NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES
Volume 45 (2023): 17-30

Becoming Monica:
Names, Naming, and Name Changing in Monica Sone’s
Nisei Daughter
William F. PURCELL ＊Introduction
Monica Sone’s 1953 fictionalized autobiography, Nisei Daughter, recounts theauthor ’ s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood growing up as an
American-born child of Japanese immigrants in Seattle in the 1920s―1940s. Born
Kazuko Monica Itoi in Seattle in 1919,1 throughout her childhood and adolescence
Sone was known among her family and her Japanese American (Nikkei)
community as Kazuko or its endearing diminutives, Kazu and Ka-chan. To her
few non-Nikkei friends she was similarly known by the slightly Anglicized names“Kazi” and “Kaz” (140, 148). It was only in the war years, separated from theWest Coast where an Asian presence was common and relocated to Indianapolis(reset in the text to “a suburb of Chicago”) where Asians were an exotic rarity, andunder the sponsorship of a retired couple who had been long-term missionaries toChina, that she suddenly became known as Monica (217). If we consider Sone’s
text to be what Frank Miyamoto has described as “a statement of self-identity, and[...] a search for identity,”2 then this abrupt (but apparently voluntary) onomastictransition from Kazuko to Monica represents on the young Miss Itoi’s part both acompromise with, and a concession to, the Euro-American majority. First,
embracing her Anglo middle name as her public identity constitutes a compromisewith American society’s Anglo and Eurocentric majority, primarily for the purposeof facilitating her inclusion in that society―inclusion that ironically should be herbirthright as an American citizen but is nevertheless resisted by that society’s
ethnocentrism. It is at the same time a concession to that same Eurocentric＊

William F. Purcell is a Professor Emeritus of Nanzan University and a research associate at
the Nanzan Center for American Studies.
1. Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (1953; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2014), 10. Further page number references to this source will be cited parenthetically in thetext.
2. S. Frank Miyamoto, introduction to the 1979 Edition of Nisei Daughter by Monica
Sone, vii―xvi (1979; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), vii.
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majority regarding the matter of just who has the authority to determine what does
and does not constitute an “American” identity. That is, Kazuko’s choice toabandon the name by which she was known to her family and her ethnic
community in favor of the Anglo-conforming Monica represents what IndianFilipina American actress Angel Desai more recently described as “yielding to thedirection in which America demands immigrants to bend” insofar as matters ofnames and personal identity are concerned; a demand Desai feels is placed eventoday on Asians in particular and amounts to “a form of erasure” requiring thatthey “do everything exactly the way [Anglo-Americans] do it and hide away
everything that is unique and different about [themselves].”3 In other words, byconsciously choosing to be Monica instead of Kazuko, Sone tacitly acknowledges
and submits to the authority of the Euro-American majority to name her.
Ⅰ : Names, Naming, and Name Changing
Names, both those we are given and those we confer upon ourselves―groupnames, personal names, family names, nicknames, professional names―
communicate to the world a great deal about us. Justina Cheang, among others,
has described them as vehicles of “self-presentation” through which we announce
to the world our perceptions of who and what we are.4 That is, names often reveal
such intimate personal information as sex; racial, national, and ethnic origins;religious affiliations; familial connections as well as individual relational standing
within the family, such as senior (Sr.), junior (Jr.), or the third (III) bearer of aparticular name. They also intimate the hopes and desires for our futures held by
the parents who named us. They are, in other words, billboards declaring to theworld our self-definition.
If names are symbolic representations of individuals, Valerie Alia reminds usthat the act of naming is a universally practiced, potentially political activity
indicative of power relations within families, communities, and even nations.5
That is, every act of naming, from the simple act of parents naming their children
to the sort of sociopolitical relationships described in Louis Althusser’s politicaltheories of interpellation,6 implies the authority of the name-giver over the named.
The case of the parent-child relationship is obvious and has been demonstrated in
3. Angel Desai, “What’s in a name? Much more than I knew,” American Theatre ,November 16, 2020, https://www.americantheatre.org/2020/11/16/whats-in-a-name-so-muchmore-than-i-knew/. Italics in original.
4. Justina Cheang, “Choice of Foreign Names as a Strategy for Identity Management,”
International Communication Studies 17, no. 2 (2008): 198.
5. Valerie Alia, “The Politics of Naming: A Personal Reflection,” Names: A Journal of
Onomastics 55, no. 4 (2007): 457.
6. For a discussion of the concept of interpellation, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, andHelen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (New York: Routledge, 1998).

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NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 45 / 2023

numerous legal test cases that have tended to support the parents’ near absoluterights over naming.7 Less obvious are religiously based relationships, such as
pastors conferring baptismal names on initiates―albeit names normally selectedby the initiates themselves or their parents―or names directly or indirectly
imposed by church administrators as a condition for inclusion.8 Similar is thestudent-teacher relationship. Indeed, immigrant history in the United States inparticular is replete with examples of schoolteachers giving Anglo names tochildren whose ethnic names they could neither remember nor pronounce.9 Then
there are sociopolitical relationships such as the colonial relationship, in which thecolonizers have bestowed their own names on the places (New York, New Jersey),peoples (Indians), and even individuals they encountered (Robinson Crusoe’s
Man Friday), which Wale Adebanwi argues in an Althusserian sense constitutes “away of ‘governing’” a place or a people.10 There is likewise a similar act ofinterpellation noticeable in Sone’s text when, for example, members of the racial
majority label the Nisei Americans “Japs,” an identity the Nisei may resist andresent but nevertheless tacitly acknowledge (114 and elsewhere). In each of these
instances of naming, the name-giver presumes to have the authority to assign
identity to the named.
Changing one’s name, in turn, constitutes an attempt to (re)assert authority
over one’s own identity and to define oneself and one’s group membership.11
Among immigrant groups and their immediate descendants, Asians in particular,name changing has been common. There are numerous reasons immigrants andtheir children might seek to change their names. Chief among these are concerns
about discrimination. For example, Sonia Kang et al. report that Chinese
immigrants tend to “whiten” their resumes through name changing in order to
7. See Carlton F. W. Larson, “Naming Baby: The Constitutional Dimensions of Parental
Naming Rights,” George Washington Law Review 80, no. 1 (2011): 175―76.
8. See, for example, Kembo-Sure, “Naming as a Cultural and Political Metaphor,” The
Nairobi Review 1 (2021): 4.
9. See Louis Adamic, What’s Your Name? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 38―
39, and elsewhere; Gary Y. Okihiro, “The Japanese in America,” in Japanese American
History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: JapaneseAmerican National Museum, 1993), 8; and Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation,
and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994), 169―71.
10. Wale Adebanwi, “Global Naming and Shaming: Toponymic (Inter) National Relations
on Lagos and New York’s Streets,” African Affairs 111, no. 445 (2012): 646.
11. See Tai S. Kang, “Name Change and Acculturation: Chinese Students on an American
Campus,” The Pacific Sociological Review 14, no. 4 (1971): 404; Ellen Dionne Wu, “‘They
Call Me Bruce, But They Won’t Call Me Bruce Jones’: Asian American naming preferences
and practices,” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 47, no. 1 (1999): 24; and Darrell W. Drury
and John D. McCarthy, “The Social Psychology of Name Change: Reflections on a
Serendipitous Discovery,” Social Psychology Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1980): 310.

NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 45 / 2023

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“even the playing field” and “get their foot in the door” at least at the resumescreening stage of the hiring process.12 Others change their names―voluntarily orotherwise―in order to minimize mnemonic and pronunciation difficulties for the
majority community. Louis Adamic recounts numerous such instances amongpeoples of various European backgrounds,13 as do Gary Okihiro14 and Eileen
Tamura15 among Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. Indeed, for similar reasons,after their marriage in 1947 Sone and her spouse likewise changed their familyname from Tsuyuki, whose word-initial “ ts ” consonant cluster proved aphonological and mnemonic obstacle to the non-Nikkei midwestern community inwhich they had settled, to the more Anglo-friendly Sone that was the birth familyname of Geary’s mother.16 Others, Ellen Wu points out, were often succumbing topressure from the majority community for Anglo-conformity and, during and afterWorld War II, the perceived need to demonstrate patriotism,17 this latter point,
Martin Saavedra suggests, being particularly true of the Japanese Americans in theimmediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.18 To varying degrees, each ofthese issues are reflected in Sone’s text.
Ⅱ : Ethnicity, Race, and American Identity
The questions of identity and of who and what constitutes an American are
central to Sone’s text. As Miyamoto has pointed out, for the Nisei these were
never easy questions to address because they often found themselves caught
between two worlds that were often giving them “conflicting answers.”19 For
instance, like most of her Nisei contemporaries, from early childhood young
Kazuko considered herself “a Yankee” (18, 19). Nevertheless, she and her fellow
Nisei had to contend on the one hand with the denials and rejections of their
Americanness by their Euro-American compatriots who saw them only as “Japs”(114, 119, 122, 146, 158, 160, 171), and on the other with the assumptions of the
12. Sonia K. Kang, Katherine A. DeCelles, András Tilcsik, and Sora Jun, “Whitened
Résumés: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market,” Administrative Science Quarterly
20 (2016): 10.
13. Adamic, What’s Your Name? , 27, 48, 50―51, and 101.
14. Okihiro, “The Japanese in America,” 10.
15. Tamura, Americanization, 169―71.
16. Monica Sone and Geary Sone, “Monica Sone interview on her career as a writer.”Interview by Joyce Wong and William Wong, July 16―21, 1972. Combined Asian American
Research Project (CARP). Five reels. University of California, Berkley. Bancroft Library.
Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/cubanc_000313. Part 8, 5:50―6:55.
17. Wu, “They Call Me Bruce,” 23, 30―31.
18. Martin Saavedra, “Kenneth or Kenji? Pearl Harbor and Japanese-American
Assimilation,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 185 (2021): 619.
19. Miyamoto, introduction to the 1979 edition of Nisei Daughter, vii.

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Issei generation of their immigrant parents who saw them first and foremost as“tender Japanese saplings born on foreign soil” (24; also see 27, 28, 120), before
eventually arriving in adulthood at an acceptance of, and sense of pride in, “beinga Nisei” (236). Yet, the question remains: can a Nisei―or any racial and ethnic
minority―be an American? This, in turn, is an issue that needs to be examinedhistorically.
E pluribus unum―“from the many, one”―the national motto proposed in 1776
and today etched in the Great Seal of the United States, emphasizes a universalist
ideological understanding of American nationality and identity initially envisionedby the founders. Ideally, it means that Americanness is not associated withethnicity or with other factors such as religious or linguistic background. Rather,echoing earlier scholars, Sarah Song has suggested that being an American “means
sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideas.”20 That is, as Philip Gleason
wrote, being “American” simply required that individuals “commit [themselves]to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, andrepublicanism,” implying that inclusion in the national body “was open to anyone
who willed to become an American.”21 However, Gleason quickly adds that,practically speaking, there was from the beginning a “ latent predisposition
towards an ethnically defined concept of nationality” that reflected the ProtestantEnglish heritage of the overwhelming majority of the new nation ’ s 1790s
citizenry.22 He further points out that in the years prior to the War of 1812 theoverall number of immigrants was rather low, about 250,000 in total, a level
Gleason suggests precluded significant linguistic and cultural reinforcement for
non-Anglo communities and contributed to a rather quick “Americanization” of
the newcomers, especially insofar as language was concerned. Of greater concern
in those early years was blocking the entrance of ideologically radical elements
connected to the political upheavals then convulsing the European nations whose
political ideals were often in conflict with those of the founding generation.23
In his classic study of American immigration, Milton Gordon, in turn, suggeststhat these ambiguous attitudes about immigration in the early decades of therepublic generally prioritized the recognized economic and political need of theindividual states to rapidly expand their populations against concerns about theethnicity, language, religious affiliations, socioeconomic class, and ideologicalorientation of the new arrivals. However, Gordon continues, from the 1850s
20. Sarah Song, “What does it mean to be an American? ,” Daedalus: Journal of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Science 138, no. 2 (2009): 31.
21. Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of
American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980), 31―
58.
22. Ibid., 32―33.
23. Ibid., 33―34.
NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 45 / 2023

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onward anxiety over immigration grew in tandem with the ballooning influx of
newcomers with different religious beliefs, languages, and attitudes towards the
Puritan and Evangelical values upon which American society was established.24
This gave periodic rise to nativist movements such as the anti-Catholic KnowNothings who achieved national prominence and power in the 1850s in part as areaction against Irish immigration. As the sources of immigration began to further
shift towards eastern and southern Europe, ethnicity also began to emerge as amore important feature in the conception of American identity, and pressure on the
newcomers to “Americanize” increasingly took the form of a demand for what
Stewart Cole and Mildred Cole called “Anglo-conformity”―the substitution of“superior” Anglo-Protestant language, beliefs, and traditions for their “inferior”
non-Anglo norms―as the prerequisite for acceptance as Americans.25 And, formany of these immigrants, a preliminary first step in what Laurence Barrett
labeled the journey to “Waspdom, [...] was the swapping of an ethnic name for an‘ American ’ one ” : that is, adopting an Anglicized name for the family andAnglicized personal names for themselves and their children.26 Thus, as Maxine
Seller observed, by the second generation many immigrant descendants, especiallythose of European descent falling beyond the pale of Western and northern
European backgrounds, had completed the journey to Americanization by making
the American lifestyle and the American language their own, and by modifying
their family names to Anglicized variations that would mask their ethnic origins.27
Thus names like Adamczyk often became Adams, Baratz became Barrett, Barbiere
became Barber, Bianco became White, Lukaszewicz became Lukas, andProtopowicz became Prescott. The American-born children, in turn, would
likewise receive decidedly Anglo (and often patriotic) “American” personal names
like George or Thomas or Benjamin for boys and Betsy or Martha or Mary forgirls.
If ethnicity had become important in defining Americanness, from the
beginning race―meaning a biologically shared set of distinctive physicalcharacteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye and nose shape―was, as
Seller points out, a barrier to inclusion.28 That the founders intended their new
nation to be a “white man’s country” is attested to first in the constitutional
restrictions on inclusion in the national body of the already present African and
24. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion andNational Origins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 91―92.
25. Stewart G. Cole and Mildred Wiese Cole, Minorities and the American Promise: The
Conflict of Principle and Practice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 135―38.
26. Laurence I. Barrett, “What’s in a Name?” Time, December 2, 1993, http://content.time.
com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,979750,00.html.
27. Maxine Schwartz Seller, To Seek America: A History of Ethnic Life in America, rev. ed.
(Englewood, NJ: J. S. Ozer, 1988), 216.
28. Ibid., 3―4.
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indigenous populations29 and then by the Naturalization Act of 1790 and its
subsequent revisions that remained in effect until 1952, specifically limiting
naturalization to “free white person[s].”30 From the mid-nineteenth century, inturn, the arrival on the West Coast of Chinese―and later Japanese―immigrants
triggered a series of exclusionary steps against Asians. These included theChinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1892, 1902), the anti-Japanese Gentlemen ’ sAgreement of 1907, and culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924 that was
intended to permanently end Asian immigration. Even when all racial exclusions
were formally lifted by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, thenational origins quotas imposed by the new law effectively limited non-European
immigration to negligible levels.31
Among Asian immigrants the Japanese in particular were eager for their
American-born children to assimilate into American society, despite the social
obstacles their physical characteristics often posed. The Japanese idea ofassimilation, however, was dualistic in nature. That is, they envisioned theirchildren as being BOTH Japanese AND American, bridges between two worlds
who would be at home in either.32 This dualistic understanding of Americanness
contradicted the prevailing notion of patriotic American identity, which from latein the nineteenth century and especially during the Great War was based on abinary either/or ideal that rejected the notion of the hyphenated American as
unpatriotic and suspicious.33 To facilitate the goal of assimilation, organizations
like the Japan American Association urged their membership to “conform theirpersons and environment to American middle-class norms” in such matters as
dress and in “learning English and the customs of white America.”34 In line with
their dualistic assimilationist hopes, in turn, the parents often conferred upon theirchildren both Japanese and Anglo names, in some instances legally by adopting
the American practice of first and middle names, or in others informally, such as
baptismal names in the case of Japanese Christians, practices suggested in Sone’s
text (e.g., 8, 10). In other cases they might alternate, giving some of their children
Anglo names and others Japanese names, as seen in the stories of Toshio Mori.35
29. U.S. Constitution, Art. I, §2, cl. 3.
30. H.R. 40. 1790. Naturalization Bill. March 4, 1790. U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/artifact/h-r-40-naturalization-bill-march-4-1790.
31. H.R. 5678. 1952. Title 2, Sec. 201 a, Immigration and Nationality Act. June 27, 1952.
U.S. Government Publishing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-66/pdf/
STATUTE-66-Pg163.pdf.
32. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism inJapanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 50.
33. See Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” 42; Cole and Cole, Minorities
and the American Promise, 137; Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 99―100.
34. Azuma, Between Two Empires, 50―51.
35. Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California (1949; repr., Seattle: University of Washington

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Ⅲ : From Kazuko to Monica
Sone’s transition from Kazuko to Monica came rather abruptly, both in her text
and in real life. In her autobiography she states that at birth her parents named her
Kazuko Monica―“the Japanese meaning ‘peace.’ (Mother chose Monica fromher reading about Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica)” (10). Oddly,
public records from the period―her birth registration,36 her baptismal records,37
and a 1926 Seattle port disembarkation record38―record only the name Kazuko,
suggesting that Monica is an informal name with no legal standing, perhaps linked
to her family’s Christian background. Similarly, those same records only include
the name Seiichi for her brother Henry, and Sumiko for her sister. (Interestingly,
birth records do indicate that the third child, known in the text as Kenji William,
was legally named William Kenji.) In civil documents the name Monica first
appears―as Kazuko’s middle name―in records of the incarceration from 1942.39
It is only when she registered as a student at Hanover College in 1943 that Monica
appears as her given name,40 and is likewise listed as her given name on her 1947
marriage registration in Detroit.41
Nowhere in the text or in interviews has Sone discussed the reasons for hertransition from Kazuko to Monica. Given the fact that it comes during the war
years and is first noted in connection to her incarceration and later release, it isreasonable to assume that it results in part from a desire to adopt a more decidedly
Press, 1985), 109.
36. Washington State Archives, Olympia, WA., n.d. County Birth Registers, 1873―1965.
Reel 3, 1391. Family Search. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:Q9M-C9TX-G9LRZ?cc=3418468 (accessed May 22, 2020).
37. Gail Nomura, personal communication. Email concerning Seattle Japanese Methodist
Episcopal Church Records (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, 1530).
February 13, 2022.
38. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington D.C., n.d. Seattle
Passenger Lists, 1890 ―1975. Microfilm Publication M1383, Family Search . https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-G5F1-9CTL?cc=1916081 & wc=M6BM6TL%3A202226001 (accessed May 22, 2020).
39. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C., n.d.
Records of the War Relocation Authority, Record Group 210. Final accountability rosters ofevacuees at relocation centers, 1944―1946, Minidoka. Densho Digital Repository. DDRdensho―304―8. Densho. Microfilm publication M1965, 10 rolls. https://ddr.densho.org/ddrdensho-305/ (accessed August 21, 2021).
40. Sara McNair Vosmeier, Professor, Department of History, Hanover College. Personalcorrespondence regarding Hanover College registration records, March 2, 2021.
41. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health
Statistics, n.d. Marriage Records, 1867 ―1952. Ancestry.com . https://www.ancestry.com(accessed February 26, 2021)

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American identity during wartime. That desire, in turn, may likewise havereceived further urgency in the context of the midwestern location in which she
found herself, where Asians were an exotic rarity and non-Anglo names would
have presented mnemonic and pronunciation challenges to the surrounding
community. In the end the transition is perhaps best understood as the culminationof a process of submission to pressures towards Anglo-conformity already nascentin her first ventures beyond the boundaries of her childhood Nikkei community
and made more urgent for reasons she later gave concerning the transition in
marriage of their family name from Tsuyuki to Sone.42
Sone’s text recounts only two incidents prior to her 1943 relocation to theMidwest that involve encounters with people beyond her Nikkei community andin which her name can be viewed as a site of contested identity. The first, in
chapter III, recalls how Kazuko ’ s elementary school teacher continuallymispronounces Kazuko’s name (50―51), while the second, in chapters VIII and
IX, involves affectionate diminutive name formation and, to a much lesser extent,
pronunciation that in the end imposes on Kazuko a slightly Anglicized identity(140, 148). On the surface both can be seen rather innocently as the consequencesof the unfamiliarity of the non-Nikkei with Japanese names. At a deeper level,
however, they can also be seen as (perhaps innocent) acts of imposed Angloconformity.
The latter and more innocent of the two incidents is recounted in chapter VIII,“Paradise Sited,” and recalls Kazuko’s extended hospitalization for tuberculosis, asituation in which for the first time she is genuinely a racial and ethnic minority
among the patients in the ward. Much to her surprise and delight Kazuko is
accepted as an equal among her fellow patients, particularly by a young woman
identified in the story as Chris Young―in real life the writer Betty MacDonald. It
is Chris who reaches out to Kazuko by inviting her to be roommates during theirlong-term hospitalization, and who makes efforts to signal her total acceptance ofKazuko and her Japanese heritage, including efforts to use what little knowledge
she has of the Japanese language. And it is Chris who subsequently confers upon
her the affectionate diminutive Kazi (140) and later Kaz (148). What makes them
Anglicized versions of Kazuko is that both names conform to the English patternsof diminutive formation in the same manner, for instance, that Susan would
become Suzy or Sue and Mildred would become Millie or Mil. In contrast, theusual Japanese patterns of diminutive formation would consist of attaching theendearing diminutive “chan” to the first one or two syllables of the name, as in
Ka-chan, or of simply abbreviating the name by dropping the latter syllables, as in
Kazu. And, while the text cannot possibly represent the phonic shifts that may
have resulted from this process of Anglicization, one can almost hear in the names
vowel shifts wherein the “a” in Kazi or Kaz would be pronounced more like the42. Sone and Sone, “Monica Sone Interview,” part 8, 5:50―6:55.
NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 45 / 2023

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(æ) sound in “ cat ” than the (ɑ) sound in “ calm ” that much more closely
approximates Japanese phonology. Obviously, there is no intention on Chris’s
part of imposing an Anglo identity on Kazuko, but the result is that the nameconferred, however affectionately, in fact does conform to Anglicizing patterns.
Perhaps more troubling is the incident Sone recalls involving her elementary
school teacher, Miss Powers. Sone notes that the teacher consistently called her“KaZOOko,” because she “could never remember that there is no accent on any
syllable in pronouncing my Japanese name” (50). On one level this sort of
mistake might be easily attributed to unfamiliarity of the teachers with Japanesenames. As such it would not be unlike incidents Kazuko later experienced in the
Midwest, where “an Oriental face [was] [...] somewhat of a rarity” and “people
much of the time mistook [her] for Chinese.” These misunderstandings inevitably
extended to her name, “people dropp[ing] the first letter [of Itoi] and simply
call[ing her] Miss Toy,” and her reluctance to correct such mistakes occasionallyhaving comically embarrassing consequences, such as being mistaken by anightclub owner for an erotic fan dancer named Ming Toy (220).
Unlike the general midwestern populace of that time, however, Kazuko’s
teachers would not have been unfamiliar with Japanese people or Japanese names.
As Sone has pointed out, the student body at the Bailey Gatzert School in her time
was predominantly Asian, with only a few white children.43 Consequently, theteachers would have been interacting with these Nikkei children and their families
on a daily basis over a course of years and thus regularly exposed to the correct
pronunciations of the children ’ s names. That they made efforts to use theJapanese names rather than arbitrarily assigning them more familiar Anglo names,
as was done elsewhere,44 is laudable. Nor is it racist in the same way as, forexample, the police in Sone’s text calling her father “Charlie” (37, 39), a genericAnglo name applied to any Asian male, and most likely a transliteration of a fairly
common Chinese name such as Cha Li.45 Yet, given that Japanese names usuallypresent few phonological anomalies to native English speakers beyond lack ofstressed syllables―and only that anomaly regarding the name Kazuko―thefailure of the teachers to learn the correct pronunciations can be seen as a variantof imposed Anglo-conformity. That is, the teachers on the one handacknowledged and perhaps respected the non-Anglo identity of the children in
their charge to the extent of using their non-Anglo names, while on the other,consciously or otherwise, they in fact did Anglicize the names by consistently
pronouncing them in a manner that conforms to the phonological conventions and
43. Sone and Sone, “Monica Sone Interview,” part 5, 0.30―1:50.
44. For example, see Okihiro, “The Japanese in America,” 8.
45. Lindsey N. H. Chen, “On the Translation of Names in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with
the Wind: A Study in Onomastic Acculturation,” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 64, no. 3(2016): 140.

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expectations of English. The resulting distortions, in turn, served only to amplify
the non-Anglo origins of the names while simultaneously, to borrow a phrase from
Angel Desai, “erasing [the] beauty and [the] meaning” conveyed in the correct
pronunciations.46
It is upon arriving in the Midwest as a young adult that Kazuko becomes
Monica. Sone notes that until then America for her had meant the city of Seattle
and in particular her “small Japanese community,” and that moving out now
presents an opportunity to “shed [her] past” and “come to know another aspect ofAmerica which would inject strength into [her] hyphenated Americanism” (216).
Indeed, the name she goes by in her new environment emphasizes her“hyphenated” status, her Anglo-conforming personal identity as Monica appended
to her obviously non-Anglo family name, Itoi. Though the text never makes it
clear, it is reasonable to assume that the transition to Monica was by choice rather
than an imposition. For one, local media records indicate that though she was oneof four Nisei students to enter Hanover at that time―“Americans with Japanese
faces,” they were called,47―she was the only one with an Anglo-conforming
personal name.48 Her decision to become Monica may reflect a pattern similar tothe one Philip Oreopoulos noted among second-generation Chinese Americans,specifically intended to make name pronunciation easier for their Anglophonecompatriots and to signal to the majority community their assimilation into
American cultural norms.49 Alternatively, it may originate in the fact that Sone
came from a Christian family, a minority among the Japanese. Sone ’ s
autobiography points out that her maternal grandfather had been acongregationalist minister in Japan (6) and that her family were long-term
members of the Japanese mission of Seattle’s Methodist Episcopal church (7,144). From this rather close-knit Japanese American environment Kazuko was
now relocating into a deeply Christian environment, first in the home of her
retired missionary sponsors, the Richardsons (217―21, 225), and later in theacademic community of a Christian institution of higher education, HanoverCollege (Wendell in the text; 226―30), both constituting situations in which she
might feel more comfortable with the “Christian-conforming” name Monica. If
this latter reason underlies her name choice, there is a degree of irony in it since
46. Desai, “What’s in a Name?”
47. Charleston Courier, “Purely Personal News of Interest to Charleston People” (October
28, 1943): 2. Hanover Historical Texts Collection: Monica Sone, Primary Sources. https://
history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/260sone.html.
48. Triangle, “Four Nisei Girls Join Hanover Students” (September 10, 1943): 1. Hanover
Historical Texts Collection: Monica Sone, Primary Sources. https://history.hanover.edu/
courses/excerpts/260sone.html.
49. Philip Oreopoulos, “Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field
Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
3, no. 4 (2011): 161.

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Christianity as a “world religion” ideally should inclusively transcend ethnicity
and nationality.50 The irony is then amplified in the fact that Kazuko’s retired
China-missionary sponsors, who long lived in a non-Western environment andshould therefore be accustomed to the non-European names of their Chinese coreligionists, are the first in the text to exclusively call her Monica, hinting that
Christian identity construction and its naming practices may also result in a formof Euro-conforming cultural colonialism.51
Whatever the intentions behind voluntary name changing, Oreopoulos further
notes that most frequently this Anglo/Christian-conforming gesture failed toachieve the desired effect. In Kazuko’s case, for example, although she seems to
be warmly accepted by the members of her college community, she is neverthelessbarred from membership in the campus sororities, ostensibly by “ national
restrictions placed on [...] membership.”52 Yet although the members say they
“ sincerely want to invite [her] into [their] group, ” none even consider the
possibility of resigning from the sorority in protest over those regulations.53 This
reluctance by members of the majority community to push back against suchexclusionary rules suggests a tacit acceptance of the general view that minorities,
by any name, are not really Americans. Indeed, such a view is implicit in the local
newspaper description, cited earlier, of Kazuko and the other Nisei students as“Americans with Japanese faces,”54 a comment itself suggestive of the presumed
mutual exclusivity of the two.
The Monica/Kazuko of the text eventually arrives at a peaceful integration ofher identity, asserting that she had now found “confidence and hope [...] theJapanese and the American parts of me were now blended into one” (237―38).
However, this resolution is not a product of her new midwestern surroundings or
any inclusionary gestures coming from that community. Rather, it emerges while
visiting her still-incarcerated parents in Minidoka. This newfound confidence andhope flows from the accounts she hears from the Issei elders and acquaintances ofher childhood recounting the sacrifices, including death in combat, of her Nisei
friends in the war effort (233―35), and through the examples of her parents andthe other Issei who refused to “hold grudges” (234) despite the injustices they
endured or the sacrifices they and their children have had to make. Nor did the50. See, for example, Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became aWorld Religion (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 176―77.
51. See, for example, Benson O. Igboin, “Colonialism and African Cultural Values,”
African Journal of History and Culture 3, no. 6 (2011): 101; Lisa Kahaleola Hall, “Strategies
of Erasure: U.S. Colonialism, Native Hawaiian Feminism,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2(2008): 278; and Regitze Margrethe Søby, “Naming and Christianity,” Études Inuit/Inuit
Studies 21, nos. 1―2 (1997): 293.
52. Oreopoulos, “Why Do Skilled Immigrants,” 227.
53. Ibid.
54. Charleston Courier, “Purely Personal News.”

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pressures for Anglo-conformity cease, either away from the anti-Asian
environment of the West Coast or with the end of the war. Indeed, outside thetext, as noted earlier, after her marriage in 1947 Monica and her husband Geary
once more conceded to that indirect pressure for Anglo-conformity by changing
their name from Tsuyuki to the more Anglo-friendly Sone―a change the presiding
judge lauded as a positive step towards “Americanizing” their name, presumably
not realizing that Sone, like Tsuyuki, is a Japanese name.55 Seemingly, despite
their patriotic service and self-sacrifice during the war―Geary served in the armyin the Pacific theater56―their name still set them apart as something outside theAmerican fold.
Conclusion
Nisei Daughter was published in 1953, soon after the enactment of the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eliminated racial barriers to immigration(particularly those targeting Asians) that had been imposed over the years throughthe Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1892, 1902), the Gentlemen’s Agreement of
1907, the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act of 1924, and finally the
Immigration Act of 1924 (though national quotas on immigration remained inforce until the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965). It also
eliminated similar racial barriers to naturalization, which had been in place since
the Naturalization Act of 1790. Appearing at a time when the preeminence ofEurocentrism and Anglo-conformity as the defining characteristics of American
identity were first being questioned, Nisei Daughter is thus perhaps best
understood, together with such works as Jade Snow Wong ’ s Fifth Chinese
Daughter (1950)57 and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), as marking those firsttentative steps by American writers of Asian descent to articulate claims for an
American identity that do not necessarily or completely conform to the dictates of
either Eurocentrism or Anglo-conformity.
Since the publication of Nisei Daughter and these other works by Asian
American writers, Anglo-conformity as the mark of American identity has
increasingly come under even greater pressure and has faced many challenges.
With its admission to the union in 1959, Hawaii became the first U.S. state inwhich Euro-Americans made up only a plurality. The civil rights movement in
the 1960s also gave rise to the Black Power and Black Pride movements, sparking
55. Sone and Sone, “Monica Sone Interview,” part 8, 5:50―6:55.
56. Ibid., part 7, 20:40―26:00.
57. It is worth noting that in naming matters, both for herself and her protagonist, Wongengages in a similar nod to Anglo-conformity as did Sone. That is, the name Jade Snow
constitutes a direct English translation of the Chinese characters for her name, which would be
pronounced Yùxuě in Chinese.

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a renewed celebration of African heritage, culture, and art and an increase in Afrocentric names. The end of the Vietnam War, in turn, brought with it an influx of
new immigration from Southeast Asia, and the digital revolution of the latetwentieth century likewise drew an influx of newcomers from South Asia, all with
their distinctly non-Anglo names. Today, as well, the District of Columbia stands
at the precipice of becoming a Black-majority state, while Puerto Rico likewise
could very well become the first Spanish-speaking state. And, in recent years, thenation elected a man with the decidedly non-Anglo name of Barack Hussein
Obama to its highest office, and more recently a woman named Kamala Harris to
its second highest office. Nevertheless, the same attitudes that questioned,
doubted, and denied Sone’s American identity from the 1920s to the 1950s remainstrong. For one, the citizenship of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, both theoffspring of non-European immigrants, and with it their qualifications to holdoffice, has been repeatedly questioned and challenged. Further, the calls for
restrictions on immigration today, like those resulting in the Immigration Act of1924, seem specifically intended to target non-Anglophone, non- (Protestant)
Christian, and non-European immigrants, especially at the southern border. A
hopeful sign, though, is that for every critic who mangles and ridicules the “unAmerican” names of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, there are more trying topronounce them correctly.

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