Complex Identities, Multiple Loyalties
"It is hard to believe that any Japanese-American... felt 100 percent loyalty to Japan or to the United States in the 1930s if such loyalty meant the exclusion of emotional feelings and respect toward one or the other country. Available evidence and common sense suggest that a majority felt an attachment to both countries... The nisei could hardly be expected to reject their ancestral land, the birthplace of their parents, and the home of their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins."
(from Hawaii under the Rising Sun by John J. Stephan)
Japan: Art and Culture, 1920-1945
The crane in this book cover represents an auspitious motif connected with the longevity of emperor and the strength of the nation.
A vase with "Radiating Black and White Stripes" inspired by the Japanese military flag (from Deco Japan)
Resources
Websites:
American Gold Star Mothers, Inc is an organization of mothers whose sons and daughters served and died in the line of duty in the Armed Forcesof the United States of America or its Allies, or died as a result of injuries sustained in such service.
Go For Broke National Education Center strives "to educate the public about the responsibilities, challenges, and rights of American citizenship by using the life stories of the Japanese American soldiers of World War II."
Research:
Ichioka, Yuji. "Japanese Immigrant Nationalism, the Issei and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941." California History 69, no. 3 (09, 1990): 260-275.
Ichioka, Yuji. "The Meaning of Loyalty: The Case of Kazumaro Buddy Uno." Amerasia Journal 23, no. 3 (12, 1997): 44
Ngai, Mae M. "The World War II Internment of Japanese Americans and the Citizenship Renunciation Cases." Chap. Chapter 5, In Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, edited by Ngai, Mae M., 175. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Film/Fiction:
Ina, Satsuki, Stephen Holsapple, Emery Clay III. From a Silk Cocoon. San Francisco: Center for Asian American Media, 2005.
Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.