After Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December of 1941, more than one hundred thousand Nikkei living on the West Coast of America were sent to various internment camps. Her parents, who had run a restaurant in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles were caught up in the war and the fear it caused.First Hanako and her family were sent to a temporary camp and then to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas.
Now on their way to Japan, Hanako's family will travel to her grandparents farm near the city of Hiroshima. She and others have heard about the single large bomb dropped on the city but they know little else.
On the large ship, Hanako feels overwhelmed. There is no privacy, and the future is unknown. Hanako and her brother and mother are sea-sick for most of the voyage on the open sea. They arrive in Uraga Harbor in Japan on January 12, 1946. After taking a boat to shore, they get into a truck that takes them to a barracks. The next morning, both Hanako and Akira's learn that their luggage has been lost, meaning they have lost their clothes and the extra money their mother had sewn into them.
From the barracks they take a train to Hiroshima. Hanako is shocked at the devastation of the city which has been reduced to piles of rubble. At Hiroshima Station, they leave the train and catch another that takes them her father's parents farm in the country. While in the station, Hanako gives the cakes, called mochigashi that her father purchased to a boy with a pink face and a little girl.
Finally they arrive at her father's parent's home where Hanako and Akira meet their jiichan (grandfather). Hanako instantly loves her elderly grandfather, wrinkled like a prune who warmly welcomes them and who speaks English. But life in post-war Japan turns out to be terribly hard. With little food, back-breaking labour and a bleak future, Hanako's father learns of a chance for his children to return to America. It will mean yet another separation, but the promise of a real future and a chance to start over.
Discussion
A Place To Belong is a fictional story based on real life events after World War II. It is about one Japanese American family who, renouncing their American citizenship after spending four years in an internment camp, repatriate back to Japan. Their hope is for a new and better life, but they are mostly unaware of just how devastated Japan is after the war. It is a novel Kadohata had been working on for many years, struggling to figure out how to portray the main character Hanako. It was the real-life story of Yasuko Margie Sakimura that finally helped Kadohata develop her character and story more fully.
Hanako's father, was born in America but lived in Japan from age nine to eighteen (sometimes referred to as Nikkei). He returned to America to have a better life. Hanako's parents ran a restaurant, called the Weatherford Chinese & American Café. But with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they lost everything. Hanako and her family have spent the last four years at the Tule Lake internment camp. This prison was located ten miles south of the town of Tulelake in Modoc County, California. The camp was opened in 1942 and closed in March of 1946. Tule Lake eventually become the largest War Relocation Camp with a peak population of over eighteen thousand. The camp was plagued by worker strikes over wages. A life-changing loyalty questionnaire was administered to the inmates of Tule Lake. Those who refused to answer the questions or who answered "no" were considered disloyal Americans who could not be trusted. Even those who said answered yes but qualified it with the request that their civil rights be restored were considered disloyal.
It is from this background that Hanako and her family have travelled to Japan to begin a new life. Her father, now thirty-five is returning to Japan, a country defeated and devastated by war. Kadohata portrays the devastation of Japan in a real way. Her characters are not shielded from the poverty, ruin and suffering experienced by the Japanese at the end of the war. For example when Hanako and her family pass through Hiroshima on the train she finds the ruin of the city difficult to comprehend. "Everywhere she looked was chaos --piles and piles of wood and rock and metal. Quite a few single poles and blackened tree trunks stuck up from the ground, and here and there a skeleton of a building rose forlornly. Hanako gasped --the destruction stretched on and one, only seeming to stop at the mountains rising on the horizon...The destruction, though...there was so much of it. It was beyond comprehension--it couldn't possibly be...What she thought was how the city would have been full of people going about their lives before they were burned, flattened, ripped open. There were probably so many ways to die in destruction like this..."
This leads Hanako to wonder if her younger brother could some day drop a bomb on a city that would destroy it in the way that the bomb has destroyed Hiroshima. And in this moment Hanako begins to comprehend the magnitude of the events that were occurring around the world as she and her family were living in the Tule Lake prison camp. "So much more had happened, to other people, not to just her, her family, and the Nikkei imprisoned..."
Seeing the people who have been terribly injured from the bomb, as well as those now desperately poor, Hanako realizes that she can relate to these homeless people who have suffered and lost everything. Remembering the pictures her mother saved of refugees from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, and how she felt a kinship with them even when she was younger, Hanako feels she understands the people who are suffering in Japan. It is this understanding that led her to give her cakes to the pink boy and his sister at the railway station even though she did not know them personally. "She knew them. She had met them before today." Hanako had seen them before in the people who left their homes in Dust Bowl pictures and in the Nikkei who also had been forced from their homes.
From Jiichan, Hanako learns that she must try to forgive the Americans and that she must "move forward in life..." He tells her the way to do this is through kintsukuroi, the belief that change, adversity and loss are a part of life and can make a person stronger and more beautiful. To express this to his grandaughter, jiichan tells her about a neighbour who gave him two bowls, one damaged and one undamaged. The damaged bowl, once broken, was mended with lacquer and the lacquer painted gold. Jiichan tells her, "So you see, in the end, the bowl end up more beautiful than before it was broken. This is kintsukuroi. Thing break, you must fix with gold. It is the only way to live your life. .."
As months pass and Hanako and her family struggle to survive and watch as those around them struggle, it becomes apparent that there is no future in Japan for Hanako and Akira. Hanako's father explains that he has learned about an American lawyer, Mr. Collins, who is helping the Japanese reclaim their American citizenship as he believes it was renounced under duress. Hanako's father has decided to send Hanako and Akira back to America where he has heard Nikkei are rebuilding their lives. This causes Hanako intense conflict as she has become very devoted to her grandparents while at the same time not wanting the life that she will likely have in Japan. However, part of kintsukuroi is accepting change as inevitable. Remembering a time when she was lost in Tule Lake, Hanako reasons, "Maybe sometimes you just had to go out into the world and trust what would happen. You had to trust that there were good people in the world. Like Mr. Collins...This was life. This, she knew, was also kintsukuroi. Putting broken things back together with gold."
A Place To Belong is well-written and filled with nuggets of wisdom for young readers about the realities of life. The novel's title is a reference to Hanako and her family's struggle to find a place to belong. Not quite Japanese and yet not considered American, Hanako must find her place in the world. Hanako is a wonderfully crafted character, at times thoughtful, intelligent and mature beyond her years and at other times like the child she is, overwhelmed by the events in her life. It is touching to see how Hanako sacrifices not only for her family but also for complete strangers.
A Place To Belong is without a doubt, Kadohata's best novel to date and clearly was written from the heart. Illustrated with simple, line drawings. Highly recommended.
Book Details:
A Place To Belong by Cynthia Kadohata
New York: Atheneum, A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book 2019
405 pp.
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