Prior to the attack on the American Military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, Japanese immigrants (known as issei) and their American-born children (nisei) lived in tight-knit communities throughout the country, particularly on the West Coast.

The attack on Pearl Harbor marked the United States’ entry into World War II. Branded as foreign adversaries, Japanese Americans—many of whom were patriotic Americans—began to face increasingly discriminatory and hostile conditions in their home communities. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal and relocation of more than 120,000 people of Japanese heritage to concentration camps. This xenophobic measure was based on racial prejudice and fear of espionage; it questioned Japanese Americans’ loyalty to the United States and assumed that they would be more loyal to the Japanese homeland, a place that many had never even seen. Prior to evacuation, many Japanese immigrants worked blue-collar jobs, a fact represented in the novel by the Maki family’s occupations as strawberry farmers. Even before the onset of this highly controversial time period in American history, Japanese immigrants had already overcome many social hardships and discriminatory laws in order to buy homes and property in America, Sadly, most were destined to lose their hard-earned property due to government seizure or being forced to sell at the last minute.