Under the Blood Red Sun

Tomi’s life was far from perfect before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but its aftermath adds significant layers of complexity with regard to identity and belonging. The characters grapple with Divided Loyalties amidst martial law after the Pearl Harbor attack.

One of the most emotionally charged moments in the story is Grampa waving the flag at the Japanese planes. In this moment, Grampa has lost faith in the Japanese government. He believed the Japanese would not bomb their people if he waved their flag. However, Japan planned the Pearl Harbor attack fully aware of the many Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. To Grampa, they willingly abandoned them for military strategy. Grampa must accept that the country of his birth has no interest in his continued welfare as an American, as it is focused on much larger goals of war. Grampa’s realization of what he perceives as a betrayal takes him a while to accept. In a misguided act of loyalty, Grampa gathers eggs for Japanese soldiers, confident they will not hurt him in light of his generosity. Unable to accept that they already have hurt him, it is only after Papa’s arrest that Grampa comes to grips with the fact that “we have been disgraced” (134). Grampa’s loyalty is divided between the culture he relates to and his adopted country, so even as he accepts that Japan is an antagonist in the war, his grief and disappointment are heavy, demonstrating the difficulty of identity when one has more than one community.

The prejudice around the Nakajis compels them to literally bury their heritage; anything remotely Japanese is interred beneath the house. Grampa willingly severs all ties to Japan. However, he hides a few family heirlooms—the butsudan and the katana—in the jungle. To Grampa, these artifacts have no ties to Japan; they represent family heritage and his identity. However, despite Grampa’s willingness to forsake his loyalties to Japan amidst the horrors of war, this decision cannot be easy and is likely not black and white. Just as there are sympathetic white characters, there are certainly people in Japan who do not condone the violence of the war or attack on Pearl Harbor, so close to where immigrant relatives live. Grampa, like Tomi, will need to find a balance between being loyal to both Japanese and American identity. Indeed, serve as foils to each other in their initial primary allegiances to one identity, and it is a source of tension between the two.

Until this point, Tomi has been loyal to the US. While he harbors no great love for the military presence in Hawaii, he has no enmity. He considers himself an American without exception. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor tests this loyalty. The military questions his family about the flag, and the entire family, along with Billy, lies. When asked if they saw anything, Billy replies, “I didn’t see anyone signaling any parachuters”(118), not revealing the whole truth. This again highlights Divided Loyalties, as the family and Billy know that the Nakajis are not working with Japanese forces, but they still need to lie to American soldiers for safety. Indeed, when two conflicting beliefs or identities meet, internal conflict boils over as the characters question the ethics of their choices and their subsequent safety.

The military persists in harassing the Nakajis, demanding that they kill all their pigeons. Tomi feels the injustice of this order; the pigeons are not messenger birds, and even if they were, no messenger bird could make the over 4,000-mile trek to Japan across an open ocean. The birds pose no threat, and the soldiers know it, yet they demand the birds’ death. Acts like this test the loyalty of those who identify as both Japanese and American, like the Nakajis, as they signal the prejudice and even punishment they will face. Further, the pigeons have long symbolized freedom, both in their free flying and in Papa’s sense of peace in tending to the birds after long days of fishing. The murder of the animals is a symbol of martial law and effective freeze on Japanese Americans.

The military mandates that all boats approaching Hawaii must fly the US flag, a startling requirement given that many boats were already at sea before the attack. Papa and Sanji fall victim to this sudden requirement—Papa is wounded and arrested, and Sanji dies. Suddenly, Tomi, who had been largely apathetic to the war, finds everything wrong: “But the papers said local Japanese who wanted to sign up couldn’t, that they weren’t loyal to the U.S. It was all wrong, like Papa in jail was wrong” (149). While Tomi feels disgraced by Japan, he feels persecuted by the US military. Tomi is, again, caught in the crossfire of being both Japanese and American in a way that his elders cannot fully comprehend: Tomi was born in the US, so his sense of tradition and culture are family-based rather than Japan-based. However, when he learns of Sanji’s death and his father’s imprisonment, he is forced to confront his own Divided Loyalties.

Billy also struggles with loyalty. Though he does not hesitate to lie for the Nakajis, he later wrestles with his choice. Billy is very concerned about World War II throughout the story, unlike most of the other characters. Despite his loyalty to the US military, Billy’s loyalty to his friend is stronger. Forced to evaluate the actions of his country’s government, Billy cannot support Papa Nakaji’s imprisonment or the death of the pigeons. Worse still is accepting that the US government killed Sanji, an innocent man whom Billy had recently bonded with. These considerations place Billy in a moral quandary, unsure of whom to support but convicted in his instinct to protect the Nakajis, as he knows they are innocent.

Loyalty is a complex theme throughout the story, never more so than in this section, which also spills into the theme of The Barriers of Prejudice and Discrimination. Each character grapples with conflicting loyalties and the discrimination that they either observe or are subject to. Grampa struggles between loyalty to Japan and the US, ultimately losing all loyalty to Japan. Tomi, who always considered himself an American, wrestles with understanding the morally wrong actions of the American government and military. Billy, too, struggles to reconcile loyalty to his country with loyalty to Tomi, finding some of the US’s actions immoral and feeling uncertain about how to address them. Loyalty becomes an intricate and thorny problem in this section, leading the characters into gray areas due to the fact that, in war, prejudice persists toward those perceived to be affiliated with warring groups regardless of their actually allegiances.