'THESE FEELINGS THAT FILL MY HEART': JAPANESE CANADIAN WOMEN'S MEMORIES OF INTERNMENT.'.

Shortly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Canadian Government uprooted roughly 22,000 persons 'of the Japanese race', seventy-five percent of whom were Naturalised or Canadian-born citizens. Women and children, and some men were relocated to ghost towns. Men who displayed the slightest form of resistance were incarcerated as prisoners of war. Families were divided, property confiscated, and after being interned for up to four years, Japanese Canadians were forced to either move to Japan, or disperse throughout Canada. In this article, I explore the ways in which Nisei (second-generation Japanese Canadian) women, most of whom were teens or young adults at the time of war, remember this event roughly sixty years later, and in the context of their lives. Informed by the oral testimonies of sixty Nisei women, as well as my own memories of my family's internment, I focus on the narratives of three women. In presenting these narratives, I consider the relationship between personal reminiscence and public history, the role of biography, and the significance of emotionality in gathering and interpreting life stories. I argue that the women's personal memories extend our understanding of the internment as an isolated event in history to one that is part of enduring historical processes shaped by unequal relations of 'race', gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]