Foreword

Yonezawa died at Loveday 2 years later. Rose Inagaki expressed outrage when police “somewhat forcibly” took her fingerprints in 1940: “I am an Australian woman of British parentage … I have naturally been, perhaps violently, British,” she protested. Her husband, Moshi Inagaki, was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, interned at the Tatura camp: “[i]s it a criminal offence to marry a foreigner?” she demanded. Masaichi Nabeshima was born in the Dutch East Indies. Arrested in Manado on 8 December 1941, he was relocated across various detention facilities and then suffered a harrowing transport to Australia, where Nikkei civilians from the South Pacific were incarcerated before their eventual expulsion to Japan: “We didn’t know where we were ’cause we moved from one place to another and were never told where we were going … I don’t have any words to describe how I felt.”.

This digital edition of Yuriko Nagata’s foundational work in Nikkei Australian history offers both familiar and surprising stories to a global audience. In its thirtieth anniversary year, Unwanted Aliens remains the only scholarly book dedicated to the mistreatment of civilians of Japanese descent in wartime Australia. The book has provided a sense of origin and purpose to Nikkei Australia, a grassroots cultural and scholarly organisation dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of Japanese immigrants and their descendants on the continent. It also offers guideposts for future scholarly writing about Australian internment. Painstaking archival research and over 100 interviews allowed Yuri Nagata to encapsulate a complex story: the prewar social, political and legal context of internment; the origins of Nikkei Australian communities; the legal enactment and practical implementation of the uprooting of 1,141 Australians and the transfer of 3,160 overseas Japanese civilians for incarceration in the country; the conditions of the camps and experiences of interned people; the quasi-judicial processes by which they sought freedom, largely without success; the expulsion of interned people to Japan; and the legacies and memories of these events in the decades since. Unwanted Aliens is the kind of book that marks the contours of a field: within them, scholars might cultivate innumerable new research projects. Recent works show the promise of this opportunity, detailing the ideological and administrative logics of specific policies, examining more closely the legal activism of Japanese Australians seeking their freedom, and exploring the legacies of Australian internment in contemporary arts and culture.¹ The space opened by Unwanted Aliens remains capacious, the research possibilities vast and varied.

Three decades before the Past Wrongs Future Choices partnership sought to bridge siloed national historiographies of Nikkei uprooting, Nagata looked across borders.² She opens by observing that “[A]fter Japan entered the war on 8 December 1941, Japanese living in many parts of the world under Allied control were interned” and lists arrests and displacements in an array of places that have received only limited attention – the United Kingdom, India, Malaya, Singapore, the Isle of Man and the Philippines. To the most heavily researched instances of Nikkei uprooting – in Canada and the United States – she devotes an entire comparative chapter, providing a useful summary of scholarship in both countries at the time of her writing. Within this context, the history in Australia is notable for the rapidity of the internment (most people of Japanese descent were arrested within a single day of the outbreak of war), the significant presence of “overseas” Nikkei within the interned population (as Australia became a regional hub), the decimation of communities as a result of mass expulsion to Japan at the close of the war, and the detention of Nikkei civilians in diverse internment camps that included other people of enemy origin, prisoners from the European and Asian warfronts, and refugee Jews held as enemy aliens.³ Scholars building a global history of Nikkei uprooting will need to attend to her work and to Australia as a major case within this troubling past.

Nagata ends her book by asking “if actions based on assumptions about ethnicity and race, such as wholesale internment, could happen again”. It is a question on the minds of many as we witness the rise of bellicose nationalism, the tightening of borders, a turn towards exclusive conceptions of belonging, and the widespread detention and displacement of people. Her book – and the Australian case more broadly – challenge us to respond to these threats in ways that do not retreat to national citizenship alone. Denied that status, Japanese Australians nonetheless deserved dignity. Detained far from home, the overseas Nikkei in Australian internment camps deserved freedoms that they were refused. Contemplating this history today, when non-citizens are often exposed to the worst excesses of capricious state power, the questions of Unwanted Aliens should stand at the forefront of our minds. It is with pride and gratitude that Past Wrongs Future Choices presents this digital edition of an indispensable book.

Jordan Stanger-Ross
Victoria, British Columbia, 21 August 2025

Notes

1. Tianna Killoran, “Distance and denial: Administering the dispossession of Japanese Australians,” and Andrew Hasegawa and Aaron Stefik, “Writs of habeas corpus and the nikkei fight for freedom: Kojiro Katsumata and Mitsuye Endo”, in Jordan Stanger-Ross, Audrey Kobayashi, and Aya Fujiwara (eds.), Nikkei Uprooting in Global Perspective (under review); Timothy Kazuo Steains, “Nikkei Australian identity and the work of Mayu Kanamori,” in David Chapman and Carol Hayes (eds.), Japan in Australia: Culture, Context, and Connections, Routledge, 2020, pp. 130–148; Christine Piper, “After Darkness: Japanese Civilian Internment in Australia during World War II” DCA Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney (2014). ↩
2. The partnership, which has supported this digital publication along with a 50th anniversary edition of Ken Adachi’s foundational Canadian book, The Enemy that Never Was, was motivated by international interest in building a global field of study and public engagement with the history of Nikkei uprooting. Important examples of transnational and comparative study before the establishment of the partnership include Greg Robinson, Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, Columbia University Press, 2010, and Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps in the Pacific, Cambridge University Press, 2022. ↩
3. This internal diversity is a major focus of Pieris and Horiuchi’s discussion of Australian camps in The Architecture of Confinement. ↩

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