Variations on a Theme

I am old enough to remember Pearl Harbor. At the time of the attack by the forces of Imperial Japan on December 7, 1941, on a substantial number of American ships anchored in that port in Hawaii, I was attending an elementary school in what today would be called a lower-middle class neighborhood. My fellow students came from a variety of backgrounds. There were Protestants and Catholics and Jews; many were the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Europe. There were several African American children whose parents had more recent roots in the American south. As far as I can remember there were no kids of Asian background. For most of us, our only introduction to folks from that part of the world occurred in art class. There, in the spring semester of 1942, our diverse array of pint-sized patriots, all united to “Bury the Axis” (a common reference to Germany, Italy, and Japan), learned to draw posters of “The Japs,” the yellow-skinned, slant-eyed, near-sighted, buck-toothed, horrible people who were threatening our way of life. Almost 80 years later I can still do a sketch of that evil-enemy’s visage (Figure 1.1). Chapter 1