Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River

Tamura’s cautionary tale depicts the unsung bravery and resilience of Japanese-American WWII veterans in the face of postwar racism. Focusing primarily on Japanese communities that settled in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, Tamura (The Hood River Issei), a sansei (third-generation Japanese-American) and professor at Willamette University, relies both on oral histories and archival documents to trace the progress of issei (first-generation immigrants), the attempted assimilation of nisei (second-generation), and the conflict spurred by the war. If “Issei had remained ‘common, unskilled laborers, they might have been tolerated,’ ” but the diligent, resourceful Japanese farmers became competitors in the eyes of white farmers. This fear triggered a movement to limit the settlers’ rights and prevent their upward mobility, sanctioning restrictions on land ownership and citizenship. Considered “nice people so long as they are in a minority,” when America went to war with Japan they were “treated as prisoners and criminals”: issei parents were forced into internment camps while their nisei sons were enlisted in the Army. This important chronicle of the community’s wartime contributions interweaves fact and anecdote, exposing incidents like the removal of 16 nisei soldiers’ names from a local war memorial; Tamura provides an engaging outlet for a hidden voice, so “we can learn from and act to correct mistakes from the past.” Illus. (Sept.)