The novel begins just three months after Pearl Harbor. Racial tensions have already been an issue faced by many in the Japanese community in San Francisco. However, in the days after the attack, tensions have exploded into racially-motivated violence against people of East Asian descent. The danger is enough that Mas has issued a warning to his little brother, Minnow: “Don’t give them any excuse” (1). As 14-year-old Minnow makes his way home, a group of Caucasian boys attack him, calling him a racial slur and accusing him of “spying on us” (8).

Many American historical narratives omit the event of the U.S. government’s internment camps, but most narratives that include the fact frame the motivation thus: The U.S. government was worried about having large Japanese communities on the West Coast because of its proximity to Japan, and they did not want any group to turn on the nation and compromise its military institutions. The government therefore strategically displaced or imprisoned thousands of Japanese Americans, forcing whole communities to sell all their belongings before being taken to improvised camps (essentially prisons)—ostensibly for the safety of the American people. The United States thereby government-sanctioned racism; if the government deemed Japanese Americans a threat grave enough to warrant their coerced isolation, it implicitly justified the everyday citizen’s fear or animosity toward those same people.