Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific

Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland uncovers the largely unexamined history of Japanese civilians incarcerated in the French Pacific during WWII.
About this Event

For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00pm on Oct. 5 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.

Speaker: Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, Associate Professor of French and Director of Asian Studies, Texas Christian University

Moderator: Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace, Columbia University

After Pearl Harbor, French colonial authorities acting on de Gaulle's orders arrested over a thousand Japanese civilians across New Caledonia and the New Hebrides, deporting them to internment camps in Australia — a history that has gone largely unexamined. Working from internee letters, descendant interviews, and military archives in three languages, Dr. Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland recovers the mixed-race Japanese-Melanesian families broken apart by that seizure, and follows the detainees from enemy aliens in wartime Australia to strangers in a postwar Japan most had never known. Dr. Ireland situates the French Pacific within a wider architecture of racialized incarceration reaching to the Japanese American camps.

Speaker's Bio: Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland is Associate Professor of French and Director of Asian Studies at Texas Christian University. A multilingual historian of transpacific migration and French colonialism with an MBA, he integrates cultural inquiry with economic and legal perspectives across the Asia-Pacific. He is also a J.D. candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi William S. Richardson School of Law, focusing on Pacific Islander rights and legal advocacy.

This event is part of the 2026-2027 lecture series Beyond Internment: Incarceration and Empire in the Pacific.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

To purchase a copy of Dr. Ireland's book, Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific, please click here: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/voices-beyond-the-grave-japanese-internment-in-the-french-pacific/.