The impossibility of his situation is made poignant through characters like Eto Minato, a soldier who said "Yes" to service in the U.S. Armed Forces; Bull, another veteran of WWII; and Taro, Ichiro's own brother. The fact of Ichiro receiving bitter verbal and physical assaults on his body and his identity indicates an important point in Okada's book: these individuals have whole-heartedly accepted the twisted social standards established by the dominant Caucasian society.
If your cultural brethren, other Japanese-Americans you own age, have bought into the racism of the white society, and have begun to practice that hatefulness and bigotry, there is nowhere to hide and no shelter is available. Again, it's impossible now for Ichiro to obtain membership in any particular society. His mother is of no help to his crisis because she is a fanatic Japanese patriot, clinging to the pathetic notion that the Japanese had won the war.
The barroom attackers have their own fears; their fears are symptoms of the fact that on one level they cannot dislodge themselves from Ichiro because of their shared racial and ethnic heritage. That bothers them a lot. On another level, the attackers' fears lead them to rely on racist slang against their own Japanese-American culture, the same bigoted, mean-spirited racism which members of the European-American culture perpetrate against them. They are left with the fear that they too will be scarred forever by events beyond their control, and the ability to lash out at others like Ichiro, who made a decision and paid the price (he thought) with two years of his life behind bars.
Ichiro on page 76 is drunk, but he is willing to dump his only friend at the bar, the war-injured Kenji, because he feels so isolated, so wholly without substance and identity, and he wants to make a strong point out of his non-person status. "Son-of-bitches. That's what they are, all of them," Ichiro tells Kenji at the bar, responding to the meanness he sees in the eyes of the other Nisei in the place.
To Ichiro, they all...
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