99% Americans

Discrimination has been prevalent since the beginning of American history but what makes the segregation of the Japanese Americans during World War II so shameful is that the people in these camps were completely Americanized. In the beginning of the book when the author was describing the woman, I imagined the housewife in an old sitcom from the 1940’s and 1950’s who always wore pearls and high heels while working around the house stopping only to give her husband a peck on the cheek when he came home from work saying, “Honey, I’m home!” Also, I imagined that they celebrated the Fourth of July at their neighbor’s barbeque and drove a Ford. The family most likely didn’t speak a lot of Japanese around the house and did not have Japanese accents but even though they did still connect with their roots by having statues of Buddha, kimonos, and other pieces of Japanese culture around the house, they could have been considered an average American family if it weren’t for their ancestry.

While on the train and in the stables and into the camps, everyone was speaking English and only some older people would only speak Japanese. This was what made it especially shameful because chances are that they had emigrated here about twenty years before. If there were more young people who only spoke Japanese, there would be more of a chance that they would be disloyal but there weren’t. The boy played cowboys and Indians and fantasized about horses while looking out into the desert and the girl liked American candy and music and also actress, Dorothy Lamour. However, when they went into the camps, they lost their identity and dignity. They lived with the bare essentials and a few personal belongings but other than that had nothing but their regrets and false sense of guilt looming over them.