The theme of Kaneko's short story, Nobody's Hero, deals with 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 Italy and throughout Europe, at the time of this story, the days of enlisting in the army were still far off. "Jackson's brother wants to join the army and become a hero. But they won't let him." (Kaneko 148) Becoming a hero was something these boys wanted, not merely to show that they were patriotic- that was a word foreign to them in Idaho, in this miserable "nowhere" camp. They merely wanted to make a statement, to show that they could not be intimidated forever by an authority that gave them and their families no voice in their living conditions. "We're gonna make life miserable for those WRA guys. If they're gonna put...