Abstract: This article reconsiders a generational division that has come to define Japanese American understandings of their wartime incarceration during the Pacific War. The Nisei, or second-generation, activists who testified against their incarceration and struggled for redress spoke for and sometimes against their first-generation Issei parents, instituting assumptions of Issei silence and an attendant political quietism. Literary renderings of Japanese internment by Nisei authors, Hisaye Yamamoto and John Okada, present disturbing portrayals of Issei authority, but the wartime art of Chiura Obata, a prominent Japanese American artist, demonstrates a profound consolation and draws strength from the natural landscape that surrounded the internment camp. Reconsidering Obata’s aesthetic discipline and tutelage in this period of political crisis, this article elaborates on the legacy of Issei resilience and Nisei despondence, in which the former became a political liability for the latter.

Key words: internment, Issei, Nisei, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Chiura Obata