Nisei Daughter

This book is not so much an analysis of the internment of the Japanese-Americans as it is primarily the story of one girl who had to go through that experience, and how she dealt with it.

The book talks about how the Nisei were culturally more American than Japanese, maintaining some traditions from their Japanese heritage, but mainly adapting American cultural practices. Many of them did not even really speak much if any Japanese.

She writes about how she attended (before the internment) both American public school and the traditional Japanese language school. This was quite a burden for elementary-school students. She talks about how the Chinese in Chinatown looked down on the Japanese. She also talks about the stereotyped editorial cartoons in the papers, how people stared at them, how others refused to serve them, and how they still tried to say they were really Americans.

She writes about how, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, men from the FBI rounded up various persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast (she and her family were in Seattle). Eventually she ends up in the Puyallup assembly center (known as Camp Harmony). Early on, she notes, about half the camp suffered from food poisoning.

Like the other internees, they eventually got moved to a relocation center/internment camp, in their case Camp Minidoka. She writes about how one man died from exposure to the cold because he didn't have proper clothing (although the internees really didn't have time, or foreknowledge, to pack “proper” clothing.)

It's a very personal type of writing and very interesting. The majority of the book is devoted to her life before the assembly and internment camp, but the parts on the camps are still quite fascinating.

---

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page