Interview with Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, author of “Voices Beyond the Grave”

Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, Ph.D., MBA is a professor in the Department of Modern Language Studies at Texas Christian University where he teaches French and Japanese languages, literatures, and histories. His new book is Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific (University of Hawaii Press, 2026). He was kind enough to chat with us about his book and what readers can get from it.

How did you become interested in this topic? Did you come to it from an interest in the war, or in the region or in labor diasporas?

My path into this history was deeply personal and familial all at once. Spending much of my childhood in Japan, I was captivated by the wartime experiences of my Japanese grandfather, Kaoru Hiramatsu. My grandfather honorably served as a sergeant major and submarine instructor in the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942, training young seamen who deployed across the South Pacific; many of his own students tragically never returned. His stories planted an early curiosity in me about Japan’s forgotten footprints in Oceania. As an academician trained across French, Japanese, and Francophone studies, I noticed an immense silence in English- and French-language scholarship regarding Japanese civilian presence in the French colonial Pacific. The catalyst came during my Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, when I read Les sentiers de l'espoir (Paths of Hope) by the late Nippo-Kanak author Dany Dalmayrac. His novel recounted how his mother had been permanently severed from her Japanese father following the raids after Pearl Harbor. I was moved to tears reading this account. Meeting Dany in Nouméa in 2016 and traveling through the archipelago opened my eyes to a layered history where labor migration and the intimate domestic lives of Indigenous Kanak and Japanese families converged. I knew I had to write this book in a way that remained deeply accessible and faithful to the families whose stories fill its pages while maintaining the scholarly rigor needed to carve out a distinct intervention in World War II and transpacific military history.

What do you hope this book will accomplish in the world? What impact would you like it to have?

I want this book to dismantle the historical amnesia surrounding civilian internment in the South Pacific and restore names, faces, identities, legacies, and voices to families from whom they were violently stripped. For decades, both the French and Japanese governments maintained a diplomatic silence regarding these deportations and property liquidations to avoid geopolitical friction. This silence forced mixed-race Japanese-Melanesian descendants (Nippo-Kanaks) to carry the stigma of being children of “enemy aliens” in isolation. This stigma was carried across generations. Beyond academic recognition, I want Voices Beyond the Grave to serve as a catalyst for decolonial healing. As one will see in the book, through the humanitarian initiative that grew out of it, Nippo-Kanak Futures, the goal is to bridge the historical trauma of the past with tangible reconciliation today. This reality for me means reconnecting long-severed families across the Pacific, funding pilgrimages for descendants to visit their ancestors’ graves in Japan, and helping these communities find closure.

How do you explain the significance of labor-related diasporas to your students? And what would you like more people to know about diasporic identity?

In my advanced seminars, my students and I examine how global atrocities intersect, challenging us to confront—in Susan Sontag’s phrasing—the pain of others while interrogating the politics of memory: how the lingering weight of human trauma is borne, categorized, and archived. I remind my students that labor diasporas are never just economic statistics or flows of commodities; they are fundamentally about human bodies carrying culture and memory into spaces of displacement. In the French Pacific, Japanese indentured workers didn't simply mine nickel or phosphate but escaped colonial mine compounds into the rural brousse, married Indigenous Kanak women, introduced novel agricultural methods, built bakeries, and negotiated shared community lives at the thresholds of tribal reservations. It is important to emphasize that diasporic identity is rarely pure or static. In my book, I show how such an identity is forged through what Jodi Byrd calls “horizontal encounters” between arrivants and Indigenous peoples: these are individuals navigating the tragic realities and irreversible damages of settler-colonial dispossession. For Nippo-Kanak descendants, as readers will see, diasporic identity means carrying Japanese Buddhist practices, culinary traditions, and names alongside sacred Kanak customs and French vernaculars.

What is missing from the narrative people have of the war when they don’t know anything about civilian internment in the French Pacific?

Chapter 1 of my book offers a comprehensive deep dive into precisely that dynamic; I’d love for readers to start there. What is missing is an understanding of the global, interconnected nature of racial capitalism and wartime carcerality. When people think of internment, they think almost exclusively of the continental U.S. under Executive Order 9066, or perhaps camps in Canada and Australia. By excluding the French Pacific, we fail to see that internment was a trans-imperial, archipelagic phenomenon that linked French colonial gendarmes, Australian outback camps, and American military finance. We also miss the reality that internment was systematically deployed to liquidate civilian wealth. In New Caledonia, detaining over a thousand Japanese civilians allowed the colonial state to seize millions of Pacific francs in private assets and take over Japanese-owned mining concessions. Leaving out this history preserves an unblemished, sanitized narrative of the Allied war effort, which, as I argue, obscures how civilian dispossession was institutionalized under the banner of national security.

How was internment distinct in the French Pacific?

Internment in the French Pacific strikingly diverged from the continental models most people recognize. Because Free France lacked local carceral facilities, it mounted an oceanic operation, using an old penal colony at Nouville (New Caledonia) as a transit point before deporting over a thousand civilian men across waters into the Australian outback. The human toll was uniquely devastating because these men had built deep domestic lives with Indigenous Kanak women. When French authorities deported the fathers, they severed those interethnic families overnight. After the war, Charles de Gaulle barred the men from ever returning, while colonial administrators used legal maneuvers to reclassify their mixed-race children as enemy aliens, effectively rendering a generation stateless and unable to reclaim their family land and assets. I unpack the full paper trail in the book, but fundamentally, it was an operation of colonial discipline and dispossession that permanently fractured families and destroyed Indigenous traditions.

Can you say a little more about the place of the French Pacific in WWII? How did it fit into Vichy, Free France, and the wider war?

This is the core question that animates the book and sets its entire investigation in motion! In a nutshell: New Caledonia was a geopolitical and economic fulcrum in the Pacific. When Metropolitan France fell in June 1940, New Caledonia initially sided with Pétain’s Vichy regime. However, cut off from European markets and dependent on Australia for food, a popular Gaullist insurrection rallied the territory to Free France in September 1940. Yet, beneath this political realignment, as I retrace in considerable detail, the institutional framework behind this realignment remained unchanged: the territory’s finances were monopolized by a Vichy-controlled bank, led by Paul Baudouin, who was none other than Pétain’s foreign minister who simultaneously directed the Société le Nickel (SLN). The SLN is important in this history because New Caledonia held the world’s third-largest reserves of nickel, essential for Allied armor plating and naval engines. After Pearl Harbor, the island became a massive forward base. In March 1942, over 15,000 U.S. troops arrived under Major General Alexander Patch, turning Nouméa into a bustling headquarters that dwarfed the local French administration. The territory sat at the intersection of conflicting empires, supplying nickel to the U.S., managing trade through Wall Street, maintaining ties with Vichy finance, and acting as a springboard for operations like Guadalcanal. It astounds me that New Caledonia isn’t front and center in the historiography of wartime internment. It was an indispensable geocultural bridge linking the United States to both Free France and Vichy capital. Yet, as my book uncovers, de Gaulle's administration operated with an extractive ruthlessness that easily matched its Vichy counterparts.

How did you conduct the research for this book? What was it like holding those letters in person?

The research was an exhaustive, multi-sited endeavor across Australia, France, Japan, the United States, and New Caledonia. It required cross-referencing declassified military dossiers, censor bureau intercepts, alien registration cards, and colonial court records across English, French, and Japanese. The research and interviews took over ten years to complete. Nearly all of the interviewees whose lives and words animate this book have now passed on, making the preservation of their voices all the more urgent.

I will say that the emotional center of the archive was the letters. Holding an original wartime letter written on fragile paper from an internment camp in the Australian outback is a profound experience. Under camp regulations, internees could only write in English or French to clear military censors, yet most Japanese laborers were illiterate in French. I think readers will find my chapter on Marcel Takeshi Iba and Kameichi Tagawa captivating. Discovering that an elite, trilingual Franco-Japanese internee, Marcel Iba, acted as a scribe and ghostwrote letters for working-class men like Kameichi Tagawa revealed how these missives became physical extensions of the father’s absent body. You can see the censor stamps, the distinct handwriting, and the places where tears fell. For families in New Caledonia, who hid these letters during French police searches, holding that paper was the only way they could touch their fathers.

On the publisher site, it says “This book goes beyond history—it is a call for racial justice.” How do you define justice in this context?

I define justice not as an abstract juridical ideal or a passive academic gesture but as an active, restorative intervention. I allude to Walter Mignolo’s phrasing toward the end of my book: decolonial healing. In the context of the French Pacific, justice means confronting the institutional racism that systematically dispossessed Japanese-Kanak families and denaturalized French citizens of Japanese descent, leaving generations of children with the trauma of perceived abandonment. Justice requires the historian to become an “implicated subject,” to use Michael Rothberg’s terms, stepping out of the archive to reconstitute what the colonial state violently dismantled. It means bringing historical evidence directly back to the living community to clear their fathers’ names and rewriting municipal records that listed children as having “unknown fathers.” Finally, going back to “healing”: justice means actively reuniting broken family lineages, giving people back their history, their dignity, and their kin. I genuinely believe—and readers will discover the extraordinary, almost providential encounters recounted throughout these pages, starting with that loose testament fluttering into my lap in the Canberra archives—that the spirits of these Japanese New Caledonians summoned me to piece their fragmented histories back together and bring their descendants long-overdue closure. Completing this book revealed the true purpose behind my fluency across French, Japanese, and English: to resurrect this forgotten archive and restore these lives before memory faded entirely.

Now, you’ve also been working to unite descendants of internees in Japan with relatives in New Caledonia. Can you say a little more about that project and how you got into it?

The project is called Nippo-Kanak Futures (Avenir Nippo-Kanak), and it grew out of the conviction that an archive of state violence can be transformed into an instrument of restorative justice. While working through declassified internment dossiers, I realized these records held the missing pieces of family histories that had been suppressed for nearly eighty years. Decades of administrative silence and the permanent postwar barring of Japanese fathers left generations of Nippo-Kanak descendants carrying the painful assumption that their fathers had simply abandoned them. Working alongside the Amicale Franco-Japonaise de Nouvelle-Calédonie and prefectural offices in Japan, Nippo-Kanak Futures mobilizes that very paper trail, literally the censors’ logs, shipping manifests, family wills, testimonies, to rebuild severed family trees. The project traces what happened to these men after their postwar repatriation and seeks to connect long-lost relatives across the Pacific. I have underwritten this humanitarian project to fund pilgrimages to Japan and classes in Japanese language so that descendants in New Caledonia can perform memorial rites at their ancestors’ graves in Japan in the language of their forefathers. For me, this is the ethical heart of scholarship: evacuating lost histories from the archive and placing them directly into the hands of living families to bring true closure, healing, and dignity.

How do you understand the link between research and scholarship and improving the lives of real people?

Too often, academic scholarship remains trapped within institutional silos, producing critical critiques that diagnose injustice without ever intervening in it. I believe research should have a heartbeat. The colonial archive is not dead stone; it is full of what Avery Gordon calls “ghosts,” namely, these unresolved injuries and silenced voices demanding redress in the present.

When we uncover immigration manifests and internment rosters, we are not just holding historical data. We are holding the lost identities and genealogies of living people. If an academician has the linguistic training, archival access, and institutional resources to retrieve that knowledge, I believe there is an ethical obligation to return it to the communities from whom it was taken. Scholarship finds its highest purpose when it moves from the seminar room into the world, transforming forgotten paper into real-world healing and human connection. My deepest hope is that readers feel the genuine love and commitment to restitution that shaped this book and that these pages remain an enduring vessel through which the voices beyond the grave are remembered and brought back to life.