Voices Beyond the Grave

Japanese Internment in the French Pacific

Voices Beyond the Grave uncovers critically understudied histories of Japanese internment and labor diasporas in the French Pacific. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, French colonial authorities, following Charles de Gaulle’s orders, detained over a thousand Japanese civilians residing across French-Pacific island territories and deported them to Australian internment camps. France’s logics of colonial racial capitalism maintained far-reaching impacts on wartime Japanese emigrant communities in the francophone territories of Tahiti, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and New Caledonia. In this book, New Caledonia, a strategic outpost in de Gaulle’s Free French empire and a U.S. stronghold during World War II, is a focal point for exploring the complex structures of power and resistance that arose from settler colonialism, Native dispossession, and the mass incarceration of Japanese civilians.

Through rare letters from Japanese internees and interviews with their descendants, this book unveils the emotional and political struggles of mixed-race, Japanese-Melanesian children and families caught in the crossfire of racial settler coloniality. Drawing from military archives in Japanese, French, and English languages, this work also connects the internment of the French-Pacific Japanese to broader, global economies of racialized incarceration and labor, extending to Japanese American internees in the United States. Finally, the author delves into the fate of Japanese detainees sent to Australia, tracing their harrowing experiences from being perceived as enemy aliens during the war to displaced strangers in their postwar lives in Japan.

This book goes beyond history—it is a call for racial justice. At the heart of Voices Beyond the Grave is the author’s global humanitarian project that has reunited descendants of Japanese internees living in Japan with their long-lost families in New Caledonia, resolving eighty-year-old historical enigmas while healing the wounds of wartime injustice. Voices Beyond the Grave sits at the interdisciplinary nexus of empire history and decolonial activism, charting new directions in transpacific studies. With insights into the lives of the Melanesian, Japanese, and French children and families that the vicissitudes of World War II irrevocably shaped, this book reveals the Indigenous and Japanese afterlives that have haunted the French Pacific.

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