Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field(1998),and Frances Itani's Requiem(201 1),and two children's books,Shizuye Takashima's A Child in Prison Camp(1971)and Kogawa's Naomi's Road(2005).These five texts give a fictional representation of personal as well as family histories during World War ? with their focus on children's traumatic experiences.The nature of these texts is a combination of fiction and facts.These fictional documents,so to speak,complement or even revise the one-dimensional official record of this segment of history by telling the stories that had been ignored for so long in the official history of Canada.In fact,this kind of fictional representation broke the long quietness of Asian-Canadian writings in Canadian literature and brought an important aspect of Asian-Canadian literature to the reading public.This has undoubtedly boosted the progress of justice and democracy in Canadian society.The publication of Obasan in 1981,for instance,which gives a moving account of the four-year internment experiences of some Japanese-Canadian children during World War II,galvanized the general Canadian readership and helped to bring about the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement in 1988.This research considers both the content and the form through which Japanese Canadian children's traumatic internment experiences are represented in the five texts aforementioned.The analysis and discussion in this thesis focus on children's psychological trauma during the internment and their cultural trauma after the internment,as well as their coping mechanisms,that is,how they deal with racism,psychological trauma,and cultural trauma at different life stages.Meanwhile,the narrative form that holds the content is also examined,where the skilful use of narrative techniques in presenting children's psychological and cultural trauma in both adults' and children's books is identified and analyzed.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is Introduction,which introduces prisoner-of-war writings—a branch of war literature—in Western literature in English,the historical background and fictional representation of Japanese-Canadian internment during World War II,a review of studies on prisoner-of-war literature as well as a review of scholarship on children's internment experiences.Besides,a brief synopsis of the five texts is given,so is the relevancy of the theories of psychological and cultural trauma,as well as the narrative theory to be used.Chapter 2 discusses children's psychological trauma caused by their loss of home,loss of caregivers,and loss of innocence as a result of the imposed internment.Chapter 3 examines the cultural trauma of grown-up children,such as internalized racism,identity crisis,and intergenerational transmission caused by legacies of the four-year internment experiences.Chapter 4 explores the narrative techniques employed by the authors in their respective children's and adults' books in representing psychological and cultural trauma attributable to the internment.Drawing on Gerard Genette's narrative theory,this chapter discusses how adults'and children's books differ in displaying children's psychological and cultural trauma in terms of narrative time,point of view,and narrative frequency.The analysis focuses on how these narrative techniques coincide with the theme of trauma.Chapter 5 is Conclusion,which summarizes the main points of the thesis and clarifies once again the political significance of this research.