The Buddha in the Attic question

This is in your response to your question, Dwight. I just finished reading the book, and I feel that I can shed some light on your question (at least as far as the novel is concerned). It looks like Japanese wives were separated from their husbands if they had married white men. At the end of page 109 in the chapter called Last Day, the author says "Sumiko left with an envelope filled with cash given to her by her second husband, Mr. Howell, of Montecito, who had recently informed her that he would not be accompanying her on the trip. She gave him back his ring." This leads me to assume that white American men were not sent away to the Japanese internment camps, unless they went there voluntarily to be with their wives and families.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't like the book, although I will give Julie Otsuka credit for being a good writer.

I read another novel last year concerning the plight of a Japanese woman who emigrated to America after the Second World War. I liked that novel a lot more. It's called How to Be An American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway. Maybe Dilloway's writing is not as poetic, but I sympathized with the main character's problems more because she seemed real. Reading Otsuka's novel was like watching the evening news with one miserable event following another. My reaction to it was very negative. In any case, I hope I was able to provide an answer to your question.

Yes they married Japanese men. I loved the story and the language helped me understand the scope and the variety of their experiences. It was an unusual way to explain a complex issue that was different and the same for so many. I too enjoyed the poetry of the language. It was not a traditional novel but an insight some painfully deep and others broad reaching of a terrible time in our nation's history.

Young Japanese men came to the US for work (much as other ethnic groups came -- Chinese, Phillipinos) in the fields and railroads, etc. When they had a little money saved up, they sent home to their families to find them a suitable wife. Arranged marriages in Japanese culture then were the norm. As photos went back and forth and eventually the woman married by proxie in Japan and traveled to the US as a married woman. The US wouldn't have allowed a single woman with no job to immigrate then so they had to be married first. But all they had was the photo which might not have been a recent one.

Options for young Japanese women even in Japan was limited -- marry someone if you could or stay a spinster and take care of your parents. Or become a prostitute. Taking the chance on coming to the US and marrying a stranger had possibilities-- America was known then as having streets "paved with gold". Lots of possibilities.

The Japanese women came to marry Japanese men, not white men. Think again about the opening chapter where the women talk about the photos of their prospective husbands, and the chapter on dealing with "them" (whites).