Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Our House Divided

Subtitle: Seven Japanese American Families in World War II

Author: T K Knaefler

Narrator: Francie Wyck

Format: Unabridged

Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-16-16

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

How does a man serving in the Imperial Japanese Army feel when he suddenly sees his brother in the uniform of the enemy United States? How does a Japanese mother, surrounded by barbed wire in an American internment camp for enemy aliens, feel when her only son writes: "I am now an American soldier. I must fight and, if necessary, die for my country"? How does a Hawaiian-born youth feel as he lies near death in Hiroshima, a victim of history's first nuclear attack, launched by the United States? Or a 12-year-old girl on a sugar plantation, whose ailing father returned to the place of his birth just a month earlier, on the morning she hears that "yellow Japs" have attacked? These are among the moments of excruciating confrontation experienced by Japanese American families, divided geographically and politically between Japan and Hawaii when the Pacific War exploded at Pearl Harbor.

Our House Divided focuses on seven personal stories of such families as they struggled with the emotions and events brought on by the war - stories of the dilemma of first-generation Japanese Americans who were strongly attached both to the country of their birth, and to the land where they had spent most of their lives and raised children in communities they had helped to build; and stories of the dilemma of second-generation Japanese Americans, whose loyalty to the United States was questioned even though they were American citizens. That these citizens turned that distrust into national respect through their celebrated achievements is also part of the poignant story.

Our House Divided, an inward journey for the author, will open the eyes and hearts of many listeners who have roots in more than one country and culture.

Members Reviews:

7 little families in a big war

For the Japanese in Hawaii, confusion and resentment were common reactions on Dec. 7, 1941. But for a few, there was extra anguish -- they had immediate family members in Japan or they were targeted as dangerous aliens by the FBI and by evening they were being arrested.

Sixty-five years later, there is a great deal of confusion and mythologizing about this, because two separate issues are conflated. First is loyalty. Second is treatment of a suspect group.

Despite shameful treatment, the Japanese in America were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States. For many, this required a split personality. Tomi Knaefler presents the example of a Japanese immigrant, denied citizenship in Hawaii, who remained loyal to Japan but admonished her sons, born in Hawaii and American citizens, to be loyal to the United States.

In an immigrant nation, the problem of divided loyalties was, and still is, usual; but, perhaps because only Japan attacked American territory, the situation of the Japanese Americans is treated as odd or unique.

In order to understand the situation of the Japanese, it is useful to recall that Irish-Americans commonly supported Germany and Austria-Hungary against Britain in World War I. Or that the most opinionated journalist in our history, H.L. Mencken, never had a word to say about World War I or II, evidently because his sentimental ties to Germany were too strong.