The Big War: Under the Blood-Red Sun

Under a warm Hawaiian sun, Tomikazu and Billy are waiting for an early practice with their baseball team, "The Rats," when fighter planes bearing the rising sun of Japan pass low overhead. Horrified, the boys watch as they strafe and bomb U.S. Navy warships in Pearl Harbor, realizing that nothing in their world will ever be the same.

Graham Salisbury's Scott O'Dell Award-winning Under the Blood-Red Sun deals with the violent disruption of life in the tiny fishing community in Oahu where Tomi's foreign-born father and grandfather proudly cherish their Japanese heritage and where the white haoles suddenly regard them as the enemy.

In retribution the Nakaji's fishing boat is sunk, Tomi's father is arrested and deported to a mainland internment camp, his mother loses her job, and Tomi, torn between feelings for his ancestral homeland and his own loyalty to America, is forced to come of age in a time of fear and turmoil in his small community. Although feared, hated, and threatened by some of the white population, Tomi is supported by his friendship with Billy and his multiracial team members. As the war grinds on far from Oahu, Tomi learns to live with his divided loyalties and his divided community and becomes the strength of the Nakaji family.

Tomi Nakaji's story is continued in Salisbury's sequel, House of the Red Fish, in which Tomi and his friends manage to raise his father's fishing boat from the sea and affirm the hope that their lives will go on after the war.

Both of these novels provide a view of the World War II home front quite different from those popular fiction works which portray a nation cheerfully united in the war effort. While this version of the story has truth, it is not the whole truth of that time, and these two noted novels provide a missing piece of that history.