Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1215837 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Library Journal
Knaefler utilized interviews published in 1966 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor to document the stories in Our House Divided . Fifty years ago, Japanese Americans were herded together, virtually imprisoned, and forced by the federal government to forfeit all vestiges of citizenship. Knaefler's family histories reflect the experiences of seven American families of Japanese descent who suffered from anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. One of her selections, for example, follows the five Yempuku brothers, four of whom left Hawaii for Japan in 1933. Only the eldest, Ralph, remained, and he later served in the American Army during the war. Younger brother Donald relates how, during the surrender proceedings, he saw Ralph, yet could not speak with him. Donald did, however, inform the rest of the family that Ralph was still alive, as they had no word during the war. A solid contribution to our understanding of the ethnic mixture that is America, this is recommended for most libraries.
- Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

7 little families in a big war
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.

Our House Divided. By Tomi Kaizawa Knaefler
This is a very important book which I will cherish and keep for my kids. I will always promote this book to people that are interested in the history of Japanese American's in America and Japan during WWII. The experiance that these seven families have gone through is unbelievible and could not be imagined. It makes me proud to be an American.