Nisei Daughter

Sone’s father, Mr. Itoi, is a first-generation, or Issei, immigrant from Tochigi-ken prefecture. He has “a firm-fleshed, nut-brown face” with a high forehead and a “sober and self-controlled” demeanor like Gandhi (231; 42). Mr. Itoi is proud of his Japanese heritage and retains his love of temples, his restrained manner of greeting, and his disdain for female exhibitionism. However, he also wishes to make a name for himself in America. He hopes to continue his legal training at Ann Arbor College in Michigan. When he’s forced to accept any job he can to get by, he gives up his legal dreams. Whatever reluctance he feels about this, Mr. Itoi applies himself to making the Carrollton Hotel “the cleanest and quietest” flophouse in town (9). When he learns he cannot expect high-quality guests, he tries to give preference to poor but hardworking men over alcoholics.

Mr. Itoi’s adaptability is shown by the way he takes care of his business interests when he knows he is going to the internment camp. Knowing he has to give up his dream of taking his wife on a vacation to Europe, he sets about making furniture for the family’s small camp room. His resilience has limits, however, when he contracts pneumonia in Camp Minidoka. When Sone sees her father lying in bed, very pale, she writes that she “did not have the heart to ask whether this was only the result of his illness” (231). There is the implication that when Sone waves goodbye to her parents, who have the appearance of “wistful immigrants,” that Mr. Itoi’s spirit has been severely dented by the experience of internment (237).

Sone’s mother, Benko Itoi, has an “oval face, lively almond-shaped eyes” and a “slender aquiline nose,” and she is a “pretty, slender five feet of youth and fun” (14). Sone claims that her mother’s predilection towards fun stems from the fact that she emigrated to America as “an energetic and curious seventeen-year-old” (48). From the perspective of retaining Japanese etiquette, 17 was the “wrong age” to emigrate because it meant that “the cement of Japanese culture had not yet been set” in Benko’s character (48). Unlike other Japanese matrons, Benko stays up late into the night, writing Japanese poetry and courageously engages with mainstream culture in Seattle as much as she can. She makes a concerted effort to learn English from her children, regretting that her early marriage meant that she missed out on English schooling. Benko has a poet’s aesthetic approach to the English language, driving her children “frantic by asking us the meaning of odd phrases to which she was invariably attracted” (49).

Benko’s taste for beauty and spontaneity remains with her in internment, as she admires the dandelions that flower through the cracks of their dingy camp room: “They’re the only beautiful things around here. We could have a garden right in here” (174). Later, when Benko is forced to hand in her beloved Japanese Bible and Manyoshu collections of poems, she exhibits a “stubborn” side to her nature, as she defends the texts against a charge of subversiveness and refuses to part with her Japanese dictionary (188).

Following the move to Camp Minidoka and the need to adhere to Idaho’s freezing winters, Benko must set aside her pride in her personal appearance and resign herself to wearing the masculine long johns that keep her warm. Her predicament symbolizes the camp’s ability to take away the interned subject’s individuality and humanity. Although Benko is still “full of smiles” when Sone comes to visit from college, Benko’s happiness is of the vicarious kind, which is obtained through her children’s experiences outside of the camp (230).

Sone’s older brother, Henry, is extroverted, ambitious, and her childhood playmate. Sone considers that Henry “was smarter and adjusted more quickly to fate” than she does, as he lacks her high emotionality and flair for drama (5). Not registering that she and Henry should act differently because she is a girl and he a boy, Sone wants to do everything that her brother does. For example, when a group of Japanese children who live near Grandfather Itoi’s house begin a fight with the Itoi children, Henry is the first to charge into the group, “whacking his fishing pole about him” (98). Sone observes the scramble of arms and legs for a while, but when Henry is arrested by the group and badly beaten, she joins in the fight herself.

As Sone grows, Henry in many ways continues to be her role model. He studies to be a doctor, and she wishes to go to university, like him. Though he’s frustrated by the increasing prejudices against people of Japanese ethnicity, Henry, like Sone, considers himself first and foremost an American citizen. He criticizes Japan’s militarism over the West’s interference and, after some thought, volunteers himself for the army in service of his country. While his poor eyesight prevents him from seeing any action, Henry eventually flourishes, getting married to the charming Minnie and obtaining work as a doctor in a Saint Louis sanitarium.

Sone’s younger brother, Kenji, makes a brief but ominous appearance in her memoir. Whereas the other Itoi children are thrilled to be going to Japan, “crystal tears glistened tremulously” in Kenji’s “huge, petal-shaped eyes” because he is afraid of the deadly earthquakes he has heard take place in Japan (87). While Kenji is forced to resign himself to going on the trip, he vehemently objects to the Japanese custom of removing shoes before sitting on a tatami mat. He kicks and screams, making such a nuisance in the hotel lobby that his uncle goes to claim him, with Kenji “triumphant, still wearing his brown shoes, the laces tied in a mass of knots” (92).

Poignantly, Kenji proves to be a truly American child when he catches a mortal local disease, dysentery, “always fatal in those parts” of the world (105). While Henry comes down with the same symptoms and is also hospitalized, Kenji’s constitution is less able to withstand the illness and he dies. The earthquake Kenji fears happens while he is in hospital, and it is a terrifying experience for Sone. When she learns of her brother’s death, she remembers that this profoundly American child never wanted to come to Japan in the first place. It is as though he had a premonition that bad luck was in store for him.

Sone’s younger sister, Sumiko, has an appearance that differs from the rest of the family, with her “olive complexion” and “huge, flashing Latin” eyes (63-64). The youngest in the family, Sumiko is delicate and easily influenced. When she contracts a bad case of asthma, she gains a black kitten that is named Asthma, because according to Japanese superstition, black cats can help cure asthma. Her illness is also the catalyst for the Itoi family’s search for a seaside home. While Sone and her mother go on the search and deal with the disappointment directly, when they are turned away for their ethnicity, Sumiko waits for the good news “in bed […] with an expectant smile” (115). When the family have to rent an apartment near Lake Washington instead of Alki Beach, Sumiko is content to eat Marta Olsen’s cookies and swim in muddy Lake Washington, but retains the fantasy of Puget Sound’s “sparkling salt water” and “fiery sunsets” (116).

Sumiko grows into a starstruck teenager who strives to look as attractive as possible while in the camp. When she is released, she becomes a nurse at the same sanitarium her brother Henry works at. A dreamer to the end of Sone’s memoir, Sumiko has plans to visit New York.

The principal of Seattle’s Nihon Gakko Japanese school, Mr. Ohashi is a stern, fastidious man who cares deeply about imparting his knowledge of etiquette to the children of Japanese immigrants. The “Oriental male counterpart of Emily Post”—an American etiquette ideologue—Ohashi “arrived in America with the perfect bow tucked under his waist and a facial expression cemented into perfect samurai control” (24). Sone’s first encounter with Ohashi is when he corrects her manner of bowing as she walks through the door of Nihon Gakko the first time. Both literally and metaphorically, Ohashi acts a gatekeeper for what is permissible in Japanese culture.

A typical Issei who is aligned with his country of origin above his host country, Ohashi takes refuge in the utopian atmosphere of Nihon Gakko and does not make allowances for American manners and customs. For example, at Tenchosetsu, the feast of the emperor’s birthday, he is shocked that two Nisei girls, for whom the emperor is a distant figure, would deign to wear hats and thereby insult the emperor. Unlike Sone, he is unwilling to understand that the American-cultured girls thought “they had worn their best hats to an important afternoon affair” (69).

The female counterpart to Mr. Ohashi, Mrs. Matsui is a woman 10 years older than Benko who thinks that because she knew Benko’s father in Japan, “she felt it was her duty to look after Mother’s progress in this foreign country” (26). While Mrs. Matsui advocates for obsequiously demure, gentle manners in Sone and her own daughter, Yaeko, she monitors Benko’s movements “like a sharp-eyed hawk,” chastising her for staying up late to read poetry and for her “chaotic” relationship with her children, whom she fails to adequately discipline (26; 27). Mrs. Matsui is a contradiction, a forceful interfering matriarch who advocates that young women should be the opposite.

However, despite her staunch defense of Japanese customs and her rudimentary grasp of the English language, when the tide turns against Japanese Americans, Mrs. Matsui advises the Itois to destroy their Japanese artifacts. A survivor above all, when Mrs. Matsui passes through the “baptism” of a direct confrontation with the FBI guards, she turns her attention to saving the lives of husbands, saying “if it’s printed or made in Japan, destroy it because the FBI always carries off those items as evidence” (154). Therefore, regardless of the circumstances, headstrong Mrs. Matsui gives advice and provides leadership.

Chris Young, “with her fluff of copper bright hair” is Sone’s best friend at the sanitarium (138). Sone not only admires Chris’s humor and resilience in the face of tuberculosis and the drab sanitarium surroundings, but the sensitive way she handles the topic of Sone’s ethnicity in a climate of increasing hostility toward Japanese Americans. Sone writes, “Chris had reminded me of my Japanese ancestry, but with a comforting difference. Somehow she made me feel proud of it” (139). Sone’s friendship with Chris gives her a taste of what life is like when people are interested and welcoming of her difference, as opposed to mistrustful of it. When the arrests of Japanese males begin and Sone fears her fine Japanese doll may compromise her and endanger her family, Chris becomes its perfect guardian.

Marta and Karl Olsen are a middle-aged, childless couple of Scandinavian origin who rent the Itois an apartment in the Camden Apartments block near Lake Washington. Their housing offer comes after numerous rejections from landlords at Alki Beach. Marta is “a small, slender, blue-eyed woman” who, with her husband, looks upon all children as being her own, baking cookies for all of them (116). Marta displays curiosity for Japanese culture when she swaps recipe ideas with Benko.

The Itois’ internment hurts the Olsens deeply, and they regret that their responsibilities to their own farmland mean that they cannot take over Mr. Itoi’s hotel. However, the effort they make to visit the Itois and talk about old times before the family are taken away is significant to Sone: “They served to remind us that in spite of the bitterness war had brought into our lives, we were still bound to our home town” (164). Where the government and people in the streets have implied that the Itois do not belong in America at all, the Olsens’ presence at this crucial moment indicates the opposite and is a reminder of the secure ties the Itois have with the land that they have made their home.