Pacific Crossings

1. The chapter Pacific Crossings by Takaki talks about Japanese immigrants coming to America to make money, and how that dream changed over the years.

2. The Pacific Crossings talk about mailed order brides, who are women who parents pick their husbands living in America. The families want the women to be able to go to America and make money so they will have a better life. The women end up working on plantations with their husbands. The men are in charge of Field work, and the women are in charge of Field work in the early morning, house work at 6am and then back to the Field, and late at night they do more house work. The women tend to start their day at 4:30am and don't end the day until around midnight- 1am. The immigrants do this for 55 cents a day if they are women and men were paid 78 cents per day. Also the immigrants were treated as animals; one person said that they were given a number, instead of their name. So one day they went on strike to get a higher wage, eight hour days, insurance and paid maternity leave and better treatment. Later the planters claimed a victory and discreetly increased wages by 50 percent. It seemed like things were working well for the immigrants, however the article says that the living conditions for the workers were very unsanitary. The workers who had children and soon made enough money to own their own land told their children to go to school so they would learn about freedom and equality, the declaration of independence. But the immigrants were still treated unfairly when it came to getting a home, and soon everything would change for the Japanese immigrants living in the US in 1941.

3. Why did the immigrants who left their homes not go back? Some of them did go back but most of them did not want to go back because they had children living the the US. The children did not want to go back to Japan because they were born in the US and felt that Japan was a foreign land because the US was their home. So if the kids did not want to go back to their homeland, the parents tended to stay because they wanted to be with their children and grand children.

4. At first I thought the immigrants were treated badly and in the middle of the article it seemed like things were changing and they were being treated fairly. I thought they were being treated badly because of Pearl Harbor. But then they were getting a higher wage, and land so I thought everything was okay. Until the Americans started to tell the immigrants who were born in the US to go back to their homeland, I was thinking okay how did they go from being treated badly to fairly, back to bad again. Then I thought maybe Pearl Harbor had occurred, but at the end it said that they were going to school and being taught about their culture, and their country. Teaching them about their Japanese American heritage. "However their hope to be both Japanese and American would be violently shattered on a December morning in 1941" After this historic event anyone living the US who was Japanese, was thought as being a spy and not to be trusted, so they were put into interment camps.