Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

To give his writing the utmost authenticity, Brown felt the need to go beyond legal documents, diaries, letters, and recorded interviews with the participants. For direct knowledge of his subject, Brown visited some of the places he wrote about and met the people would write about. For him, this firsthand experience was important to fully understand social history and individual biographies. By the time of Brown’s writing, most of the veterans of World War II had already died. Thus, his meeting with the remaining veterans was a matter of preserving memory: “All of us knew that they would not be with us much longer” (3).

Brown also introduces one of the major themes in this work, The Complex Identities in the Japanese American Community. Brown roots the coming forced removal and incarceration of his subjects in historical conditions. The men he interviewed grew up being seen as having split selves: “[T]heir lives, their very identities, were inevitably bound to their roots” (4). He argues that because of this external perception and because of the government’s policies differentiating immigrants from East Asia, “[f]or all their essential Americanness,” Japanese Americans knew that “their place in American society remained tenuous” (3). The result of denying citizenship to first-generation Japanese immigrants was racist prejudice, including “decades of virulent anti-Asian rhetoric” (3). Brown also connects the treatment of Japanese Americans to that of the continent’s Indigenous peoples: Japanese Americans were the first since the Indigenous Cherokee to face “the wholesale forced removal from their homes, deprivation of their livelihoods, and mass incarceration” (5).