No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai'i during World War II (review)

Franklin Odo's No Sword to Bury, Japanese Americans in Hawai'i during World War II is a long-anticipated work that should not disappoint its readers. The book is concerned with 169 nisei (second-generation Japanese American) University of Hawai'i students who after the Pearl Harbor attack immediately joined but six weeks later were summarily dismissed from the Hawai'i Territorial Guard because of their Japanese descent. Odo describes in detail how they offered their labor services to the military governor as a way of contributing to the war effort "as loyal Americans" and did construction and other projects for eleven months. In January 1943 when it was announced that the military was going to organize an all-Japanese American combat unit, the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV), as they called themselves, opted to disband; most of them joined the 442 nd Regimental Combat Team, and some of them were later selected for the Military Intelligence Service as Japanese-language specialists.

Extending beyond the VVV experience, No Sword to Bury is a significant contribution to our understanding and analysis of Japanese American history in Hawai'i, particularly of the nisei generation, and complements well other major works that appeared in the 1990 s (eg, The Japanese Conspiracy, by Masayo Duus [1999]; Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, by Eileen Tamura [1994]; and Cane Fires, by Gary Okihiro [1991]). Odo's achievement lies in detailing the diverse lives and viewpoints of the VVV members in their own words through many revealing oral history interviews. In providing an economic and political context for the VVV initiative, No Sword to Bury includes chapters on the Japanese American community during its two very difficult decades prior to the war, and on the socioeconomic background of the issei (immigrant) parents of VVV members, since the latter, as college students, were hardly representative of the larger community.

The book also addresses much larger theoretical and substantive issues concerning Japanese Americans and race relations in theUnited States. As Odo argues, "The VVV was the leading wedge of a strategy that culminated in two related but distinct transformations in post-World War II America. The first was the establishment of a radically new multicultural democracy in Hawai'i. . . . The second was the incorporation of Japanese American 'success' into what has since become widely known as the 'model minority' thesis" (2 -3 ). In this regard, one of the major arguments Odo develops challenges the generally accepted explanation of Japanese American socioeconomic success as primarily due to the Japanese cultural values, or kachikan, that the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their nisei children. Odo contends that these traditional values—including enryo (restraint), gaman (enduring adversity), shikata ga nai (fatalism), kodomo no tame ni (for the sake of the children), and an emphasis on education—have become stereotypically associated with Japanese Americans, although there is no reason to privilege them over other values that the issei and nisei followed. Odo thus maintains that the postwar socioeconomic success of Japanese Americans resulted in the development of the "nisei myth" that ahistorically attributed their upward mobility to the above-noted values, emphasizing passivity and self-discipline. Furthermore, this explanation of their success tends to affirm the "model minority" view of Japanese Americans, unfortunately a stereotype that many of the latter, including academics, continue to espouse.

Odo contends that a study of the Varsity Victory Volunteers is informative in four major areas: (1 ) the varied lives of the nisei men discussed prevents their being stereotyped; (2 ) the Varsity Victory Volunteers and its establishment illustrate the ways by which a "vulnerable" minority developed strategies for its advancement; (3 ) the VVV experience manifests the complexity of race relations in Hawai'i before and after Pearl Harbor and the planning necessary to manage those relations; and (4 ) the Varsity Victory Volunteers is a case study of "racial formation or...