Show Me the Way to Go Home: The Moral Dilemma of Kibei No No Boys in World War Two Incarceration Camps

In 1995 Takako Day received a plea from a Japanese American who had been forcibly removed from his home and incarcerated during the Pacific War. He asked her to tell the painful story of American citizens who had been labeled “disloyal” by the US government. She interviewed more than ten “disloyal” men and discovered that at heart of their experience was a moral dilemma, buried deep in the Japanese American community: unlike many other English-speaking Japanese Americans, their mother tongue and the language of their education was the “enemy” language, Japanese. It is dedicated to making the untold stories of US citizens — imprisoned but asked to fight for the country that imprisoned them — accessible to readers of English.