71 pages 2 hours read

Daniel James Brown

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Prologue

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

The author describes “meeting extraordinary people who have lived the story you are telling” (1). In 2018, he traveled to Hawaii to meet a “dozen white-haired gentlemen, all in their nineties” in a Honolulu restaurant. Two of them were Flint Yonashiro and Roy Fujii—the veterans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT). RCT was the most decorated Japanese American army unit that fought in Europe during World War II.

The men’s lives changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result of the war with Japan, Japanese Americans faced the “wholesale forced removal from their homes, deprivation of their livelihoods, and mass incarceration” (5). This experience was rooted in decades of social and legal anti-Asian racism. Despite their treatment, the 442nd members became true American heroes. 

Prologue Analysis

To give his writing the utmost authenticity, Brown felt the need to go beyond legal documents, diaries, letters, and recorded interviews with the participants. For direct knowledge of his subject, Brown visited some of the places he wrote about and met the people would write about. For him, this firsthand experience was important to fully understand social history and individual biographies. By the time of Brown’s writing, most of the veterans of World War II had already died.