Nisei Daughter

When Sone’s younger sister, Sumiko, becomes unwell, Dr. Moon prescribes her “milk, rest and sunshine” (111). Sone accompanies her mother to find a rental home near Alki Beach, which they hope will alleviate Sumiko’s asthma. Although they see several FOR RENT signs at Alki Beach, they are turned away repeatedly, with excuses that the cottages have already been rented out. That night, Sone is alarmed to overhear her mother telling her father that it is possible that the owners lied because they did not want to rent to Japanese.

When Sone and her mother go to Alki a few days later, they confront direct racism. A woman sneers, “I’m sorry, but we don’t want Japs around here” (114). Sone’s first encounter with prejudice is devastating, but her mother tells her that she must “bear it, just like all the other unpleasant facts of life” (114). Later, Mr. Kato confirms that Alki “district has been restricted for years. They’ve never rented or sold houses to Orientals and I doubt they ever will” (115).

Eventually, a woman named Mrs. Olsen permits the family to stay in a small apartment near Lake Washington. Sumiko and Sone make the best of the place, though in their hearts they wish they could have gone to Alki Beach. Benko, meanwhile, composes tanka, beautiful sung poems of exactly 31 syllables.

Sone begins to feel that having Japanese blood is “a terrible curse” because “Japan and the United States were no longer seeing eye to eye, and we felt the repercussions in our daily lives” (118). When the Japanese invade Shanghai, people stop buying in Japanese shops, Chinese employees quit, and Sone endures stares of contempt.

Some of the Nisei confuse the Issei, such as when college students march with sandwich signs reading “halt the oil and stop the Japs!,” as though they have no Japanese blood in them (120). Dick Matsui, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction when he accepts an important job with the Goto firm in Japan. Dick’s decision is fueled by an incident at Pike Place Public Market, where a bigoted man tells him to go back where he came from. At that moment, Dick believes he has discovered “what every white man in this country really thought about” Japanese Americans (122). Dick’s decision is controversial among the Japanese immigrant community. There are those who point out the racism facing the Nisei, who graduate from college and only find work in the fruit market, and those who point out that a Nisei is an American who will never fit in in Japan, where there is equal contempt for them.

Dick looks nervous at his send-off at Smith Cove, and Sone wonders if he “was having a change of heart at the last minute” (123). Watching him go, Sone reconfirms her allegiance to America, feeling it was “too late, much too late for us to turn back” (124).

Sone is thrilled when Haruo, the handsomest boy in class, gives her an envelope with his picture; however, having nowhere to hide the precious artifact, she has to destroy it in case her parents find it and disapprove: “They thought that anyone who thought about boy and girl friends was in danger of softening of the brain and weakening of the character” (126). The next time Sone meets Haruo, she feels “as if I were on the pinnacle of a mountain, looking down into Haruo’s perplexed eyes” (130). She has grown to be an unwomanly (by Japanese standards) five feet six inches, while Haruo has not.

Unlike many of her female classmates, Sone is not married off after completing high school. The most domesticated girls are “swamped with marriage offers by the baishakunins,” or matchmakers, but Sone only has a single offer from a Japanese sailor that Mrs. Matsui presents through a photograph (135). While Benko does not approve of “picture marriages” because her sister, Yasuko, endured a miserable one and drowned herself to escape from it, she does not feel she can refuse Mrs. Matsui an interview with Sone (135). Sone’s reaction is to laugh in Mrs. Matsui’s face.

While she is quiet in class, as is the habit with most Japanese students, Sone feels that her future is bright and that she will go to college. However, her father tells her that he would prefer she go to business school so that she will be directly employable. Sone is reluctant, but dutifully presents herself at the Washington State Vocational School, where Miss Thompson says that she is only accepting a quota of six Japanese American girls this year because she has had problems placing them in the past. The only way Sone can get in is by obtaining a letter that she will be able to find employment in the Nisei community. She procures such a letter from Mr. Iguchi of Mitsui and Company, who says that once she completes her training, she can apply for a job at his firm. It is enough and she is accepted.

Sone races through her training and graduates from a two-year course in one year, hoping that she will be able to attend the University of Washington. However, she finds herself ill and enrolled in the North Pines Sanitarium instead. As a tuberculosis patient at the sanitarium, Sone shares a room with four characterful white girls, all of whom accept her, regardless of her race. She grows especially close to a girl named Chris Young, who calls Sone by the name Kazi, short for Kazuko: “Chris had reminded me of my Japanese ancestry, but with a comforting difference. Somehow she made me feel proud of it” (139). While Sone is confident of her Americanization, an incident at the sanitarium makes her realize that she retains elements of the Japanese manners she was taught in childhood. When a new girl, Laura Wilson, comes to sit at the table with Sone and her friends, Sone thinks that the way to welcome Laura is to give her “my best smile” and say little else (140). Laura, however, thinks that Sone does not like her, because she has not been more overtly friendly. By observing two other Nisei girls, Sone realizes that they have all been taught that to have good manners is to make yourself inconspicuous around strangers.

Sone gives up being the most polite person at the sanitarium, and during her nine-month stay, she becomes “so absorbed in people and finding out about [her]self, that the tragedy of having tuberculosis receded into the background” (142).

When Sone is well enough to go home, she’s gained 25 pounds and is thrilled when her father drives her to their new house, a large brown and yellow two-story frame house. Sone is thrilled to see her family and to learn that her brother, Henry, is engaged to a family acquaintance named Minnie Yokohama. The parents are cautious in their enthusiasm, warning that the couple must wait until they’ve finished their university education before they can marry.

It is on a peaceful Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, when Sone and Henry are singing Handel’s Messiah in the University of Washington choir, that news about Japan’s invasion of Pearl Harbor is broken.

Henry and Sone immediately go home, where the whole family is devastated and confused. The Itoi parents have to hear the news in their own language to believe that the attack has actually happened. Leading up to Pearl Harbor and the worsening relations between America and Japan, there has been conflict between the Itoi parents and children. Henry and Sone criticize Japan’s aggression in Manchuria, while their parents condemn Great Britain and America’s superior attitude toward Asia and their interference in Japan’s economy: “During these arguments, we had eyed each other like strangers, parents against children. They left us with a hollow feeling at the pit of the stomach” (148). Worse of all, prominent Japanese men in the community have been arrested by the FBI on suspicion of spying. The family gear up for Mr. Itoi’s arrest, and Benko even packs a suitcase of clothes for him, when the time comes.

Mrs. Matsui urges the Itois burn all of their Japanese artifacts to avoid arousing suspicion in the event that their house is searched. Sone burns her books, but cannot burn the doll that Grandmother Nagashima sent her from Japan. She gives the doll to her sanitarium friend, Chris, for safe-keeping.

When President Roosevelt formally declares war on Japan and describes the Pearl Harbor attack as “shameful,” and “infamous,” Sone writhes, unable to escape “the stab of self-consciousness that I could have changed my Oriental features” (150).

Once war is declared, widespread racism and fear of the Japanese spreads through America, especially on the West Coast. There is talk of relocation and ridding the land of the “Yellow Peril”; however, the final solution reached by General J. L. De Witt of the Western Defense Command is that the army will march Japanese Americans out of their homes and into assembly centers (157). Eventually, permanent camps would be built to isolate them from the rest of the community. They are permitted only two suitcases of clothing per person and are advised to pack “warm, durable clothes” (161). Before they go, the family think of who will run Mr. Itoi’s business. He confesses that in the next 10 years, his business would have made him wealthy enough to pay for the children’s college tuition and a vacation to Europe, as well as Japan. However, it now appears that his dreams will remain unfulfilled.

The family contact Marta and Karl Olsen, the Scandinavian couple who lent the family the apartment near Lake Washington, to see if they can help manage a hotel. While they insist that they are unable to leave their farm, the Olsens pay the Itois a surprise visit: “They served to remind us that in spite of the bitterness war had brought into our lives, we were still bound to our home town” (164).