The Good War: Peter Ota + Betty Basye Hutchinson

Both these stories serve to offer alternative views of the war; they don't depict the standard stories of heroes on the battlefront or housewives on the home front left worrying about their loved ones. The first story is offered from Peter Ota, a Nisei Japanese who first-hand experienced the battle against the Japanese that occurred on the home front. Ota recalls having to live at Santa Anita horse racing track. This truly shows the dehumanization of Japanese-Americans that the U.S. government hoped to accomplish. They felt that by treating them like animals, they would hopefully feel equivalent to them. Ota reveals other aspects of living in such a dehumanizing way, but most importantly he reveals the persevering attitude he had throughout the experience; he didn't let the poor treatment of himself and his family get to his head the way other Americans may have wanted it to. His attitude was: "You persevere. Take what's coming, don't react" (206). Ota revealed that an important Japanese value is perseverance, and this is also a value that is important to Americans. Perhaps Ota meant to show that both Japanese and American traditions have a lot in common, and that for this reason the physical separation of such similar cultures was that much more preposterous. Rather than focusing on the differences between the communities, the similarities should have been stressed, and maybe the situation could have been seen in a whole new light.
Basye also offers an alternative view of the war: one that focused on the results of war, the side that wasn't all too often seen by the public. Basye felt the need to serve her country any way she could during the war, and she found her calling as a nurse to those who had been wounded on the battlefield. At first, she was in sheer horror, disgusted by just the sight of men so harshly wounded. Eventually she would grow accustomed to the sight of such men, and it was then that she found a new sense of appreciation for what her peers were doing overseas. She found herself able to tell jokes in order to lighten the mood in the hospital where so much pain and suffering was felt. But the real shock that Betty experienced was not in the hospital, rather it was outside, where the common citizen was disgusted by the sight of the wounded men, just as Betty was when she first started working at the hospital. People wrote letters to the editor asking why wounded soldiers can't be kept on their own grounds and off the street (216). As Basye points out, these people didn't know real war. The propaganda showed to the general public only depicted the heroism and bravery of the men overseas. It didn't depict the real truth. Basye's account effectively shows the dark side of war that most people did not see, or perhaps were just too ignorant to see.