Last week I picked up a copy of “Facing The Mountain” by Daniel James Brown, a new book out this year about the true story of Japanese Americans who fought in World War II. I was a bit intimidated by the size of the book when I got it but was immediately captivated by it and finished it within a week!
The book begins with introducing the four main characters, pre-wartime, as well as their families, friends, and general social situations. It’s immediately an interesting look into the lives of these second generation Japanese Americans. Like many immigrants, their lives were often hard, brutally so from today’s standards, and yet often a vast improvement from the lives their parents had left behind. Similar to my own family’s history of fleeing the conditions of poverty and hunger (plus religious oppression) in Ireland, many Japanese came to America in the late 1800s due to impoverished conditions and famines in Japan. Like many immigrants back then, although they suffered discrimination and difficulties they counted themselves lucky to be able to improve their conditions and appreciated the ideals, if not always the realities, of the American dream – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the idea that all men are created equal!
The bombing of Pearl Harbor had a dramatic effect on the entire country but especially on those of Japanese descent. I was aware of the internment camps before reading the book. I even knew a lovely woman when I was a child who had been interned in the camps. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about though. I didn’t realize that it was an “exclusion zone” in the west from which the Japanese Americans were removed. If you lived in eastern Oregon or Washington, you weren’t interned. Likewise if you lived anywhere east of California. I was also unaware that no Japanese Americans were interned in Hawai’i. The main reason for this was that Japanese Americans made up almost half of the population of Hawai’i and the, then, territory would not have been able to function had they attempted to intern the Japanese Americans living there.
One of the most fascinating things about the stories from the camps, for me, was the ingenuity of the people interned there. They created a full society while living in a, as the author terms it, concentration camp. The difference between those camps and the death camps, the concentration camps of the Nazis are striking however. The residents of the American camps set up their own school systems, churches, and temples, auditoriums, and police and firemen. They irrigated the land and grew gardens. They raised animals and were able to order things from the Sears catalogue. In many ways, despite the horror of being held captive, they set up a vibrant society and it was almost sad to read about them being released at the end of the war. Although I’m sure they longed for their freedom, the society they set up was suddenly dropping them back into a world that in many places still feared them, was prejudiced against them and had often destroyed their former homes and lives.
One of the amazing things about this book was to see how much the young men who volunteered for the Army, when it finally decided to accept those of Japanese descent, thought of themselves as Americans. They held a strong hereditary and cultural connection to Japan but were proud to be Americans and had grown up being taught the American ideals of liberty, democracy, and the world changing idea that all men are created equal! They wanted to defend their country from the aggression it faced and wanted to prove themselves to be true Americans. They wanted to bring honor to their families. I wonder at how many of today’s youth have even half as much appreciation for the United States as did these young men. Most of today’s young people have never faced anything like the discrimination or hardships that these young men and their families faced and yet these young men fought and died for the ideals of this country in a way most of today’s youth could probably never imagine!
For the beginning of the book I found myself captivated by the stories as the author introduces the reader to these young men and their families and life situations. We follow them as they make their decisions to go to war (or not to, as the one Quaker conscientious objector we also follow) and go through training. We follow them as we see the culture clashes as the mainland and Hawaiian groups clash in training and find joy as they become a united group. Then, just as they say no one can ever be prepared to go to war, I found myself unprepared even to read about their experiences in war.
From nearly the first battle they face I found tears streaming down my face as I read about their bravery and their great losses. The deeper they got into the war and the more they saw the terrible atrocities of the Axis, brutal, inhuman atrocities, the more these young men fought not just to be accepted as Americans but with the absolute conviction that this was a war that must be fought and won by the side who believed in the dignity and rights of all human beings. No matter how much America has often failed to live up to it’s ideals, the contrast could not have been more stark than to see the brutal murders of men, women, and children whom the Nazis thought to be subhuman and whom they murdered – on the roadsides and in the camps.
“Facing The Mountain” is a brilliantly written and captivating story of a group of people who showed the true ideals of what America stands for, that no matter where we come from in the world, we stand together as a united peoples, often failing as humans do, but doing our best to live up to those high ideals on which this nation is founded. These men sacrificed and many of them made the ultimate sacrifice to serve their fellow men in a land far from home, that this world might be continue to hold to those ideals which inspired the founding of the United States, life, liberty, and the grand idea that all men are created equal and deserving of these rights.
I encourage you to read the book and to visit the author’s website. https://www.danieljamesbrown.com
Autodidact Log 