Dash

In Chapter 1 and the Author’s Note, Larson provides the general historical context for Mitsi’s story. The year is 1941, and the world is at war. Nazi Germany began the war in 1939 when it invaded Poland. Adolf Hitler, the totalitarian leader of Nazi Germany, wants to dominate the world and systematically kill multiple groups of people, including people with physical and mental conditions and Jews. Japan and Italy are on Nazi Germany’s side, and they’re the Axis. The United States helps England, France, and Russia fight the Axis by giving them supplies and weapons. When Japan attacks Pearl Harbor on December 7, killing around 2,400 people, America officially joins the war, and the United States, England, France, and Russia became the Allies. In May 1945, the Allies defeat the Nazis in Europe. In August 1945, the United States forces Japan to surrender after dropping two atomic bombs on the country, killing around 200,000 people.

During the war with Japan, Americans treat Japanese people like enemies. Mitsi sees the discrimination inside and outside of school. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, giving him the authority to put Japanese people on the West Coast (those closest to Japan) in concentration camps. In “Eighty Years After the U.S. Incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans, Trauma and Scars Still Remain” (Smithsonian Magazine, 11 Feb. 2022), Alice George explains that the government used euphemisms to obscure the harshness of the camps—nicer names like “assembly centers” or “internment camps”—but they’re concentration camps. As National Public Radio’s Neal Conan explains in “Euphemisms, Concentration Camps and the Japanese Internment” (Schumacher-Matos, Edward, and Lori Grisham, NPR, 10 Feb. 2012), what the Americans built for the Japanese people meets the definition of a concentration camp. However, some historians stay away from calling the American camps “concentration camps” because they feel it minimizes the experiences of those in German concentration camps, which were a key component in the systematic genocide of over 6 million Jews and the murder of millions of others deemed undesirable by the Nazis.

As in Mitsi’s story, people sleep in horse stalls and can only bring what they can carry. Japanese people must sell their items and property, so Pop sells his car. It’s also likely that they would’ve sold their home. Alice George estimates that Japanese people lost around $3.64 billion. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan apologized to the Japanese people put in the concentration camps and gave each survivor $20,000. The reparations fall short of the billions of dollars in reparations that Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations continue to receive from Germany and other countries and businesses.