I started this collection sometime in tenth grade, with my first book that I collected being Honor Before Glory by Scott McGaugh. It is the main theme in all of these stories: struggling with questions of loyalty and the systemic racism and discrimination that is faced as a result.Įven then, the answer to the question of loyalty has always been the same even though others chose not to acknowledge it in order to promote their hate-filled view of the Japanese: all these people are loyal to the country of which they are citizens - the United States of America - and that they belong and take pride in calling themselves American, just as much as every other person. However, some books focus on life in America during and after the war, but nonetheless, they all follow the stories of a group that was racially persecuted and discriminated against in a country they called home. Its dramatic conclusions will have broad implications for further research in Asian American studies, labor history, and immigration history.This collection focuses on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a regiment formed during WWII made up entirely of Japanese Americans.

Drawing on both Japanese- and English-language materials, including important unpublished trial documents, this richly detailed narrative focuses on the key actors in the strike. Eventually, she demonstrates, this suspicion led to the passage of the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, an event that cast a long shadow into the future. Placing the event in the context of immigration history as well as diplomatic history, Duus argues that the clash between the immigrant Japanese workers and the Hawaiian oligarchs deepened the mutual suspicion between the Japanese and United States governments. And to end dependence on Japanese immigrant labor, the planters lobbied hard in Washington to lift restrictions on the immigration of Chinese workers. Although the strikers eventually capitulated, the Hawaiian territorial government, working closely with the planters, cracked down on the strike leaders, bringing them to trial for an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the house of a plantation official. By the end of World War I, the Hawaiian Islands had become what a Japanese guidebook called a 'Japanese village in the Pacific,' with Japanese immigrant workers making up nearly half the work force on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. The event shook the traditional power structure in Hawaii and, as Masayo Duus demonstrates in this book, had consequences reaching all the way up to the eve of World War II.

In early 1920 in Hawaii, Japanese sugar cane workers, faced with spiraling living expenses, defiantly struck for a wage increase to $1.25 per day.

Unlikely Liberators by Masayo Duus