Last week I read An Enemy Among Friends, an autobiographical story by Kiyoaki Murata.
Kiyoaki was a Japanese student who, through various circumstances, found himself studying – or trying to study – at an American college as war broke out between Japan and the US on the date “whch will live in infamy.”
It’s a fascinating account of what it meant to be Japanese and living in America during the height of the Second World War. Kiyoaki lived through the deportations of coastal Japanese, but eventually managed to convince the authorities to allow him to study in Chicago and other parts of the US.
And as the title suggests, Kiyoaki did not feel discriminated against, persecuted, or hated. On the contrary, he found the average American to be much more pleasant and personable than the average Japanese of the same era.
Very cool book – worth reading if you can find it.