Prior to World War II, he was able to find success in America by starting a dry cleaning business and purchasing a home with Mama, and after the war, he was able to start over, raising a tight-knit family and succeeding in business once again. On the one hand, Daddy remains optimistic throughout his life that the U.S. Daddy-an immigrant from Japan-encapsulates this paradox. Throughout the memoir, there’s a tension between America’s pervasive racism and the nation’s claim to be welcoming to immigrants.

Through this, They Called Us Enemy shows that while racism certainly exists during peacetime, the onset of war can make racism worse by painting minority groups as enemies of the nation and framing racism against them as patriotic. This widespread racism culminated in the country incarcerating more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps for the duration of the war. without any evidence to support this outrageous and racist claim. Several passages in the graphic memoir depict white civilians destroying a Japanese family’s car and painting racial slurs on it, while others show how powerful people in the military and government accused Japanese Americans of conspiring against the U.S. Though racism and anti-Asian sentiment existed in the United States prior to the country’s entry into World War II, They Called Us Enemy shows that, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment exploded.

They called us the enemy