Dear Miye

Letters Home From Japan 1939-1946

By: Mary Kimoto Tomita, Robert G. Lee (Editor)

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Hardcover | 1 December 1995

At a Glance

Hardcover
440 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 2.87

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$372.90

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The letters of Mary Kimoto Tomita tell the story of a young American woman of Japanese descent who along with over ten thousand other Japanese Americans was stranded in Japan during World War II. After growing up on a small farm in central California and completing junior college, Mary traveled to Japan in June 1939 to study the Japanese language and culture and to visit relatives. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Mary was on a Japanese ship bound for the United States; the ship turned around and returned to Japan, where Mary remained for the next five years.
Mary's letters to her two closest friends, Miye Yamasaki, her childhood friend in California, and Kay Oka, another young Japanese American stranded in Japan, chronicle Mary's turbulent life from her arrival in Japan through her experiences as a civilian employee of U.S. forces in the first years of the American occupation. Mary's wartime letters and journal were destroyed in the Tokyo air raids, but shortly after she returned to the United States in January 1947, Mary wrote a memoir that reconstructed her wartime experiences; selections are included here to cover the war years.

Industry Reviews

"The letters give a sense of immediacy in her descriptions of conditions in prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan. They also reveal an ordinary, resourceful, sassy, yet vulnerable young woman negotiating her way through tough situations." - Library Journal "Tomita's commentary on the racial prejudices, economic disparities, moral dilemmas, and day-to-day social and sexual politics that she observed and experienced provides an intimate account of Japanese society, as well as a critique of U.S. society as represented in microcosm by the Allied occupation establishment." - Asian Weekly "The letters cover three periods: the prewar years (1939-41); the war years (1941-45); and the postwar years (1945-46), during which Tomita worked as a civilian employee for the U.S. occupation forces pending her repatriation. As an 'indelibly American' woman, she describes the conflict of competing political loyalties, gender role expectations, and ethnic identity in a voice of immediacy and authenticity that make these intensely personal, unselfconscious letters a valuable contribution." - Choice "A fascinating, and often passionate firsthand description of Japanese, American, and Japanese American society from 'over there.'" - JAAS

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