Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone

First published: 1953

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1920’s to the 1940’s

Locale: Seattle, Washington, and Idaho

Principal Personages:

• Monica Itoi Sone, a first-generation Japanese American (Nisei) who was born and reared in Seattle, Washington
• Mr. Itoi, and
• Mrs. Itoi, the parents of Sone, Japanese immigrants
• Henry Itoi, and
• Kenji Itoi, Sone’s older and younger brothers, who are also Nisei
• Sumiko Itoi, Sone’s younger sister

Form and Content

In her autobiography Nisei Daughter, Monica Sone examines her life as a Nisei, a first-generation Japanese American, in Seattle, Washington. She writes her life story chronologically, beginning with her childhood and ending in young adulthood, when she and her family were placed in internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Sone begins her autobiography with her parents telling her that she is of Japanese ancestry. Her parents informed her that she is a Nisei, a first-generation Japanese American born and reared in the United States of immigrant parents, known as Issei. Because she is of Japanese heritage, Sone, along with her older brother, Henry, had to attend Japanese school after their regular elementary school day. It was at this school that they learned not only Japanese language, literature, and history but also Japanese behavior and social customs. Consequently, Sone and her family traveled to Japan to visit relatives, despite the protests from her brother Kenji. Her years in Japanese school had not prepared Sone for Japan, as her behavior, culturally, was more American than Japanese. While in Japan, Kenji mysteriously became ill and died shortly afterward. Kenji’s death was especially traumatizing to Sone because he never wanted to go to Japan.

When the Itoi family returned to the United States from Japan, they were the targets of much discrimination. Once, Sone and her mother were looking for rental beach property. The family needed the fresh sea air for Sumiko, the younger sister, to recuperate. Property owners rebuffed and rejected them, refusing to rent a house to them because of their Japanese heritage. Despite the racism that the family experienced, Sone continued her education. She was about to enter a secretarial college when she became ill with tuberculosis. Like many patients with the dreadful disease, she was admitted to a sanatorium until the disease subsided and she was no longer contagious. In the sanatorium, Sone met few Nisei, again reminding her how different she was.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, thus intensifying the preexistent racism against both Japanese immigrants in the United States and Japanese Americans. The government declared all those of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to be potential enemy agents capable of sabotaging the war effort. President Franklin Roosevelt issued executive orders that forced all Japanese Americans to vacate their homes and businesses and report to designated areas for transportation to relocation camps. The Itoi family, outraged at being subjected to such treatment, was sent to a relocation camp in Idaho. The forced resettlement orders meant that the family had to abandon everything for which they had worked. Property, mementos, all documents containing Japanese writing, and tools and other valuables were sold at ridiculously low prices, confiscated, or left behind.

Sone examines various aspects of life for a Japanese American woman before and during relocation. These factors and the clear delineation of the experiences of these women during the middle of the twentieth century contribute to the uniqueness of Sone’s autobiography. Furthermore, she examines in detail the behavior of Issei and Nisei females in Japanese American society. According to Sone’s text, many of the roles of Japanese American women were similar not only to those of traditional Japanese women but also to European-American women. Yet Sone’s interaction with men and women tended to challenge that viewpoint. She consistently refused to behave in a way that society considered appropriate. This constant striving to become her own person probably helped Sone survive in the internment camp.

Context

Nisei Daughter presents the voice of a young Japanese American woman who, because of the times and her ethnicity, is forced by the United States government to relocate to an internment camp and create a new life for herself. Sone’s work is significant because of its uniqueness in American literary history. Although Etsu Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) precedes Sone’s work, Sugimoto was Japanese writing in English, not Japanese American. As a Japanese American, Sone could not emphasize her “Japaneseness” as forcefully as Sugimoto; such an act would have been viewed negatively in American popular opinion. Therefore, not only is Sone’s work one of the first post-World War II autobiographies by a Japanese American, it is nonaccusatory. She does not blame American racism for the problems faced by her, her family, and other Nisei.

Sone reveals to the reader that early in her life, she won little victories through constantly questioning the roles assigned to her because of her race and gender. For example, her father often attempted to define her and to discourage her from certain paths in life. Although her father had told her that only certain types of women were dancers and his daughter was not going to be one of them, Sone and a friend insisted on dancing in a school program. Her father also would not allow her to attend college immediately after her graduation from high school. He believed that she first needed to obtain a skill. The local secretarial college had established a quota limiting the number of Japanese American students that it would admit. Sone studied very hard and, much to her father’s surprise, was accepted into the program.

As a Japanese American female, Sone discovered that culturally she was very different from her Japanese counterparts. Despite her apparent acceptance of a dual personality, her actions and behavior were distinctly American, not Japanese. She outraged Japanese boys by joining her brother in a fistfight. She upset and embarrassed her mother by striking one of her cousins, who was always acknowledged as superior to Sone because of her quiet, passive demeanor. These and other incidents caused her family to ask if she had forgotten that she was not a boy or to question why she was not more “ladylike.” Sone was constantly told that she should be more quiet and passive, as women are in traditional Japanese culture. Not understanding or accepting these cultural differences, Sone was adamant in her refusal to adapt to these “foreign” norms.

While interned, many Japanese American women became empowered to a certain extent because their husbands lost their authority in the family and in the community. Perhaps the most significant factor that makes Sone’s experience important to the literature of women is that as a Nisei female, her experiences were different from those of Nisei males. Unlike some of the characters in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), as a woman she could not join the Army and thus prove her loyalty. Instead, Sone worked as a stenographer, traditional female work, maintaining the records of the interned Japanese and Japanese Americans. Sone’s options in the internment camp were as limited as her options elsewhere.

Bibliography

Kim, Elaine.“Nisei Daughter.” In Asian-American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim asserts that Nisei Daughter is more than a glorification of the virtues of the “model minority.” The autobiography deftly chronicles the story of the sacrifices made by the Nisei in an American society that frequently saw itself as racially exclusive. Sees Sone’s statement that the “Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one” as “unconvincing because the blend seems externally imposed, and everything, including the answers to Kazuko’s unspoken questions, is left in limbo.”

Lim, Geok-Lim Shirley. “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Feminist Studies 16 (Summer, 1990): 289-312. Lim gives a feminist reading of Nisei Daughter in an attempt to refute Frank Chin’s assertions that major Asian American writers are women because they cater to stereotypical views of Asian American men. Chin and other male critics tend to ignore the intersection of race and gender in the works of women writers. Lim advances the argument that Sone does not promote racial and gender stereotypes. To a certain extent, her themes are not only a rationalization of dual identity, existing as both Japanese and American, but also a search for a concrete racial identity within a society that denies her. Still, according to Lim, in the end “the psychological, economic, and cultural price the family has had to pay for being Japanese is distorted.”

Sumida, Stephen H. “Protest and Accommodation, Self-Satire and Self-Effacement, and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter.” In Multicultural Autobiography:American Lives, edited by James Robert Payne. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Sumida compares Sone’s autobiography to those of other Japanese Americans: Daniel K. Inouye’s Journey to Washington (1967) and Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise (1971). Suggests that Inouye and Okimoto are accommodationists because, to define themselves as Americans, they must reject their “Japa-neseness.” Sumida implies that a close reading of Sone rejects their stance and that she unobtrusively presents “subversive antiracist themes.”