Call for Chapter Proposals

Diversifying Accountability: Exploring Nikkei Struggles for Memory and Redress Around the Globe

Dear colleagues,

We, the editors, seek proposals from prospective authors for chapters in an edited scholarly book, titled provisionally, Diversifying Accountability: Exploring Nikkei Struggles for Memory and Redress Around the Globe. The volume editors are members of Past Wrongs, Future Choices, a global partnership focused on scholarship, archival work, education policy research, and museum exhibits.  The partnership works to understand and engage the diverse histories and community struggles for justice of diasporic Japanese populations, often known as Nikkei, who suffered dispossession, incarceration, exclusion, exile, and more in Allied countries during the Second World War.

In the 1980s, survivors and descendants in the US and Canada succeeded in their fights for official redress, leaving proud legacies of community mobilization and precedents of accountability for historic wrongdoing. Nikkei populations in these and other diverse countries also continue to tell their stories, research their histories, and seek justice. Most recently, for example, the Nikkei community in Brazil received an apology and elicited a recommendation for reparations from the Ministry of Human Rights in 2024. Of course, debates about remembrance inevitably persist, not only in Brazil, Canada, and the US, but in Australia, Mexico, Peru, and beyond—wherever Nikkei communities were victimized during the Second World War.

Our specific focus in this volume is accountability. At once a buzzword of neo liberal governance, corporate management, and rallying cry of the wronged, accountability is particularly fraught when it comes to historic injustice. Lives are long lost, and decades have passed: what can it mean to seek accountability for the wrongs? In what form? For what wrongs, specifically? From whom? Who decides? Are the accountabilities sought and received in the US and Canada relevant models for Nikkei elsewhere? How do we understand racism in its diverse forms—imperial, colonial, official, structural, attitudinal, and more? How does the passage of time change judgments on any of these matters? What about accountability after official apologies and redress? After all, anti-Asian racism continues, not only in terms of so-called “model minority” myths, but, for example, in the overt violence and hate seen during the global Covid-19pandemic and in the authoritarian populism resurgent across much of the globe.

Politically, accountability does not just mean punishing wrongdoers or eliciting reparations: it can also mean surfacing suppressed histories, eliciting meaningful accounts and explanations, and achieving reforms to prevent injustice from recurring. Accountability is also social:  engaging others in learning about injustice so that they fight for reform or undertake grassroots projects of community healing and repair. But even if we conceive, broadly and imaginatively, of accountability, our searches for it will create or expose problems of their own. For example, seeking accountability from states through officially organized and well-recognized forms of collective action may invisibilize a vast range of factors, concerns, and experiences. No matter how democratic and well-intentioned the movement, diverse voices may be minoritized, ignored, and suppressed. Hierarchies of memory and narrative can simultaneously unite and divide in overlooked or misrecognized ways.

We seek proposals that explore any of these diverse meanings of accountability in relation to the Second World War injustices and Nikkei struggles for memory and justice. While contributions from all geographic areas are welcome, we wish particularly to encourage proposals from the global South. We are keen to address the specificities and complexities of accountability in relation to different types of racism and/or political regimes. We hope for contributions that explore understudied Nikkei reparations movements, either in their own light or in relation to better-known ones. We emphatically encourage proposals from a diverse range of identities, subject positions, disciplines, and methodologies. Although accountability may seem to some like the province of political science or public administration, we want to approach our topic through capacious lenses, including autobiographical and artistic ones. We are interested in proposals that explore paths that might help to amplify actors, concerns, or experiences bypassed or invisibilized by traditional modes of redress-seeking, and that might help more generally to aid future struggles–for memory and against racism.

Editorial Team

Darren Aoki (Oral and Cultural History, University of Plymouth)

Masumi Izumi (History and Ethnic and Migration Studies, Doshisha University)

Matt James (Political Science, University of Victoria)

Monica Okamoto (Japanese Immigration and Audiovisual Studies, Federal University of Paraná)

Publisher

The volume will be published in both electronic and hard-copy formats by a leading scholarly press.

Submission

Questions can be sent to Michael Abe at mkabe@uvic.ca and will be forwarded to the team for a reply.

Please send a one-page, single-spaced chapter proposal to Michael Abe at mkabe@uvic.ca by October 13, 2025, for prior review.

Timeline

The results of the proposal selection will be sent to the authors by November 2025. Chapter drafts should be submitted by November 2026. The collaborators will meet for a workshop of vibrant peer-to-peer discussions in Curitiba, Brazil, in the fall of 2027.The papers will be submitted to a major academic publisher for publication in 2028.