Legacies of violence can manifest not only through overt conflict, but also through erasure and marginalization. Koji Lau-Ozawa’s essay on the United States’ WWII-era incarceration camps considers how their placement in isolated locations sought to remove citizens of Japanese descent from American life. This very marginality also exposes the camps, as sites of heritage today, to new kinds of erasure and conflict in the form of infrastructure development that seeks to make these remote landscapes profitable.
Koji Lau-Ozawa
https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/koji-lau-ozawa is a Phd candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the archaeology of the Japanese Diaspora, and in particular Japanese American incarceration sites from WWII. His dissertation focuses on the history and archaeology of the Gila River Incarceration Camp located on the land of the Gila River Indian Community, and the site where his grandparents were imprisoned. This research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant program and has appeared in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, International Journal of Historic Archaeology, World Archaeology, and elsewhere. Before Stanford, Lau-Ozawa received his MA at San Francisco State University and his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh.