Prompt Three: Spring Break ( Japan vs. America)

1991. Many plays and novels use contrasting places (for example, two countries, two cities or towns, two houses, or the land and the sea) to represent opposed forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work. Choose a novel or play that contrasts two such places. Write an essay explaining how the places differ, what each place represents, and how their contrast contributes to the meaning of the work.

Japan vs. America

In Joy Kogawa’s historical book Obasan one family has been put in a contradiction between two countries, Canada (also considered America) and Japan. America their new land where they are free to create their own future and Japan their homeland where their culture and ancestors have came from. This novel takes place in the 1950s, also in the time of World War II when Japan, Germany and Italy united to take over the world. During such a time of chaos and confusion, the American government gave the Japanese Canadians two options, to move into an internment camp with others like them, or to go back home to Japan, the country they were fighting.


Those who stayed in America were put under strict supervision because their home had become the enemy and the American government did not know how the war started it and who took part of it. For the remaining Japanese who returned to Japan were hit by either one of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In America you are given the right to be free and to make your own life, but that fortune was taken away from Japanese Americans because of the greed that the Japanese government displaced. Americans believed in the individual where as Japan believed in the whole, meaning the population. But neither were thinking about the people that they were governing. By Japan connecting with the other top countries of the world to dominate against the rest they weren’t thinking about their people, their lovely home, and what could be the outcome of all this commotion. Those Japanese Americans were isolated and treated poorly from everyone else. Their freedom was also taken away from them unwillingly. And the citizens of Japan suffered greatly from the atomic bomb hits. They either lost their family or parts of their bodies, which lead to diseases such as cancer and/or an amputation later.


The main character Naomi Nakane and her family were separated during WW II. Her aunty (Obasan) took her and her brother far away from America and lived off into an unknown abandoned down called Slocan to get away from the internment camps in America. During this time Naomi’s grandmother and mother went back to Japan, where Naomi’s mother had her facial tissue and some of her bones in her face blown out during the atomic bombing on Hiroshima. While grandfather Nakane and their father stayed in the American Japanese internment camps where they were severely beaten and died of starvation. Naomi and her brother Stephen never saw their mother, father, or grandparents after 1950, because the war had separated and eventually killed each of them.


These contrasting countries were only looking out for what they thought was best for everyone, but in the end they ended up hurting their own citizens. Something to think about while where in World War III huh?