Even before the bombing, Kiyo had been living in a veritable "pressure cooker" of divided loyalties: Must he sacrifice his future by slaving for years on the plantation to pay off the family debt? What must it have felt like to work on the plantation knowing, as he did, how it divided and exploited its workers? In fact, one could attribute responsibility for a large portion of the family’s debt to the plantation’s miserably low wages, insufficient to provide for the family’s basic needs for food and health care. Living amidst these tensions and with no real hope of escape, even through boxing, Kiyo tells us, "It was a long lousy summer. For once in my life I was really mad at somebody" (71). He says he "wanted to kill Ken Soga" (71), but later in the paragraph we hear the real source of his anger:

Boxing wasn’t the way. All this work meant maybe I was going to beat Soga, who got beat easy in Honolulu. But for a Japanese there were no jobs except the plantation, unless you went into business for yourself. Even if you went to college, all you could be was a grammar school teacher, and if lucky, a high school teacher. Unless your family had enough money to send you to dental or medical college, and then you came back and practiced in your old hometown." (71)

Neither Kiyo nor Murayama tell us why a Japanese-American boy’s future is so limited, so we have to look to our own knowledge of history, racism, and assimilation in this country. Racism against Asians during the last two centuries led to a series of laws severely limiting and then completely restricting their immigration to this country. Even before the anti-Japanese hostility aroused by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kiyo had wondered how the Japanese could be more integrated into American society. He had once spoken to his Japanese school teacher Mr. Takemoto about the problem: "The haole papers keep saying the Japanese can’t be assimilated because they don’t intermarry. Shouldn’t the Japanese intermarry more?" (81)

Kiyo’s sense of divided loyalty is magnified when the United States enters World War II, fighting against Japan and the Axis powers. When Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, it’s hard to comprehend the intensity of Kiyo’s sense of betrayal and divided feelings about Japan and his adoptive country the United States without understanding the Japanese cultural imperative to remain loyal and never to bring shame to one’s family or country. Luckily, Mr. Takemoto, who is open-minded and "unusual for an issei" (81), can listen to Kiyo’s troubling questions:

"You know, you’ve always said, ‘Be proud you’re Japanese.’ ‘Never bring shame to the Japanese race.’ What if they, all of them, bring shame to me? What about me? I feel ashamed I’m Japanese. I feel a shame I can never erase, and here I haven’t done a single bad thing." (82)

Mr. Takemoto’s explanation that Japan, a militaristic nation since the 1930’s, is pragmatically fighting a modern war in which "there are no rules" doesn’t help Kiyo (82-83). For Kiyo, watching Japan’s shameless violence in the war is "like watching your older brother whom you’d believed in and loved now running wild committing murders" (83).

Kiyo’s questioning process has forced him to look truthfully at every institution in his life: his family, the plantation system, his adoptive country, and his homeland. In a lecture on this novel given in Hawaii in 1980, Murayama said that Kiyo’s central quest for freedom and truth begins with the teacher Snooky’s questions: "What about fresh air and freedom of the individual? What about standing on your own two feet? What about thinking for yourself. . . ." (34). Murayama outlined Kiyo’s struggles:

All he’s asking for is ownership of his body to do as he wants, all he’s asking for is nothing less than freedom. The Japanese obligation to the family and the paternalism of the plantation are the antagonists. All the details of Japanese family life, camp life, work in the canefields, boxing, reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the nights of black-out flesh out the theme of obedience and cooperation vs. individualism, suffocation vs. self-glorification. (quoted in Chock and Manabe 60)

How does Kiyo or Murayama ultimately resolve these struggles? Murayama describes the novel’s trajectory toward resolution: ". . . [P]ut a sympathetic man into a hole; every effort he makes to get out makes it worse or gets him nowhere; then when it’s the bleakest, there’s a reversal, and he climbs out of the hole" (quoted in Chock and Manabe 60). How does Kiyo climb out of the hole, and how does he answer the question of group vs. individual loyalty? When Kiyo considers volunteering to fight on the American side in World War II, his mother warns, "You shouldn’t volunteer. . . . we’re depending on you to help the family" (97). When he suggests that "Every family should send at least one son," she continues, "But you’re our only son now. We’re poor and poor families have to be more careful. Acting as an individual is a luxury only the rich can afford. The poorer you are the more you have to be united. Acting on your own when you’re so poor is selfishness" (97). Kiyo ends up volunteering anyway, but commits the majority of his Army salary or, upon his death, his $10,000 insurance to help the family. Why does he volunteer? Entering the service is the ticket out of plantation life, the ticket to something better perhaps. After all of his questioning, Kiyo sees his participation in the service as granting him the right to do something, finally, about the problems he sees: "Besides, once you fought, you earned the right to complain and participate, you earned a right to a future" (98).

Kiyo’s decision to act is based on the lessons about freedom he learned under Snooky’s tutelage. Right before Kiyo enlists, he acknowledges his old teacher as "the only guy who helped you to see things as they were out there . . . . He talked of freedom, while everybody else talked of duty and obligation" (96). Kiyo has finally seen things as they truly are, realizing that "Freedom was freedom from other people’s shit, and shit was shit no matter how lovingly it was dished, how high or how low it came from. Shit was the glue which held a group together, and I was going to have no part of any shit or any group" (96). His strong words don’t mean he’s going to abandon his family—in fact, he sends his gambling earnings home to pay off the family’s debt—but his sentiments show clearly where he finally stands. He’s the kind of free thinker who could one day paint a clear-eyed but loving portrait of family life on the plantation, writing novels that "[recreate] and [reinterpret] a world that no longer exists" (Odo 109). But Murayama is emphatic when he says, "I feel nostalgic about the plantation camp, but I don’t grieve its passing" (quoted in Odo 109). The writer has earned his vision of that world with all of its blessings and injustices, love and oppression.

Works Cited

Chock, Eric and Jody Manabe, eds. Writers of Hawaii: A Focus on Our literary Heritage. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1981.

Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988.

Odo, Franklin S. "Afterword." In All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988.