In Search of Hiroshi

A memoir about the lingering racial trauma of America’s concentration camps, from the author of Fox Drum Bebop

“Can one wreak vengeance against oneself?” This anguished question hangs over Gene Oishi’s powerful memoir about his lifelong struggle to claim both his Japanese and American identities in the aftermath of World War II, when he and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in America’s concentration camps. From the moment he and everyone like him on the West Coast is deemed a threat to national security by President Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066, Oishi finds himself trying to distance himself from his Japanese heritage even as he questions whether he will ever truly be accepted as fully American. Throughout his return to California as a teenager, his postwar service in the US Army and his subsequent career in journalism and politics, the deep wounds caused by the trauma of incarceration continue to fester. In Search of Hiroshi, originally published in 1988 and long unavailable, is republished in a new edition in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of EO 9066.
Gene Oishi (born 1933), former Washington and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, has written articles on the Japanese American experience for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post and Newsweek. His novel Fox Drum Bebop was published in 2014 and won the Asian American Studies Association Book Prize in 2016. Now retired, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland.