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From Confinement to Containment: Japanese Americans and the Making of Cold War Culture is a book project that examines popular representations of Japanese Americans in the postwar period (late 1940s to early 1960s). During the Second World War, the Japanese were a hated enemy, while Japanese Americans were a maligned minority, those on the West coast forced into internment camps because of suspected loyalties to Japan. Yet the Cold War helped shift how most Americans perceived the Japanese and Japanese Americans. Japan became a valued anti-communist ally in the Pacific, and Japanese Americans supposedly became a model minority embodying the best of American values. Even before the activist movements of the 1960s and 70s, Japanese Americans were able to create imaginative spaces within popular culture (films, magazines, newspapers, and other artifacts) that allowed them not only to re-embrace their cultural connections to Japan but also to debate the legacies of their internment.