Japanese American Books

I was quite delighted with this book. The author, who was a 14 year old Japanese-American living on Maui when the attack occured, gives several different viewpoints of the attack and the days following. His characters are entertaining, and his use of "local" language is accurate. Definately recommended for anyone who wants a view of the Pearl Harbor attack from the local people's perspective.

I read the book Midway battles that changed the world. This book is written by Richard Worth. The book Midway takes place in the mid 1900's. The book tells what happened before the war and what caused the war to happen. It tells you about purple, this was a machine that they used in the 1900's to decode the Japanese messages. This machine had many errors many times it would shut down, but the Americans used this machine to decode a lot of messages and helped the Americans in the war. The book also includes how the Americans got ready for the war and things they did to make sure they would not get attacked. He explains what America does to win the battles. They explain what the Japanese were doing at the same time. I thought that this book was very good; I would give it 4 stars out of 5 stars. I thought that it explained what happened very well. They have some pictures of the ships that they used and they give you some of the routes that they used in their battles. I would recommend this book to any person who would like to learn about the battles that America had to fight in the mid 1900's. Many people would enjoy reading this book.

This story gives insight into early interactions and cultural differences between Americans and Japanese. A quick read. Can be hard to find.

Little Hazel is mad. She's mad at the war, and she's mad at the stupid Japs for ruining her birthday. She thinks it's their entire fault that no one has time for her, and that her closest friend and her brother are leaving to join the army. Everyone is leaving this little tomboy - or so she feels. At school, she belongs nowhere. The girls are too girly and the boys are too irritating. At home, she doesn't seem to fit. Her mother always tells her to do chores, her sister is always smitten, and her father is just quiet. Hazel has plenty of time to go off on her own. However, Hazel found herself in a most surprising friendship of friendships - she somehow made friends with Sogoji, the "maid" the neighbors have, who also happens to be a Japanese boy.

My Friend the Enemy caught my eye at first because of the title and the controversy in it. When I started reading the book, the first line being, "I didn't mean to do it. I just got carried away." it automatically FORCED me to keep going. I mean, who would actually put a book down right after reading that? What kept me into the book was modest Hazel. She caught my heart right when she had to part from Jed, her closest friend; and from then on I was totally hooked; and the friendship that Hazel found was just awe-inspiring.

In 1942 Andrew Carson, who had joined the military to make a better life for himself, found himself taken prisoner by the Japanese as they began their conquest of the Philippine Islands. Starving, sick, and beaten, Carson survived a series of prison camps until he was finally liberated in 1945.

Carson provides chilling details of life in Cabanatuan in the Philippines and the harrowing voyage on a hell ship to Japan. His memoir is grim but never self-pitying. A true testament to the will to survive.

Quote from page 4 - "It will be argued that the assumption that Toyota and other Japanese car assemblers led a break from 'Fordist' mass production of standardized models is historically counterfactual, and that this branch of manufacturing history has been subject to a collective process of fictionalization..."
The author very carefully disassembles the main premise of Womak & co's book "The machine that changed the world". He goes further to debunk Womak and Jones book "Lean Thinking".
While the main thrust is to show that critical claims led by Womak and co are historically inaccurate, the author fell short in several areas that show have been addressed while he was debunking his two central targets (hence only 4 stars).

I happened to come across this book while actually in Koror, Palau (Koror was the capital of the Nan'yo, the Japanese governing body for Micronesia) during a vacation and read it while I was there. In general, it is worth reading if you are are a student of Japan's occupation policies of southeast asian countries during the war. It is very detailed but could have focused more on military strategy, but the book is not really about that, its about how Japan built up, governed, then lost its colonies in Micronesia-- colonies which would most likely be in a much better economic state than there are in now, arguably, if the Japanese were still there running things.

Word, This 'lil book has been hot fo 'bout a minute now. I have to say this book is da bomb. Before I was an imitator, now i'm a straight intimidator. No better how-to book exists to get you out there on the playing field on life and speak to the hood and represent. Major props RC Miller 'AKA' Danger M. Peace.

For the Japanese in Hawaii, confusion and resentment were common reactions on Dec. 7, 1941. But for a few, there was extra anguish -- they had immediate family members in Japan or they were targeted as dangerous aliens by the FBI and by evening they were being arrested.
Sixty-five years later, there is a great deal of confusion and mythologizing about this, because two separate issues are conflated. First is loyalty. Second is treatment of a suspect group.
Despite shameful treatment, the Japanese in America were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States. For many, this required a split personality. Tomi Knaefler presents the example of a Japanese immigrant, denied citizenship in Hawaii, who remained loyal to Japan but admonished her sons, born in Hawaii and American citizens, to be loyal to the United States.
In an immigrant nation, the problem of divided loyalties was, and still is, usual; but, perhaps because only Japan attacked American territory, the situation of the Japanese Americans is treated as odd or unique.
In order to understand the situation of the Japanese, it is useful to recall that Irish-Americans commonly supported Germany and Austria-Hungary against Britain in World War I. Or that the most opinionated journalist in our history, H.L. Mencken, never had a word to say about World War I or II, evidently because his sentimental ties to Germany were too strong. Or that the reason pre-1941 isolationism was strongest in the upper Midwest was that Germans and Scandinavians admired Hitler for rebuilding German state power.
Furthermore, the American persecution of enemy aliens or their descendants was not unique to the Japanese. In 1917, the German-owned H. Hackfeld company was seized in Hawaii and patriotically renamed American Factors and its drygoods store became Liberty House; while on the Mainland German measles became Liberty measles, sauerkraut become Liberty cabbage and German language teaching -- the most common foreign language taught in most American high schools -- was suppressed.
Treatment of the Japanese Americans in 1942 was the same, only worse. It cannot be emphasized enough that it was not unreasonable for government authorities to have doubts about the loyalty of Japanese Americans; the Japanese government certainly expected them to welcome the Imperial Army, and elsewhere in the Pacific that happened. Those reasonable doubts were made shameful by three things: the lack of confidence in the superiority of American political institutions that the doubts betrayed, the brutal way the security question was resolved and the theft of Japanese property.
In "Our House Divided," the question of loyalty is portrayed simultaneously as complex and as oversimplified.
In some cases, brothers ended up in opposing armies (with the difference that in all cases in this book, the American G.I.s volunteered and the Japanese soldiers were drafted). But in all seven of Knaefler's examples, the only two factors that the survivors admitted taking into account were family and geography.
Not one suggested that moral or ideological considerations ever were thought of. It is unlikely that this reflects true history. All seven divided families belonged to the educated elite; all had children in college. No doubt these teachers and journalists debated seriously the issues between Japan and the United States, and perhaps even between Japan and China and Japan's other east Asian neighbors. (Probably poor Hawaii plantation families that had difficulty even sending their children to high school were spared the problems these families faced because once they left Japan for Hawaii, they never had the opportunity to go back.)
The mothers, unsurprisingly, were dominated not by politics but by the hope that all their children would merely survive. In most cases, this happened and several told Knaefler, "It worked out" or variations on that theme.
In the years since 1945, the members of these divided families have struggled to come to terms with their experiences. Surprisingly, they have not studied the history of the war, though notoriously participants in war can know little about it on their own. Though presumably these stories are fairly accurate as to personal details, they are full of errors about other events. For example, one man who was a student in Japan says that many of his classmates left school to volunteer for the kamikaze; but this cannot be so, since he left school himself in 1943, well before kamikaze were thought of.
These interviews were originally collected by reporter Knaefler for a series on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1966. At that time, no book publisher would touch them because the subject was too raw. The value of re-reading these stories after 65 years is that it humanizes a great historical event.

Michael Lewis, the controversial author of Liar's Poker, and later writer for the New York Time's Magazine, is quite a writer. He proves his talent yet again in this work about Japanese-American business relations and cultural differences in the 1980s.

As the saying goes, if you liked Liar's Poker, you'll love Pacific Rift.

My only word of caution is that the book may seem dated now that the U.S. isn't scared to death of the Japanese economic "machine". However, the book now gives a nice historical review of what things were like only ten to fifteen years ago.

It's a shame the book is out of print.