Qualitative Sociology, VoL 14, No. 1, 1991 Children of Inmates: The Effects of the Redress Movement Among Third Generation Japanese Americans Yasuko L Takezawa During the 1950s, it was predicted that Japanese American commu- nities would eventually disappear. American society praised their "success story"a; and their social and economic mobility, as well as their assimilation into the mainstream of society proceeded remarkably. The ethnic boundary of Japanese Americans appeared to have become blurred after World War II. Over the past decade, however, an ethnic identity has been reconfirmed and a sense of community has been revived amongst Japanese Americans. Such a reaffirmation of ethnic identity seems to be derived largely from the reconceptualization of their wartime internment brought about by the redress movement and its recent success in forcing the United States Gov- ernment to acknowledge its own misconduct. It is now no longer a secret in American history that by Executive Order 9066 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were uprooted from their homes to live in internment camps surrounded by barbed wire during the Second World War. Over 110,000 peopie of Japanese descent, including American citizens who constituted nearly two thirds of all the victims, were deprived of their constitutional rights and subjected to this evacuation and internment merely because of their Japanese ancestry. Not only did the short-notice evacuation order cause their total economic ruin, but a maximum of three and a half years of imprisonment left deep psy- chological scars among the internees, which subsequently kept them silent for decades after the war. Special thanks go to Rainer C. Baum, who carefully read the earlier version and gave me insightful comments. Address correspondence to Yasuko I. Takezawa, Institute of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba-shi Ibaraki-ken 305, Japan. 39 © 1991HumanSciences Press,Inc,