United States federal government

The United States federal government is a central force in the novel’s history of Japanese American incarceration: it confines Japanese Americans during World War II, bars Jim Shimada from military service because of his ancestry, and later drafts him from camp when policy changes. Through Jim’s experience, government power appears not only as a distant wartime policy but as a sequence of decisions that shapes a family’s losses, a young man’s imprisonment, and the life of his daughter, Jenny.

Wartime Incarceration and Exclusion

Jim Shimada is seventeen when, after Pearl Harbor, he tries to enlist. The United States federal government does not reject him for being too young; it refuses him because of his Japanese ancestry. In the fall of 1942, he is instead incarcerated with other Japanese Americans living in California. The reversal is stark: a teenager who wishes to serve the country is excluded from its military and confined by its government. Jim and his parents are sent to Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, where their lives are governed by the fact of confinement rather than by any individual finding against them.

The consequences reach beyond the camp gates. Jim’s parents lose their home and the produce stand they had recently opened after years of saving, because they cannot make mortgage payments while interned and unable to work. Jim’s memories of his mother’s distress, and of the family’s economic loss, make incarceration more than a change of residence: it breaks the material basis of the life his parents had built. Jenny later describes her father’s anger at the government’s imprisonment of Japanese Americans, including citizens, and recalls the sharp racial distinction between their treatment and that of German and Italian Americans during the same war.

Loyalty, Transfer, and the Camp for Incorrigibles

In spring 1943, the government introduces a loyalty oath for internees. Its two questions ask whether a person would serve in the United States Army if permitted and whether the person would renounce loyalty to Japan. At Manzanar, the second question fuels fear that an answer could be treated as evidence of prior disloyalty. A small, violent pro-Japan movement exploits that panic, while anti-Japanese voices in the press use the turmoil to argue that Japanese Americans pose a threat. Pauline’s grandfather amplifies that argument through loud editorials in his newspapers. The novel thus places official policy within a wider public climate in which suspicion is reinforced by political rhetoric.

Jim, who had not previously been a political person, is caught in the violence surrounding the oath. An administrative security detail picks him up while he is resisting a beating and transfers him away from his parents to the Camp for Incorrigibles, a newly established camp in the northern Cascades. The transfer separates him from his family and places him in a more punitive institution. Unlike Manzanar, the camp has no family groups or the modest communal amenities that had developed there; its barracks are converted horse stables, without heat or hot water. The narrator stresses that its prisoners have not been confined through due process. Government power here operates by categorizing people as incorrigible and moving them into confinement without an ordinary legal determination.

Draft Policy and Criminal Punishment

The United States federal government later changes its military policy toward Japanese Americans. After first reversing its position on Japanese Americans in uniform, it allows men to leave camp by enlisting in segregated battalions; subsequently, the policy is broadened to draft men over eighteen from all camps. For Jim, who has already been refused enlistment because of his ancestry, compulsory service arrives under radically different conditions. He refuses the draft and asks that the government return his parents’ house and produce stand, compensate them for their lost income, and allow them to go home before he considers serving. The demand connects his refusal to the losses caused by incarceration rather than presenting it as an isolated act of defiance.

Jim is tried and convicted of draft evasion and transferred to a federal prison. In 1947, President Truman quietly pardons Japanese American draft resisters, and Jim is released. The pardon ends his imprisonment but does not restore the years of family separation, the lost business, or the education he had expected to pursue. His trajectory exposes a sequence of government actions that alternately excludes, confines, compels, and punishes him; release comes later, but the prior consequences remain part of his family’s history.

Family Memory and Public Narratives

The novel also contrasts the government’s actions with the stories told about them. During the Camp for Incorrigibles’ riot and escape, the immediate cause is uncertain and may have involved a dispute over dinner. The next day, headlines in Pauline’s grandfather’s newspaper chain portray the escape as a murderous rampage. The episode demonstrates how public accounts can turn the actions of confined people into a racialized threat, obscuring the conditions of their confinement and the uncertainty surrounding what happened. The government’s classification of internees and the press’s depiction of them reinforce one another without being identical: administrative power confines, while public rhetoric supplies a hostile explanation for that confinement.

Jim’s history is disclosed much later, as Anne searches records and finds that California has more extensive documentation about Jenny’s father than about Jenny herself. The retrospective account reaches back from Jenny’s fugitive past to the government’s wartime treatment of her father, making that history essential to understanding her family’s political inheritance. Jim’s experiences also complicate any simple division between patriotism and opposition: he had wanted to enlist, but the government barred him; later, when it drafted him, his refusal insisted that service could not be separated from the rights and losses it had denied his family. The United States federal government therefore remains consequential in the novel even when it is not present in the immediate scene: its policies survive in family memory, legal records, public labels, and the unequal conditions against which later choices are measured.