How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
In typical Japanese fashion, they all wanted to be independent commercial fishermen, yet they almost always fished together. They would take off from Terminal Island, help each other find the schools of sardine, share nets and radio equipment—competing and cooperating at the same time. (1.1.3)
If this is the spirit of competition in a Japanese immigrant community, then no wonder the Japanese-American communities in pre-war California were able to flourish. We're looking at a co-operative more than anything else…
Quote #2
The people around us were hardworking, boisterous, a little proud of their nickname, yo-go-re, which meant literally uncouth one, or roughneck, or dead-end kid. They not only spoke Japanese exclusively, they spoke a dialect peculiar to Kyushu, where their families had come from in Japan, a rough, fisherman's language, full of oaths and insults. Instead of saying ba-ka-ta-re, a common insult meaning stupid, Terminal Islanders would say ba-ka-ya-ro, a coarser and exclusively masculine use of the word, which implies gross stupidity. They would swagger and pick on outsiders and persecute anyone who didn't speak as they did. (1.2.5)
Not all Japanese communities are alike, that's for sure—or for that matter, Japanese people. Here we get a sense of the role language plays in establishing and maintaining communities.
Quote #3
Like so many of the women there, Mama never did get used to the latrines. It was a humiliation she just learned to endure: shikata ga nai, this cannot be helped. She would quickly subordinate her own desires to those of the family or the community, because she knew cooperation was the only way to survive. At the same time she placed a high premium on personal privacy, respected it in others and insisted upon it for herself. Almost everyone at Manzanar had inherited this pair of traits from the generations before them who had learned to live in a small, crowded country like Japan. (1.4.19)
It can't be easy to put your own needs aside for the greater good and insist on privacy for yourself. How does that even work? That's probably why Jeanne goes on and tells us that going to the latrines is like being continually slapped by yourself—you have to share things like cardboard boxes (as privacy screens), but all you really want to do is not wait and grab one for yourself. So much angst over something as mundane as going to the bathroom…