Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River by Linda Tamura (review)

The period since the end of World War II has witnessed the publication of literally thousands of books about all aspects of the US role in that conflict: home front and combat accounts, economic and political studies, and more. Some fine oral history titles are among these works. But only a small portion of these World War II studies examine the complex experiences of Asian Americans during, and especially after, the war years. Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River, by Linda Tamura, works to correct this imbalance. This book is another in the excellent Oki Series in Asian American Studies from the University of Washington Press.

Tamura, professor of education at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, grew up in Hood River, and her father was a veteran of the war. She published an earlier oral history study on Japanese settlers in the region, entitled The Hood River Issei (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and is thus familiar with the area and its inhabitants. But this new book should not be seen merely as a sequel to this earlier study; rather, its focus is on a small group of individuals in a specific time and place.

This volume is neatly centered around a key event for the community of Hood River: the defacement, on November 29, 1944, of a downtown memorial board listing local men and women who had served in the armed forces. Black paint had been used to blot out sixteen names, all of them American citizens of Japanese descent. How and why this happened, and the ways after 1945 that the citizens of Hood River dealt with—or refused to deal with—the incident, forms the content of this book.

Nisei Soldiers is based extensively on oral history. Specifically, Tamura conducted more than one hundred individual interviews with Hood River Nisei veterans (including four whose names had been defaced), family members, and local non-Nikkei residents with memories of November 1944. The author’s stated purpose was to gain multiple perspectives, and this wealth of interview evidence works to achieve this goal. Interviewees are identified in the bibliography. Throughout the book, Tamura integrates this material most often using short quotes within paragraphs but also with some longer excerpts standing alone. In both cases the oral history pieces are well integrated and do not interrupt the flow.

This study is organized chronologically into four main sections. In the first, "Early Years," Tamura provides readers with some historical background on Japanese settlement in the region around the turn of the twentieth century (her earlier book details this period more fully). The middle two parts, "World War II" and "After the War," form the heart of the narrative. In the first of these, Tamura introduces Nisei soldiers and their families in order to recount the many challenges endured during the war years, for men in uniform as well as their parents and siblings in internment camps. And, as the author makes clear in part three, these challenges did not cease when the war ended; in fact, reintegration into the Hood River community proved difficult, and returning Nisei veterans and their families faced racist outbursts and discrimination that lasted for decades. But a final section brings the story full circle, to reconciliation and forgiveness. Tamura shows how the community came together for a "Day of Remembrance" in 2007 to finally recognize the wartime service of its Nisei veterans; in 2011, a marble monument was dedicated to honor all of the town’s Nikkei veterans.

Tamura’s Nisei Soldiers is an interesting, solidly researched, and well-written piece of history, one that fills a gap in the literature on the American war experience. University instructors of twentieth-century US history survey sections could use this readable volume as supplementary reading, and Nisei Soldiers also would fit nicely into courses on World War II or Asian American history...