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History has contradicting versions. While no one doubts that atomic bomb ended the World War II, the World War II Museum in New Orleans redefined the United States as a nation originally reluctant to participate in the war; to the United States in the early 1940s Japan seemed to be an invincible empire with a number of global colonies. While Japanese people suffered from Hiroshima and Nagasaki so deeply as to advocate the anti-nuclear movement now, ending up with the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese grassroots organization of the atomic bomb survivors, it is also true that Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941 is still believed to be the root of all evil. Studying history requires us to study the way to perceive the world full of contradicting versions and to come to terms with them at a certain point.

Japanese Internment Camp during World War II is one of the regular topics for Japanese Americanists that has invited us to confront the contradicting versions of history. Please note that “internment camp” is also called “segregation camp” or “incarceration facility.” This peculiar institution was visible in several countries during wartime: Germany, the UK, the USA, and the USSR. Its German version called “Concentration Camp” is infamous for the Holocaust (Shoah) especially at Auswitz that resulted in the deaths of approximately 6 million Jews.

The major problem of internment camps in the United States is that despite the Axis powers formalized by the 1940 Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, German Americans and Italian Americans were not confined within any kind of internment camps: only Japanese Americans are called enemy aliens. Of course, my favorite writer Kurt Vonnegut’s meta-autobiographical masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five (1967) narrates the absurd tragedy of the Allied firebombing of Dresden German American prisoners of war like the author had to survive in February 1945.  When I first read the novel as a teenager, I could not grasp the essence of the absurdity; I was too young to pay attention to Vonnegut’s birthplace Indianapolis as a city of German immigrants. From today’s perspective Slaughterhouse-Five could well be reread as an incredibly tragic story of a German American soldier taken captive in Germany about to be killed by the American compatriots he had long worked with together. Therefore, it is reasonable that Vonnegut once stated that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki he could not have survived the war. It means that without Vonnegut we could not have enjoyed the best fruits of postwar and postmodern literature. Herein lies a paradox: while Japanese people cannot overcome the trauma of Atomic Bomb even now, without the American victory Vonnegut and other talented American writers could not have published their anti-war and highly experimental novels.  In this sense, it is safe to regard Internment Camp Narrative as inheriting the motif of identity crisis that Captivity Narrative---whether Indian Captivity Narrative as represented by Mary White Rowlandson or Barbary Coast Captivity Narrative as represented by Royall Tyler---vividly described in Puritan Colonial America. Hence the renaissance of Transpacific Captivity Narrative as exemplified by Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Jeane Wakatsuki Houston, Cynthia Kadohata, Karen Tei Yamashita and others.

This hidden agenda is completely applicable to Star Trek actor George Takei’s New York Times Bestseller They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf, 2019), which will immediately convince you of how absurd internment camp was for Japanese Americans. Insofar as the American Constitution guarantees civil rights and liberties to the individual, the very institution of internment camps in the United States contradicts the very Constitution, revealing the racist unconscious of the 32^nd president of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19^th, 1942, which allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in concentration camps. In his magnum opus By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard UP, 2001) my friend Greg Robinson, professor of American History at Université du Québec À Montréal, assumed that FDR was influenced by nativist ideas, which remained widespread in the nation and among his family and old friends. The culture of nativism was nurtured by Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), without which even F.Scott Fitzgerald could not have written The Great Gatsby (1925). Here Grant stated that America’s previously pure Nordic racial stock had been depleted due to declining birth rates and immigration of inferior races, who had debased the physical and moral qualities of the nation. It is well-known that FDR had a copy of the book and a life member of the Museum of Natural History, where Grant worked and where Henry Fairfield Osborn, an old family friend, was director. I came to realize the significance of this problem recently, when I visited the Home of President Roosevelt: National Historic Site located in Hyde Park only a couple of years ago. Inside his residence our tourist guide told us that insofar as internment camp is concerned President Roosevelt made a serious mistake. Accordingly, for my Book Club last year I selected a Japanese American detective fictionist Naomi Hirahara’s novel Clark and Division (Soho Press, 2021) featuring a Japanese American family’s life during wartime in the Internment camp in California, which was to be radically transformed after they got resettled in Chicago; Rose Ito rescued her family at the cost of her own life.

Thus, it is my great honor to have Mr. Takeshi Furumoto as today’s special speaker for our omnibus “Triculture” lecture series; as he clarified in the title of today’s lecture “My 81 Years of Bio: Tule Lake, Hiroshima, Vietnam”(March 21^st, 2026), Mr. Furumoto witnessed his own “tricultural” hardships: the internment camp, postwar Hiroshima and the Vietnam War. I started talking with him at the board meeting of the Digital Museum of the History of Japanese in New York three years ago. I think some of you might have already been familiar with the documentary film of his life produced in 2025 by NHK World-Japan entitled “Raised in Hiroshima, Fought in Vietnam.”

Born in 1944 in the Tule Lake Segregation Camp nicknamed as “No No Camp,” Mr. Takeshi Furumoto was deported to Hiroshima after the War and spent ten years there with his family (1946 to 1956). And yet, his father made up his mind to live in South Central LA, coming out of ashes to dream the American Dream. Receiving a business degree from UCLA in 1967, Mr. Furumoto volunteered for the Army and served as a Military Intelligence Officer in the Vietnam War from 1970 to 1971. In the postwar years, however, PTSD seriously affected his career.  However, being CEO of Furumoto Realty he and his wife established in 1974, founder and Honorary Chairman of New York Hiroshima Organization, life member of the Japanese American Veteran Association now, he is pleased that Japan became #2 World Economic Power and changed the lives of Japanese Americans. What matters most is that Mr. Furumoto was instrumental in establishing the passage of Fred Korematsu Day in New Jersey, which was signed into law on January 30, 2023.  Fred Korematsu (1919-2005) is a Japanese American who was not permitted to serve in the U.S. military due to his Japanese ancestry. When FDR signed Executive Order 9066, Fred Korematsu refused to move to a concentration camp because this order contradicts the American Constitution and violate his civil rights.  Mr. Takeshi Furumoto’s resurrection of Fred Korematsu will carry us into the remembrance of Internment Camp and the potentialities of the American Dream in the 21^st century.

Omnibus "Tricultural" Lecture Series: The Season Four: Lecture 4 Mr. Takeshi Furumoto