This book reflects the author’s wish of not only remembering what has happened to the Japanese families living in the United States of America at the time of war but also to show its effects and how families made through that storm of problems and insecurities. The story takes in the first turn when the father of Jeanne gets arrested in the accusation of supplying fuel to Japanese parties and takes it last turn when after the passage of several years, Jeanne (writer) is living a contented life with her family and ponders over her past (Wakatsuki Houston and D. Houston 3-78). As we read along the pages
Mary Matsuda Gruenewald tells her tale of what life was like for her family when they were sent to internment camps in her memoir “Looking like the Enemy.” The book starts when Gruenewald is sixteen years old and her family just got news that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japan. After the bombing Gruenewald and her family life changed, they were forced to leave their home and go to internment camps meant for Japanese Americans. During the time Gruenewald was in imprisonment she dealt with the struggle for survival both physical and mental. This affected Gruenewald great that she would say to herself “Am I Japanese?
Tolerance turned to distrust and irrational fear. The hundred year old tradition of anti-Asian sentiment on the West Coast resurfaced, more vicious than eve. (Houston, p. 15). Three years of wartime propaganda funded racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters turned Japanese faces into something despicable and grotesque. The American Legion and The Native Sons of the Golden West were racist organizations agitating against the West Coast Japanese for decades (Houston, p. 115).
Metaphorically the authors are alluding to the father as the country of Japan, and the mother as the U.S. they are fighting for irrational reason, and then Kiyo who punches his father to stop him from striking his mother represents all the Japanese Americans who are stuck in the middle and just want it all to
Each image is paralleled to the other on the bottom of the first and third panel. In the first panel, the presents the image of Richard Nixon dancing with his daughter in a ballroom on her wedding day. Nixon, a president with reputation for scandal and corruption, and displays his image in parallel to the third panel, containing a photo of a red war ship named after Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State in the Bush administration who would’ve been ending her time in office at the time of this piece’s creation. By shrouding Nixon and Rice’s ship both in the black ink, Harris is associating both figures with the same amount of corruptness, perhaps for Rice not with the ship itself but with the War created during her term as Secretary of State with the inclusion of a sniper rifle with the repeated images of the inverted dove and Uncle
The author is supporting Japanese Internment, and is trying to convince the Japanese and Japanese-Americans to come to the Internment camps. The author has successfully done this by having a cheerful, bright tone, while talking about something so grim and even deadly. This is exemplified in paragraph 5. “The War Relocation Authority is now establishing Federally-owned and protected relocation projects. Within these areas you will have an opportunity to build new communities where you may live, work, worship, and educate your children.
This paragraph from Kesaya Noda’s autobiographical essay “Growing Up Asian in America” represents the conflict that the author feels between her Japanese ethnicity, and her American nationality. The tension she describes in the opening pages of her essay is between what she looks like and is judged to be (a Japanese woman who faces racial stereotypes) versus what she feels like and understands (life as a United States citizen). This passage signals her connection to Japan; and highlights her American upbringing. At this point in the essay, Noda is unable to envision her identity as unified and she describes her identity as split by race.
She writes about the incarceration of her and other Japanese families in the USA at that time. This quote is a reflection of the thoughts that Jeanne had as a child about the arrest of her father, “But, like Papa's arrest, not much could be done ahead of time. There were four of us kids still young enough to be living with Mama, plus Granny, her mother, sixty-five then, speaking no English, and nearly blind. Mama didn't know where else she could get work, and we had nowhere else to move to. On February 25 the choice was made for us.
A soldier tells them to put the shades down. The girl has a brief conversation with a Japanese man who only knows japanese. “The girl shook her head and said she was sorry she only spoke English” (Otsuka, 28) By saying this the girl emphasises the fact that she is a American girl and she has that identity and not just a japanese spy. The soldiers guarding the Japanese-American families makes guarding absurd.
Part III, The War in Japanese Eyes, allows the reader to receive a Japanese perspective and also grasp how devastating the results of war were. Chapter 8, “The Pure Self,” Dower explains the Japanese traditions and culture, along with the humiliation and discrimination the Japanese received. The Japanese believed their culture was unique, and spent this period of time during the war focusing on themselves and their race. Whereas yellow was the color of illness and treason and the Japanese were usually referred to as yellow, the color white symbolized purity which stood for the American race. On the contrary, the Americans were also known as demonic.
In many American propaganda, the words 'Yellow Peril' continued to be used. This apocalyptic image of '"hordes" of Asia outnumbered the population of the West' horrified the American public greatly. The Japanese were portrayed in many degrading ways, comparing them to vermin like 'rats' and mice' , by showing how disgusted the Americans
Most Americans believed that the Japanese leaked secrets of America to destroy their country. Conclusion In conclusion, the two literary works have the American identity as a central theme. People from different cultures seem to be split between their culture and America.
“Mary Tsukamoto once said ‘I knew it would leave a scar that would stay with me forever. At that moment my precious freedom was taken from me’” (Martin 54). The Betrayal. The attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Survival of the fittest”, is a popular saying that has a lot to do with Social Darwinism. The theory of Social Darwinism is that humans and animals compete with each other in a struggle to survive. An example is when a cat and a mouse are together, it’s obvious the cat will kill the mouse as the term ”fittest” refers to the cat. Although a lot of people believe that Charles Darwin came up with the phrase “Survival of the fittest”, a sociologist, Herbert Spencer actually was the creator of the phrase. Charles Darwin came up with Social Darwinism, hence the name.
The “Japanifying Korea” efforts are depicted as once again detrimental to society; however, it appears that in this film, Korea ultimately saves Japan in a metaphorical stance. The uncle of Lady Hideko adamantly attempts to adopt Japanese styles, culture, and modernization that it brings; this is evident in the Japanese-inspired architecture of the uncle’s property, which incorporates English and Japanese styles in a Korean landscape (Park 0:03:30). The property as a whole is product of the forced infusion of British, Japanese, and Korean styles and culture, which develops the allegorical basis of tension and issues that the film tackles. The uncle is perversing Korea and Korean culture, ultimately making circumstances worse, which is metaphorical for the criticism of Japanese imperialism in Korea.
