This short story's theme is not about bored Japanese-American children, tucked away for the safety of the nation in a forlorn spot in inland Idaho, who decide to take a few items from the canteen of the camp. It is about the indignities and the loss of a normal childhood and maturing heaped on people because of their appearance and their ethnic background. There is no more obvious exclusion of Americans and an unconstitutional enforcement of being relocated, than the fate incurred by tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This short story brings some grim reminders to me, a foreigner in a land now where people of my own ethnic background (I am Kuwaiti) are looked on with suspicion following the terrorist attacks of September 11, perpetrated by Middle Eastern zealots. It goes without saying that neither Hiroshi, Jackson, nor the narrator felt they belonged in a place without running water or indoor plumbing. Their attempt to rob the canteen was not merely an act of wanting to TAKE something. It was an act of defiance against an authority that put them and their parents and grandparent in a strange, forlorn place for no other reason than, some generations back, they arrived in America from Japan.
While we know from history that a number of young Japanese-=Americans did join the army, formed their own battalion, and were one of the most highly-decorated army units in the fighting in It
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