Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone (University of Washington Press)

Monica Sone is six when her parents tell her she is Japanese. She’s been told stories about her parents’ early lives in Japan, but she and her siblings are Yankees, born in America. Only when she and her brother learn that soon they’ll spend their after-school playtime in a Japanese school every day, does she realize she’s part of a culture that until now hadn’t intruded on her life.

A scrappy little hoyden who lives in her father’s Skid Row hotel, Monica’s playground is on the streets and alleyways of a rundown Seattle neighborhood. Taverns, a burlesque house, and businesses owned by the Japanese parents of her friends make up her landscape. Suddenly she’s in Nihon Gakko where she receives rigorous lessons in the Japanese language and etiquette. It’s a place, Monica decides, where “the model child is one with deep rigor mortis…no noise, no trouble, no backtalk.”

This is in preparation for a family trip to Japan where Monica’s youngest brother has a shrieking tantrum when he’s told to remove his shoes before entering a hotel dining room and Monica slaps one of her cousins during an argument, shocked when the girl doesn’t fight back. At the Nikko Shrine, she rebels when told that no one but the  Emperor is allowed to set foot on the sacred Shinkyo Bridge. Lagging behind her father, she slips under the rope barrier, tries to run up the curving arch of the bridge, and fails, seen only by horrified strangers. When a group of village boys gang up on her brother, Monica dives into the fray, scratching, biting, and pulling hair in “a marvelous free-for-all.” She returns to America knowing that in Japan she is “an alien.” The country where she was born, with its “people of different racial extractions,” is her home.

As she grows older, fissures threaten her sense of security. When her youngest sister grows ill and her parents want to find a house near the beach for the summer, they discover that even places with vacancy signs are no longer available. Finally they’re told “I’m sorry but we don’t want Japs around here,” and Monica feels “raw angry fire flash through my veins.” When she enters adolescence, she and her friends are barred from a swimming pool and leave, protesting “But we’re American citizens” as they drive away.

She is Nisei, an American-born Japanese, with a strong belief in equality and justice. While her Issei parents, born in Japan, had grown up steeped in acceptance and resignation, Monica refuses to submit to prejudice. Then an evening’s choir practice is interrupted when a boy bursts in announcing that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America is at war. Within two months, Executive Order Number 9066 turns Monica’s American birthright into a cruel hoax. She and her family are packed off to an army barracks where they wait for the orders that will send them to a relocation camp. Anger and rebellion are useless now, and Monica faces the truth that “my citizenship wasn’t real after all.”Perhaps neither were “the ideas and ideals of democracy.”

Memoirs are the heart and soul of history and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter illuminates the lives of Japanese Americans in the first half of the 20th Century with a bright and stabbing light. Her journey from a peaceful childhood into the betrayal of promises in a country at war is beautifully told and presents a scalding indictment. Her conclusion holds words from an Issei neighbor that sums up the difference between the two generations: “You young ones feel everything so keenly. It’s good, but sometimes you must suffer more for it.” More than any class Monica took when she reluctantly attended Nihon Gakka, it’s the time she spends with her parents and other Issei in the relocation camp that makes her know she’s both American and Japanese, integrated into “a whole person.”~Janet Brown