Daniel James Brown’s “Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II” is about tough challenges faced by Japanese Americans after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the aftermath of the disaster at Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans, especially those residing on the West Coast, were subjected to assaults. Their businesses were vandalized and boycotted. They had travel restrictions and curfews imposed on them, and they were in other ways ostracized from American society.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to remove about 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast, including sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants who were born in the United States, to barbed-wired enclosed relocation camps — Brown refers to these facilities as concentration camps — in isolated parts of the country.
The Army initially rejected Nisei — American-born offspring of Japanese immigrants. When this policy was changed, thousands of Nisei enlisted, including many young men who were living in the........