Japanese American

Kimi’s Obaachan, her grandmother, had always been a silent presence throughout her youth. Sipping tea by the fire, preparing sushi for the family, or indulgently listening to Ojichan’s (grandfather’s) stories for the thousandth time, Obaachan was a missing link to Kimi’s Japanese heritage, something she had had a mixed relationship with all her life. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, all Kimi ever wanted to do was fit in, spurning traditional Japanese cuisine and her grandfather’s attempts to teach her the language.

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.

Delve into the mystical worlds of Celtic enchantment, the heroic sagas of Bulfinch's lore, the enigmatic tales of Slavic spirits, the celestial dances of Japanese deities, the profound fables of Turkish origins, the creation epics of Sumerian and Mesopotamian civilizations, the rich tapestry of Native American heritage, and the captivating chronicles from the Filipino archipelago.

Japanese-Americans were forcefully removed from their homes and businesses, and placed in "relocation" camps throughout the West. With countless instances of "Gestapo-like" tactics used against them, no one would have faulted them for being bitter or angry at the country that held them captive. Instead, the remarkable story of these Nesei (first generation Japanese born outside of Japan) warriors explains why they were eager to defend their American homeland, and how they became the most decorated fighting unit ever assembled in U.S. military history. Go For Broke is the incredible story of...

After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara - all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest - moved to Hiroshima, their mother's ancestral home. Eager to go back to his own land - America - Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.

In this dramatic and pause-resisting narrative history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after their World War II incarceration, Susan H. Kamei weaves the voices of more than 130 individuals who lived through this tragic episode, most of them as young adults.

Kai Bimore never imagined that sneaking a legendary sword through Narita Airport would plunge him into Tokyo’s vicious underworld. Once a criminal with a dark past and a heart still loyal to his family's warrior legacy, Kai now finds himself pitted against the ruthless Ice Kuroda and her deadly empire. As high-stakes alliances fracture and secrets of the ancient Honjo Masamune reveal unprecedented power, every choice he makes could spark a violent revolution or seal his doom. The narrative centers on high-stakes criminal underworld conflicts in modern Tokyo—with rival clans, lethal ...

From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given $25 and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs.

In a voice both haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri describes her life as a geisha. Taken from her home at the age of nine, she is sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Witness her transformation as you enter a world where appearances are paramount, virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder, women beguile powerful men, and love is scorned as illusion.

Japan faces Korea in the World Baseball Classic at Dodger Stadium, and curmudgeonly gardener Mas Arai finds himself embroiled in a murder. A Japanese tabloid writer drops dead on the field, and Mas gave the victim his last drink. It turns out there's more at stake than a baseball championship - international diplomacy depends upon uncovering secrets buried decades ago.

Ash shook off the images swarming his head and tried to focus on her again; it wasn’t hard. She was so beautiful, those plump lips naturally lined by a darker stain of pink as they blossomed into a cherry in the center, those wide eyes so rich and opaque he could stare into them for hours and never separate pupil from iris. The lashes kissing the delicate smattering of freckles on her mahogany cheek—“I can’t begin to tell you how much your friendship means to me,” Ash said, still drinking in her face. She was so close. It would take nothing to just come a little closer, just there...

Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.

Yukiko Yashida was just an ordinary Japanese American ten-year-old living on a strawberry field on Bainbridge Island, Washington. She lived a simple life of school, chores, gardening, and friendships. She was a girl in search of her own place in the world and her own special story to share. Then, in a blink of an eye, Pearl Harbor is attacked and the Land of the Rising Sun emerges and looms large in her life. Not quite Japanese, not as American as she believes, Yukiko and her family are taken from their homes and relocated to the internment camps where now it's the desert sun that never ...

A unique World War II thriller; love, hate, brotherhood, espionage, loyalty. With master storyteller Rodger Carlyle, every chapter takes you places you never expected; powerful. --Robert Dugoni, bestselling author of the Charles Jenkins Thriller Series His family imprisoned on a visit to Japan, Mark Ishihara is ordered to the family fish processing plant across the bay from America’s only military base in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. With the planned bombing of Pearl Harbor only months away, his job is to spy for Japan, as they prepare to seize American territory. Mark’s blood brother, ...

Bold Venture tells the nearly forgotten story of the American airmen who flew perilous combat missions over Hong Kong during the Second World War.

February 19, 1942. George Takei is four years old when his world changes forever. Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares anyone of Japanese descent an enemy of the United States. George and his family were American in every way. They had done nothing wrong. But because of their Japanese ancestry, they were removed from their home in California and forced into camps with thousands of other families who looked like theirs.

Phantoms is a fierce saga of American culpability. A Vietnam vet still reeling from war, John Frazier finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. John comes to learn that in the onslaught of World War II, the Takahashis had been displaced as once-beloved tenants of the Wilson orchard and sent to an internment camp. What happened to the Takahashi son, Ray, when he returned from service and found that that nowhere was home for a Japanese American?

“Your husband is a landowner,” they told her. “Food and clothing is so plentiful, it grows on trees.” “You will be able to go to school.” Of the three lies the matchmaker told Willow before she left home as a picture bride in 1918, the third hurt the most. Never one to be deterred, Willow does all that she can to make the best of her unexpected circumstance. But it isn't long before her dreams for this new life are shattered.

Rising Sun is the 11th book in the New England Series set in a universe in which George Washington died at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and…the Revolutionary War was lost...and the Britannia's domain has literally been an empire on which the sun never sets for most of the last two hundred years! The Russian foothold in the Alaskan lands has been vanquished, the war with the Triple Alliance is over, almost history; and ‘the West’, specifically the vast former Californian lands of the old Spanish empire of New Granada is a freshly annexed colony of New England. For the first time a...

Gaman is a word that means strength in Japanese within the silence there is no yellow peril only the courage to be. Kenichi Yabusaki (Ken) was born a prisoner of war in an American concentration camp in Minidoka, Idaho. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, primarily on the West Coast, were forced into ten main concentration camps across the continental US with no due process.