Japanese Roots in American Soil

Landscape representations offer a rich and underexamined source to explore race, citizenship, and nation in narratives about Japanese American internment. During World War II, the U.S. government forced more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into “relocation centers” across the inner-mountain U.S. West. Two-thirds of these internees were U.S. citizens while the remaining internees were Issei, or first-generation immigrants, whom the federal government deemed racially ineligible for citizenship. In using racial identity as grounds for suspected national disloyalty, the government blurred the line between racial and national identity. Works written in the decades following internment, like Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and John Okada's No-No Boy , depict characters struggling with their knowledge that society and government dictated “it wasn't alright to be Japanese and American” (Okada 91). In contrast, more recent works by David Mas Masumoto and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston refute the assumption that a rejection of Japanese identity is required for the formation of an acceptable Japanese American identity. There is no fundamental contrast developed between Japanese and American cultures in Masumoto's nonfiction essay collection Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil or Houston's novel The Legend of Fire Horse Woman . Instead, Masumoto and Houston assert the possibilities of a Japanese American identity with roots in Japan. ¹ In both works, it is the characters' relationship to the land that suggests the compatibility between Japanese cultural identity and U.S. national identity.