52 pages • 1 hour read
Monica SoneNisei Daughter
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introductions and PrefacesChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction to the 1979 Edition, by S. Frank Miyamoto Summary
Miyamoto considers the title of Sone’s memoir about growing up in a Japanese immigrant family in early 20th century apt because it positions her experiences in the context of the Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. The Immigration Act of 1924 prevented fresh generations of Japanese immigrants from entering the United States. This meant that there was a substantial generation gap between the Issei, first-generation Japanese Americans who had “permanent alien status” and clung to the language and habits of Japan, and the Nisei, who were citizens by birth and saw themselves as American (viii). While fluency in the Japanese language and customs generally eluded the Nisei, according to Miyamoto, “most Nisei absorbed more of Japanese culture than they realized” (xi). A distinctive generation, the Nisei organized their own clubs, conferences, and associations.
The Japanese community of 1920s and ’30s Seattle was “highly organized” and mainly located in the business center surrounding Sixth Street and Main Street, “where a dense cluster of shops and offices served the needs of an ethnic population” (ix).
Miyamoto opines that Sone, whose childhood name was Kazuko, was atypical in the Nisei generation because she was “more closely related to her mother” than to her peers (xii). Growing up in the skid-row hotel operated by her father, Sone also had more contact with white Americans than most Nisei. Sone’s parents were atypical: Mr. Itoi arrived in the country with legal training and the ambition to enter a major American law school, and Mrs. Itoi was the daughter of a Japanese, Christian minister and wrote Japanese poetry all her life. As a family, they were less involved in the organized aspects of the immigrant community.
Sone’s memoir begins with the charming account of her childhood among Nisei and Issei, and then leads into describing the prejudice facing Japanese Americans in the years preceding the Second World War, as she and her contemporaries are denied the job opportunities offered to their white peers. With the outbreak of war, the status of the Nisei was especially liminal because they were American citizens and yet “a serious question arose as to whether they had any standing at all in American society” (xiv). This question concerning the Nisei generation has a personal parallel in Sone’s memoir as she seeks to answer the question: “What is my place in this world?” (xiv).
Preface to the 1979 Edition by Monica Sone Summary
Twenty-six years have passed since Nisei Daughter came out in 1953. Sone ended her narrative when she and her brother and sister left the internment camp to go to their respective destinations, while her parents remained in camp. The 10 concentration camps, which received 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942, were closed in 1946. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford acknowledged that the mass incarceration “was a national mistake” (xvi). For Sone, this was a small but significant step in righting a past wrong.
So that their story will be known to future generations, Japanese Americans “are telling the nation about 1942, a time when they became prisoners of their own government, without charges, without trials” (xvi). Japanese Americans hope that the redress movement and the sharing of the story “may discourage similar injustices to others” (xvii).
Introduction to the 2014 Edition by Marie Rose Wong Summary
Marie Rose Wong considers that the first reviews of Nisei Daughter, from when the book was published in 1953, evaluated the book on a “surface level,” neglecting to account for the wonder that such a book had been published at all (xviii). Nisei Daughter was one of the few books written by an Asian American in the 1950s and is especially remarkable for documenting “the internment experience from the perspective of a female internee” (xviii). When the book was published in 1953, in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the shadow of the Korean War, there was great pressure for Asian American communities to differentiate themselves from Asian nationals.
The federal immigration law that prevented the naturalization of Issei-generation Japanese Americans, like Sone’s parents, ended when the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act passed. This meant that Issei were finally permitted to own property. “Throughout the book,” Wong observes, “Sone weaves her personal story into the framework of these events, illustrating how being an American measured in light of one’s Japanese ancestry and personal identity often came with a cost to human dignity” (xix-xx).
When Nisei Daughter was reprinted in 1979, the book served as a foundation “for understanding the Asian immigrant experience and the new wave of Asian refugees coming to America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War” (xx). S. Frank Miyamoto’s introduction to the 1979 edition especially put the book in context of Asian American studies. Wong considers that Nisei Daughter has a “timeless quality” and even following the 2014 reprint, Sone’s story “can be visited, revisited, and understood within the context of a maturing discipline of Asian American studies” (xxii).
Wong laments that the Nisei are now “an aging and fading population,” and that we as a society are losing their wisdom as well as their stories of the transition between the first- and second-generation Japanese American experience (xxiii).
Referring to Sone’s statement in her preface that the US government’s acknowledgement, in 1976, of mass incarceration “was a small, but significant step toward righting a wrong,” Wong observes that “it took more than another eleven years for the passage of HR 442 and SB 1009 to clear the US House and Senate and head to President Ronald Reagan for his signature before a more meaningful recognition of the social and political travesty was achieved” (xxiv). Sone lived to see the first redress payment of $20,000 made to the living survivors of internment camps in October 1990.
Wong concludes by saying that Sone’s account of her search for identity “remains an important issue to be addressed as America continues to deal with issues of immigration” and assimilation (xxiv).
Introductions and Prefaces Analysis
The 1953 reviewers of Nisei Daughter praised the “lively,” “witty” writing style of the text and Sone’s apparent lack of resentment regarding the 1942-46 Japanese internment camps (xviii). However, as Wong, author of the 2014 edition introduction, points out, it is most miraculous that such a book about minority experience was published in one of the most conservative periods of American history—the Postwar era, when the Korean War and the anti-communist McCarthy trials took place. In the midst of these campaigns to safeguard American notions of freedom, Sone’s memoir pointed out that oppression and injustice had also been part of America’s recent past.
With the release of the 1979 edition, Sone’s preface and Miyamoto’s introduction attempt to directly frame the narrative as a vehicle for exposing the 1942 injustice against Japanese Americans, so that it “will not be forgotten and lost to future generations” (xvi). Sone directly speaks to the “small, but significant” step of the US government’s 1976 apology for the mass incarceration and hopes that the republication of her text will work toward a new generation’s redressing of a past wrong (xvi). Significantly, both Wong and Sone herself see the book as timeless, having scope beyond its historical moment to influence the national conversation on immigration, assimilation, and the impact of federal law.
Writing 30 years after the experiences Sone describes, sociologist Miyamoto sets Sone’s work in context, explaining that the Japanese character sei denotes generation and that there were stark differences between the Issei, the Japanese settlers who arrived before the 1924 prohibition, and their children, the Nisei. While the Issei, who were not naturalized until 1952, retained the habits and language of Japan, the Nisei were Americans both in citizenship and outlook. On a micro level, the Nisei/Issei distinction is that between Sone and her parents. However, in her preface, Sone uses the word Nikkei to refer to Japanese Americans, which, as Wong explains, defines Japanese Americans regardless of the “earlier generational distinctions” (xxiii). Wong argues that Nikkei “is more inclusive and allows for flexibility” regarding intermarriage and subsequent generations of Japanese immigrants (xxiii). While the terms Issei and Nisei are crucial to describing Sone’s early experiences, following the wartime atrocities against people of Japanese ethnicity and the passage of time, Nikkei is an umbrella term that covers the Japanese experience of America as a whole.
