I was going to take a break from the Challenge after my last book, but Nisei Daughter was sitting there on the pile and I knew it also had something to do with the internment camps, so I just picked it up... and there you are, another book finished. It can happen.
Although I chose this as my nonfiction classic, I think my previous book, Citizen 13660, is a little closer to nonfiction than Nisei Daughter. It's probably not fair to say Sone sugar-coats her internment experience, but she seems to be trying to convince an unfriendly white-American audience of her loyalty to her country. In 1953, I guess that was still necessary. Actually, let me back up. The sugar-coating isn't really obvious until the last couple of chapters.
Before that, this is a very interesting -- and utterly charming -- description of growing up Japanese American in Seattle in the 1920s and 30s. Sone, born in 1919, was just a few years older than my own mother, and so I kept imagining her as a darker-haired version of my mom, watching some of the same movies and reading some of the same books. Sone writes about how she and her siblings (Nisei) adopted modern American ways, much to the consternation of their Japanese-born parents (Issei), and I thought about how my mother's white American-born parents also found it hard to accept their modern children.
Still, I can't deny that there is a huge gap between Sone's early life and that of her parents. The book begins at the point when Sone's parents decide to send her and her older brother to "Japanese school" after their regular elementary school each day. Sone is furious, because up to that point she had no idea she had "Japanese blood" and now she will lose a great deal of her playtime each day. She adjusts to the school, more or less, but she never learns how to be a true Japanese girl -- which is made clear when she and her family visit Japan later on and the kids get into trouble by acting like the Americans they are. It wasn't clear to me whether Sone really learned to read and write Japanese well, or just at a rudimentary level. Her parents were both well-educated -- her father had come to America to study law, but wasn't able to pay for school, and her mother owned copies of Japanese classic literature and wrote Japanese poetry as a hobby.
I thought, aha! there's the connection I was looking for, between classic Japanese literature and Japanese-American literature. But Sone and her siblings make fun of their mother's poems, and in 1942, as they wait to be ordered to evacuate to the internment camps, the family burns all their Japanese books and papers and artifacts, so as not to be thought disloyal to America.
And I thought, yep, that's where the connection went. The internment camps killed it, in so many ways. That really is the answer. Japanese Americans were kept in the camps for a fairly short time, but it was long enough to wreak havoc on their lives.
Of course, it was harder on the parents, the Issei, who had been in the US perhaps 30 or 40 years but were by law not allowed to become citizens. The Nisei, those American children with "Japanese blood," had a somewhat easier time of it. Sone and her family were sent to a temporary camp ("Camp Harmony") on the fairgrounds in Puyallup, Washington on May 1, 1942, and then on to the more permanent Camp Minidoka in Idaho in August, but she was allowed to leave in early spring, 1943. The West Coast was still off limits to Japanese Americans, so her parents stayed in the camps for a few more years (all the camps were closed in 1946). But Sone and her siblings were able to find jobs and school placements in the Midwest before the war ended. She went to Chicago and lived with a minister and his wife and worked for a dentist, after which it was arranged for her to go back to college, in Indiana.
So just about a year is all the time she spent in the camps. Such a mess, and it was only a year.
Sone eventually graduated from college, earned a masters in clinical psychology, and worked as a social worker for 30-some years. She married another former internee and veteran, and had four children. They lived in Canton, Ohio, and I guess had a good life, possibly a better life than she would have had in Seattle. Sone writes briefly about the prejudice her family encountered as she was growing up, and about things they weren't able to do, such as rent a vacation home. When Sone tried to enroll in business college (around 1937), she first had to prove that she had a job with a Japanese firm waiting for her after graduation, because no white firm would have hired her and the school didn't want to waste time training unemployable students.
But it doesn't sound as though things were all roses in the Midwest either. She writes briefly about how she was allowed to participate in the sorority rush at "Wendell College" (actually Hanover College -- I don't know why she changes the name in the book) but not allowed to pledge, due to the rules of the sorority's national headquarters. Some of the girls in the sorority come to apologize to her about it and she accepts their apology graciously.
I knew this call had cost them something in pride, and it took moral honesty to have come in the spirit in which they did.
It would have taken even more "moral honesty" for the girls to have dropped out of the sorority to protest those racist "national restrictions," but apparently Sone didn't expect that of them. Perhaps she felt that including this little story would encourage other white Americans to behave better.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone, with the caveat that some of the sentiments expressed in the last couple of chapters are hard to take. This is the sugar coating I referred to earlier. Sone goes back to the camp to visit her parents at Christmas in 1945 and there she has a stilted "conversation" with them about the camps, democracy, and whatnot. She says to her parents,
"In spite of the war and the mental tortures we went through, I think the Nisei have attained a clearer understanding of America and its way of life, and we have learned to value her more. Her ideas and ideals of democracy are based essentially on religious principles and her very existence depends on the faith and moral responsibilities of each individual. I used to think of the government as a paternal organization. When it failed me, I felt bitter and sullen. Now I know I'm just as responsible as the men in Washington for its actions. Somehow it all makes me feel much more at home in America."
Gag me with a spoon.
But then read Sone's preface to the 1979 edition (note: "Nikkei" means all Japanese Americans, both immigrants and their native born descendants):
So that their story will not be forgotten and lost to future generations, the Nikkeis are telling the nation about 1942, a time when they became prisoners of their own government, without charges, without trials. This happened because the President and Congress yielded to the pressures of agricultural and other economic interest groups on the West Coast, which for fifty years had tried to be rid of the Nikkeis. Mass media assisted in molding public opinion to this end. Most astounding of all, the Supreme Court chose not to touch the issue of the Niseis' civil liberties as American citizens...
I wonder whether Sone knew all this when she wrote her book. Her last chapter doesn't make it sound like she did. Or did an editor force her to add all that nonsense about how she was "just as responsible as the men in Washington"? We'll never know, I think.
I found an obituary of Sone (she died in 2011) that said she was at work on another book when she died. I wonder whether she wrote other books and couldn't get them published. I wonder what else she might have said.
The racism of that preface is just infuriating. Wow.
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