Japanese American

A war hero on the run. A girl behind barbed wire. A love letter to hope in the darkest times. In 1944 California, Aiko Takeda writes letters to her childhood friend, Takeshi "Taki" Nakamura, a Nisei soldier serving with the famed 442nd Infantry Regiment in Europe. Through their letters, their bond deepens across oceans and gunfire. But when her letters suddenly stop, Taki fears the worst. Learning of the U.S. government's internment of Japanese Americans, Taki makes a life-altering decision: he deserts his unit and sets out on a perilous journey across continents and borders to find Aiko. ...

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor.

1976. A 22-year-old Japanese American woman enters the management ranks of a major corporation and encounters...just what you'd expect. Sexism. Misogyny. Racial bias. And she breaks barriers anyway. From the moment Elaine Koyama was hired as a management trainee at agri-business giant Cargill, Inc., she found herself entangled in the endless fight to wedge herself through the doors the women's movement opened.

Dee, Misa, and Matt were the "three musketeers" of the psych ward. A year after discharge, Dee is eager to convince everyone that she’s finally turning things around. But Matt and Misa are tying the knot in Turks and Caicos, surrounded by guests who have no idea where they met, and the secrecy isn’t sitting well with Dee, who has been hopelessly in love with Matt since before she got kicked out of the hospital. So, when Dee arrives at the swanky resort with her high-voltage sister, Tilley, it’s now or never to confess how she feels.

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together 15 stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's 40-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In celebration of the 75th anniversary, a riveting first-hand account of the Battle of Okinawa from the first officer ashore, who served at the front for the battle’s entire 82-day duration, heroism that earned him a Bronze Star. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 1,500 Allied ships and 1.5 million men gathered off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa and launched the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War. The first American officer ashore was Major Art Shaw, a unit commander in the US Army’s 361 Artillery Battalion of the 96th Division, often called the Deadeyes.

Fred Korematsu liked listening to music on the radio, playing tennis, and hanging around with his friends - just like lots of other Americans. But everything changed when the United States went to war with Japan in 1941 and the government forced all people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes on the West Coast and move to distant prison camps. This included Fred, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan many years before. But Fred refused to go.

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible.

Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life - child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen - mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the 20th century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.

Just 75 years ago, the American government did something that most would consider unthinkable today: It rounded up over 100,000 of its own citizens based on nothing more than their ancestry and, suspicious of their loyalty, kept them in concentration camps for the better part of four years. How could this have happened? Uprooted takes a close look at the history of racism in America and carefully follows the treacherous path that led one of our nation's most beloved presidents to make this decision.

Bruce Blanc, fresh off a nine-year prison jolt and back on the streets of Honolulu, is about to turn 41. He finds himself embroiled in urban Honolulu’s Asian American nightlife. Kids lighting up the night with cocaine and killing daylight with Xanax. Girls who spend more time looking at themselves in the mirror than Snow White’s stepmom; the older divorcees with means who prey on them. And 90-pound female drug lords and the cops in love with them. A new bar is opening or shutting down daily.

The origins of Asian martial arts in the United States reach back to the Pacific Rim and immigration. This anthology is dedicated to the profoundly significant period—roughly from mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century—in which gifted Japanese taught their brand of jujutsu/judo to small groups that gradually disseminated knowledge of combatives into the American mainstream. Wingard provides insightful coverage of the “manly arts” in America as they swept the land along with moving populations. Hlinak analyzes Japanese-American immigration into the American West, ...

Some refugees who had fled from Germany, in an attempt to escape Nazi persecution, were rounded up, interned, and later used in a prisoner exchange program between the United States and German governments. The American government also went to great lengths to secure Germans living across Latin America, who they believed posed a tangible threat, should they cross America’s southern border. In spite of a preponderance of evidence affirming the occurrence of these events, the United States government persistently denied it for decades.

"When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends." Culminating a bitter-sweet epic and traditional coming-of-age story, 'Eyes Behind Belligerence' sets precedence to fear and hatred, to families torn apart, and to the calloused response of internment camps. While two Japanese-American families endure the wake of Pearl Harbor’s wrath, each member must face the most painful question of their life: Where does their loyalty stand? Told in five parts, this novel unravels the challenges between two unlikely Nisei friends, Jim and Russell, into adulthood during the Second ...

Marching Orders tells the story of how the American military's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes during World War II led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and hastened the end of the devastating conflict. With unprecedented access to over one million pages of US Army documents and thousands of pages of top-secret messages dispatched to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, author Bruce Lee offers a series of fascinating revelations about pivotal moments in the war.

Bridget Jones meets James Bond! What happens when you stumble in the arms of a gorgeous man with DANGER! written all over? Especially, when you're stuck in your worst magical eclipse? FREE on Kindle Unlimited! I’m Sophie Rowling. I used to be a world-renowned violinist, until my world was turned upside down. Following a freak accident in Paris, I can’t remember how to play the violin anymore. To make matters worse, I’m supposed to perform for my childhood teacher’s retirement party, which is just weeks away. Usually I would turn to my BFFs, Jackie the ghost and Allegra the violin ...

The Block Manager is the gripping memoir of Janet, an American-born child of Japanese immigrants. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Janet's life in California was uprooted when thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast - including Janet's family - were forced into internment camps. Because of her brilliant command of English and Japanese, she was assigned the job of block manager. Janet was shuffled between three camps, got married, and had a child while the war raged on.

Here are the dramatic stories of the fall of Bataan, the siege of "the Rock," the daily struggles to tend the sick, the wounded, and the dying, during some of the heaviest bombardments of World War II. Once captive, the doctors and corpsmen waged a desperate war against disease and starvation for nearly three and a half years, amid an enemy who viewed surrender as a disgrace. To survive, the four POWs tried to function as a family.

After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to leave their homes. The government was afraid that because they looked like “the enemy,” they might be spies. One American, librarian Clara Breed, was heartbroken and outraged. As the San Diego Public Library’s Children’s Librarian, Miss Breed was close to many of the children who were evacuated. She went to the train station the day they left, handing out postcards and telling them to send her letters.

Cara is on the cusp of adventure. Unlike her best friends, she doesn’t want to go to college, she wants different kinds of challenges. And anyway, home just doesn’t fit anymore. She is growing distant from her friends and hasn’t spoken to her father in eons. To make matters worse, her ex-boyfriend and fellow climber, Nat, has popped back into town after breaking up with her over text. So it’s the perfect time to leave, and she has big plans for a gap year to rock-climb in Patagonia. But when Cara hears that her father is actually missing, things change.