Dear Miye: Letters Home from Japan, 1939-1946 (review)

Dear Miye: Letters Home From Japan, 1939–1946 was of such exceptional merit that it won an outstanding book award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 1996. It was well deserved. Editor Robert Lee’s introduction provides a concise and informative background for the remainder of the text, the “innermost thoughts and feelings” of a young Mary Kimoto. (p. vii) Kimoto’s correspondence to her friend Miye Yamasaki, and later with another United States-born nisei, Kay Oka, provide a fascinating, and often passionate firsthand description of Japanese, American, and Japanese American society from “over there.” ¹

Kimoto, an United States citizen and raised in rural California, went to the country of her parents after graduating from junior college. She wanted to see the sights, meet the family she knew only from letters and secondhand stories, and learn something of Japanese culture. She also went to escape temporarily the grim economic realities faced by even college-educated nisei under segregation, a point emphasized by her having to work as a domestic to raise the money to go abroad. After a two-year stay, she was returning to the United States when war broke out; her ship turned back to Yokohama, trapping her in Japan for the duration. Kimoto went back to college, and kept on writing down her thoughts, although she could no longer send them to her friend Miye due to the war. It was during this period that her correspondence with another nisei trapped in Japan, Kay Oka, blossomed. When the war ended, Kimoto was able to work for the American Red Cross and the occupation forces, and was also able to resume her correspondence with her family in the United States and with Miye. After two years, Mary Kimoto succeeded in claiming the United States citizenship that was her birthright, despite the official assumptions to the contrary, and went home, eventually marrying and taking the name Mary Kimoto Tomita.

The book is divided into four sections and a brief epilogue that brings the reader up to the present. The first section consists of the author’s preface and that of the editor, the latter of which spells out the logic used in editing the voluminous and highly personal correspondence. It also informs the reader that the wartime section is largely based on an essay written by Kimoto in 1947, because the wartime correspondence to Kay Oka was burned in an air raid, along with journals and the accumulated letters Kimoto was unable to send Miye. The prefaces are followed by an introductory essay that locates the experience of the author in terms of the social and cultural history of the time, the place of Dear Miye within extant scholarship, and addresses some of the intellectual issues the work raises. This is followed by “The Prewar Letters, 1939–1941” (pp. 23–139), “The ‘Dear Kay’ Letters, 1941–1945” (pp. 141–156), and the largest portion of the work, “The Postwar Letters, 1945–1946” (pp. 157–387).

Dear Miye, as the introduction notes, is a “countermemory, which is to say, a trace of the resistant strain that ruptures the continuity of official history.” (p. 4) What Kimoto’s letters show best is that people make the world they live in, and that the rules, codes, and laws they live by are neither “natural” nor necessarily logical. Like Transforming the Past (1985) by Yanagisako, Dear Miye exposes these often assumed “truths” to analysis. ²

Structures of domination and ligitimation contain contradictions that lie uneasily, always able to erupt into the smooth flow of hegemonic processes. Individuals like Mary Kimoto take those contradictions for starting points in their resistance to being “realistic” or following the common sense of the time.

Growing up in rural California, and in Japan, Kimoto withstood the intense pressures faced by a minority person with few resources and many handicaps of gender, race, nativity, class, and economics. Although a self-described “unworldly young...