Kazuko Monica Itoi Sone (1919-2011) was a Japanese American writer and clinical psychologist. The author of the 1953 memoir Nisei Daughter, Sone was among the first writers to grapple with the psychological trauma of the incarceration of Japanese Americans like herself during World War II. Originally from Seattle, Sone migrated to the Midwest after leaving Minidoka incarceration camp. Although she lived in Canton, Ohio, for most of her life, she frequently returned to Seattle. She became involved in Seattle Asian American activism during the late 1970s and was a supporter of the redress movement to provide compensation to former inmates of the camps.
Early Years
Monica Sone was born Kazuko Monica Itoi on September 1, 1919. The daughter of Seizo Itoi (1879-1948) and Benko "Ben" Nagashima (1893-1993), Kazuko was the second of four children: an older brother, Henry Itoi (1918-2016); a younger brother, Kenji William Itoi (1921-1926), who died tragically at the age of 5; and younger sister Sumiko Sammie Itoi (1923-2020).
Sone's father Seizo immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1904. After working several jobs and owning a laundry, he bought and operated the famous Carollton Hotel in the heart of Seattle's Japantown, or Nihonmachi.
Sone's mother Benko, a poet, shared her interest in writing with her daughter. Benko became a noteworthy tanka poet in the Seattle area. She published what journalist David Yamaguchi argues is the first tanka poem written in Seattle: a poem describing Seattle's Central Area overlooking the Rainier Valley written in 1937. Tanka is a genre of Japanese poetry with a five-line structure.
Like many children in Seattle's Japantown, Sone regularly attended Japanese language school at Seattle's Nihongo Gakko. Her experiences dealing with strict teachers, a common experience for nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), were later documented in several chapters at the beginning Nisei Daughter. She graduated from Broadway High School in 1937. She completed secretarial school a year after graduating, and shortly thereafter contracted tuberculosis. Her family sent her to the Firland Sanitorium. There, she met another future author, Betty MacDonald (1907-1958), and the two became friends.
On August 2, 1938, shortly after her release from the sanitorium, Sone was photographed participating in Seattle's annual Potlatch of Progress parade. As part of a float submitted by the Japanese Association and Chamber of Commerce, Sone and several women (including a young Mariko Mukai [1919-2017], a future opera singer) dressed in American clothes alongside women in Japanese kimonos, symbolizing East and West.
Starting in May 1940, Sone began contributing articles to the Taihoku Nippō, one of two Japanese American newspapers in Seattle. Her articles spotlighted musical events in Seattle's Japanese American community, such as concerts performed at the Seattle Methodist Church.
Imprisonment at Puyallup and Minidoka
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Kazuko and her family began preparing for the worst. While Seizo Itoi was uncertain whether the bombing was false propaganda, the trickling of news from Hawaii and ensuing government orders made the bombing all too real.
In Nisei Daughter, Kazuko recounted the tense atmosphere facing Japanese Americans in Seattle. As families witnessed their issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) fathers rounded up by the FBI, individuals began destroying precious heirlooms out of fear that it would incriminate them. For Sone and her family, a night spent destroying heirlooms from Japan left her feeling empty. "It was past midnight when we finally climbed upstairs to bed," Sone recalled. "Wearily we closed our eyes, filled with an indescribable sense of guilt for having destroyed the things we loved. The night of ravage was to haunt us for years. As I lay struggling to fall asleep, I realized that we hadn't freed ourselves at all from fear" (Sone, 156).
For Sone, who was finishing her second year as a student at University of Washington, and her brother Henry, a graduate student at University of Washington, the war would mean a pause in their education. The siblings decided to escort their father to the hotel and help manage it in the event of his detention by the FBI.
All plans for keeping the hotel were thrown aside when, on April 21, 1942, the Western Defense Command issued an order for all Japanese Americans to report for detention at the Puyallup Assembly Center on May 1. Within ten days, the Itoi family packed their bags and closed the hotel. Henry gathered their tags from the army control station. Sone recalled: "He came home with twenty tags, all numbered '10710,' tags to be attached to each piece of baggage, and one to hang from our coat lapels. From then on, we were known as Family #10710" (Sone, 166).
The family was then sent to the Minidoka incarceration camp near Twin Falls, Idaho. Sone's stay at Minidoka ended within a year, when she received word that she had secured a job working as a secretary in Indianapolis, Indiana. She left Mindoka on April 13, 1943, and traveled to Indianapolis. In August of that year, Sone enrolled at Hanover College, a private Presbyterian college. There, she pursued a bachelor's degree in social science. Around this time, she started referring to herself by her English name Monica.
She graduated from Hanover College on June 1, 1946. Her sister, Sumiko "Sammie" Itoi, resettled in New York, where she enrolled in Adelphi College and joined the Cadet Nursing Corps. Brother Henry Itoi and his wife, Minnie, resettled in St. Louis, Missouri. Seizo and Benko Itoi, however, remained at Minidoka until 1945. After the war, Sone's parents returned to Seattle. Seizo Itoi died on June 3, 1948. The Itois were unable to regain ownership of the Carollton Hotel, and the building was eventually demolished in 1956. Mother Benko Itoi died in March 1993.
After graduating from Hanover College, Kazuko (Monica) enrolled at Western Reserve University to study clinical psychology. There, she met Geary Masami Tsuyuki Sone (1914-1998). Geary Sone, a nisei who grew up in Lodi, California, was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's program of agricultural entomology. In 1940, Sone was drafted in the army and, because of his scientific research, was subsequently sent to Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas as a medical assistant. During World War II, he was deployed to the Pacific theater, where he participated in the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, he pursued a master's degree in bacteriology. On June 10, 1947, Kazuko Monica Itoi married Geary Sone in Detroit. After several years of working in Detroit, the Sones moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where Geary worked as a bacteriologist at Iowa Methodist Hospital. The Sone family had four children: Philip Geary, Susan Mari, Peter Seiji, and John Kenzo Sone.
Writing of Nisei Daughter
On September 16, 1950, The Northwest Times reported that Sone had sold an article based on her experiences in camp to The Atlantic: "Kazuko Itoi, a former Seattleite, has sold an article to the Atlantic monthly magazine on camp life in Idaho. Miss Itoi is now a housewife with several children, living in the East" ("Main Street…by BF"). No article was published, but rather, it was the announced beginning of Sone's Nisei Daughter.
In 1948, following the success of her bestselling novel The Egg and I, Sone's friend Betty MacDonald produced another novel about her time at the Firland Sanitorium. Titled The Plague and I, the book was published by J. B. Lippincott and The Atlantic Monthly in 1948. MacDonald featured Sone as the character Kimi, and she recalled her experiences in the sanitorium together. According to Japanese American journalist Kats Kunitsugu, The Atlantic Monthly's press representative, Dudley Cloud, asked MacDonald about what happened to Kimi. Cloud then contacted Monica Sone and offered her the opportunity to tell her own story. "It was Cloud and Mrs. Sone's husband," Kunitsugu wrote in her review of Nisei Daughter for the Pacific Citizen, "who encouraged her to write some 900,000 words while caring for one baby and expecting another until she finished her autobiography" ("Book Review: Nisei Daughter").
Published by Brown, Little, and Company in cooperation with The Atlantic in 1953, Sone's Nisei Daughter presented her life story from her childhood in Seattle up to her departure from camp. Written in a similar style to MacDonald's novels, Sone interjected humor into her wartime memoir to provide levity for difficult situations.
As a historical text, Nisei Daughter offered readers a detailed and gripping description of life in Seattle's International District. In the beginning, Sone introduces readers to her family and their migration from Japan to Seattle. Her father's struggles to succeed in the United States, such as being unable to practice law despite having received a degree from the University of Michigan, offered an eye-opening account of the struggles of the issei.
Laced throughout the text are witty observations of Seattleites. In ways comparable to John Steinbeck, Sone offered sketches of individual characters who became fixtures of the International District and Skid Road neighborhoods near the Carollton Hotel.
In many ways, Sone's text was the first to give a candid, personal view of life in West Coast Japanese American communities before World War II. Other publications of the period, such as Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 and John Okada's No-No Boy, exposed readers to the plight of Japanese Americans sent to camp and the psychological adjustment that followed. Sone's Nisei Daughter, however, offered a more detailed sketch of prewar community and the anxieties that Japanese Americans faced within white society.
The chapters on camp, unlike other texts, focused heavily on the individual dynamics between Sone and her family members. Readers may become so lost in the antics between Sone and her siblings that they forget the setting is a prison. At times, though, you are reminded that despite the cheerful depiction of events, life in camp has its limits. In one anecdote from Minidoka, Sone tells readers of a brief field trip beyond the barbed wire to help purchase a wedding dress for his brother's soon-to-be bride Minnie:
"Early the next morning we rode to Twin Falls, crowded into the back of an army truck. Although a raw, slicing wind whipped through between the canvas cover and slowly turned us into ice figures, the thought of our first day of freedom in town brightened our eyes. Sumi chattered excitedly. 'First thing I'm going to do, I'm buying a chocolate ice-cream soda.' We shivered and concentrated our thoughts on hot coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches. Minnie breathed deeply, ' hope I find my wedding dress'" (Sone, 203).
Critics Respond to Nisei Daughter
Upon publication, Nisei Daughter was received by literary critics and members of the Japanese American community with acclaim. As one of only a handful of books on the wartime Japanese American experience written by a Japanese American to appear shortly after the war – such as the 1946 books Mine Okubo's book Citizen 13660 – Sone's autobiography was a first for several reasons. It was among the first of the postwar books to offer a glimpse into life in the Japanese American community. It was also the first detailed account of the postwar adjustment to life after camp to reach a national audience. Because of her fluid prose and riveting accounts of events, the book garnered attention from critics as both a document about the incarceration and as a piece of literature.
Among the first to comment on Nisei Daughter was The Seattle Times. As Sone's hometown newspaper, The Seattle Times offered a review that commented heavily on the book's connection to the city:
"The author tells of the fun of Japanese annual community picnics in Jefferson Park, the mixed nationalities of Bailey Gatzert School, her struggle with formal deportment as taught by the Japanese school she attended every afternoon…Seattleites will have a quarrel with the volume and that is for the insistence upon calling the Skid Road 'Skid Row."' We suspect that the Boston publishers, Atlantic-Little Brown, may have influenced this misnaming of one of the city's landmarks" ("Former Seattle Nisei…").
Perhaps the most revealing part of the review was the critic's downplaying of the city's anti-Japanese discrimination. The reviewer attempted to minimize the racism that Sone's family faced in the book: "As a child she resented the discriminations, the unwillingness to rent houses to Japanese, but she was equally uncomfortable on the memorable trip she made to Japan with her parents" ("Former Seattle Nisei…").
Similarly, a reviewer for The Oregonian commented on Sone's cheerful perspective on her wartime experience. No mention was made of Oregon's treatment of its Japanese American residents during the war:
"Now we can know how it went without Japanese natives and their American children. The former Kazuko, now Mrs. Monica Sone, has told it with simplicity and great understanding in a new book, 'Nisei Daughter,' just published by Little, Brown. The author says she wants to make a protest 'against people who sneer at the words 'democracy' and 'freedom' simply because they have met with unpleasantness in the course of their lives as Americans. This is all very well, but it gives no idea of the warmth, the charm and the understanding of Mrs. Sone's account of times that sorely tried the souls of Americans of Japanese parents. It is a book that we in the Northwest have good reason to read and to ponder. It is a human document and a pretty fine statement of what it means to be a good American in circumstances that ought to make many of us who are not Nisei blush." ("Today's Editorial: A Nisei Girl")
Joseph Henry Jackson of The Los Angeles Times offered similar praise for Sone's achievement with Nisei Daughter. Using his January 20, 1953, review as an opportunity to reflect on the mass roundup of Japanese Americans, Jackson reminded readers that camps were a mistake:
"Looking back now at the spring and summer of 1942, many an American feels a twinge of uneasiness when he thinks of the Americans of Japanese ancestry – the niseis, so called – who were bundled behind barbed wire for the duration…Yet we let ourselves be panicked into thinking of American kids born in Seattle or Turlock or San Bernadino as potential 'enemies' and we treated them this way" ("Story of Monica Sone…").
As for Sone's memoir, Jackson offered this praise:
"The moral is clear enough for those who wish a moral. For myself, the deepest impression this unaffected, honest little story made on me was one of smiling courage. Here is a girl -- and she is only one of thousands -- who could take prejudice unjust treatment at the hands of the country she looks upon as her own, and still come up cheerful, undaunted and able to make a good life for herself, taking her place as a thorough American among Americans of all bloods and racial backgrounds" ("Story of Monica Sone…").
Among Japanese Americans, the book received mixed reviews. Some regarded it as a refreshing take on incarceration by telling a human story. Among the most remarkable reviews was that penned by Togo Tanaka (1916-2009). The former editor of the Los Angeles Rafu Shimpo and documentarian of life in the Manzanar incarceration camp, Tanaka came to the review with a detailed and academic knowledge of the camp experience. His review in the Chicago Tribune spoke volumes of the book's contribution:
"Books that deal with the wartime mass evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West coast generally tend to be grim reading. Or else they are stodgy sociological tracts between hardcovers. Monica Sone's 'Nisei Daughter' is neither. It is, instead, a warm-hearted, sometimes sobering, but more often gay and humorous, story of a Japanese immigrant couple and their American-born children. Of more than a score of books that revolve around the mass evacuation of 1942, this is by far the most readable – and most refreshing – of the lot. In her story, she reveals insights into the emotional disturbances that anyone who has ever been incarcerated without trial must overcome. Herself a victim, she has done this with rare good humor – and she skillfully manages to entertain you in the process" ("110,000 Held Without Trial…").
Kats Kunitsugu, writing for the January 30, 1953, issue of the Pacific Citizen, the national organ of the Japanese American Citizens League, praised Sone for her ability to effectively use humor to tell the story of camp. Kunitsugu highlighted Sone's ability to turn memories of the incarceration into laughing moments, bringing levity to an experience that many would have rather forgotten, without ignoring the injustice of the policy. "It is Monica Sone's gay sense of humor, her ability to see the laughter in things as well as her ability to laugh at her own foibles that make her book delightful reading. The chapter on her brother Henry's wedding – which takes place at Minidoka Camp – is the funniest thing I have read since 'Teahouse of the August Moon'" ("Book Review: Nisei Daughter").
However, Sone's more joyful account of camp dismayed others. Japanese Canadian writer Ken Adachi (1928-1989) was less enthusiastic about Nisei Daughter. Writing for The New Canadian, Adachi felt the book seemed too cheery for such a morose subject as the camps:
"The evacuation seems to be a side issue in the book with the dominant theme that of the growing up of a Nisei to the point where she finds that she can look at life with the eyes of both her divergent cultures and not feel like a split personality…Her life, it seems, was one episode of laughter after another, and I wonder vaguely whether this was typical of the Nisei…The philosophy of Mrs. Sone through the book, then, seems to be a simple one: that if one smiles enough, all things will come out right in the end" ("Book Review: The Nisei Daughter, by Ken Adachi").
After Nisei Daughter
Following Nisei Daughter, Sone did not publish any additional books. In 1961, the Sone family moved to Canton, Ohio, where she and Geary resided for the remainder of her life. Geary worked as chief bacteriologist at Akron City Hospital, and Monica worked as a clinical psychologist at the Canton Catholic Community League.
Starting in the 1970s, Sone's work received renewed attention from Asian American activists. In 1974, William and Joyce Wong interviewed Geary Sone about his prewar life. Writers Shawn Wong and Frank Chin included the interview in their collection of Asian American literature, Yardbird Reader Volume 3.
Frank Chin (b. 1940) and members of the Combined Asian American Resource Project remained in touch with Monica Sone. In 1978, Chin invited her to speak at the first Day of Remembrance, held on November 25, 1978, at the former site of the Puyallup Assembly Center, where she was imprisoned 23 years before. As she later spoke, Sone described attending the Day of Remembrance as the beginning of her own self-healing.
The event marked her return to the West Coast. Two years later, Frank Abe and Karen Seriguchi invited Sone back to speak at a conference series called "Japanese America: Contemporary Perspectives on Internment." Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and the Combined Asian American Resources Project, the conference at Seattle Central Community College brought together several panels of Asian American writers and activists to discuss the legacies of the incarceration on the Japanese American community.
As a clinical psychologist, Sone spoke passionately about her own struggle to grapple with the damage of camp:
"I was one of the first to leave camp, being female, of school age, and no great threat to society. As I took the train to the Midwest, I was loaded with guilt, self-hate, and fear. My guilt came from the feeling that I was abandoning my parents in camp. My other guilt came from an old ongoing guilt of having a Japanese face. At that time, looking like a Japanese meant being a despicable subhuman.
My self-hate came from my having 'cooperated' with the evacuation. Many times, I had wished that I had been able to stand up to my government's illegal order. Since I did not act according to my conscience, I felt weak and hated that weakness.
My fear came from the past. I experienced all that hate which had poured out from the public and the government officials as a death wish upon us – that message had sunk deeply inside me. As I sat on that train which clanked across the continent, I felt like a mauled creature looking for a safe environment. If the West Coast hadn't wanted me, why would it be different elsewhere" (Japanese America).
In concluding her speech, Sone told the audience that redress not only served as a movement to provide compensation to victims of the camps, but as a teaching moment for Americans.
Sone also struck up a correspondence with writer Michi Weglyn (1926-1999), the author of the groundbreaking work Years of Infamy. Weglyn personally wrote to Sone showing interest in tanka poems written by Sone's mother, a gesture that earned her Sone's gratitude.
The Asian American movement and the redress campaign to provide compensation to former inmates of the camps brought Nisei Daughter to a new generation of readers. In 1979, the University of Washington Press republished Nisei Daughter with a new introduction by Sone. Excerpts of the book were included in Bruce Barcott's 1994 compilation of Northwest writers, Northwest Passages. University of Washington Press reset Nisei Daughter in a new edition in 2014, and today the book remains a key text in Asian American studies. More recently, editors Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung included an excerpt of Sone's Nisei Daughter in their literary anthology for Penguin, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, as a testament to Sone's enduring legacy in Asian American literature. A moving gesture to Monica Sone's past activism was when her nephew Shawn Brinsfield brought the writer's duffel bag from Minidoka with him to a protest organized by Tsuru for Solidarity in February 2025 to honor her legacy.
On September 5, 2011, Monica Sone died at her home in Canton, Ohio at the age of 92. Sone's impact on Asian American literature cannot be overstated. As one of the few writers to speak about the traumatic nature of the incarceration at a time when few published narratives existed, Sone's work remains a classic within early Asian American literature. To this day, Sone's Nisei Daughter holds up as a comprehensive text that touches on the experiences of Japanese Americans, from the prewar years through the bitterness of the incarceration and resettlement.
