“From the beginning, Auntie and Uncle had never asked her to work, but she still remembered lying in her new bedroom after her parents died, worrying that she and her brother would get sent to an orphanage. So the next day she’d gotten up and scrubbed all the floors.”

Sumiko’s impressive work ethic comes in part from the need to prove herself useful after her parents’ death. In her young life, Sumiko has already had to endure extreme hardship; those difficulties shaped who she is. Sumiko loses some of her motivation to work hard while in the internment camp and must recover her sense of industriousness by finding meaningful tasks, such as working on the garden with Mr. Moto. 

“Except for Bull, the family spent the rest of the day combing the house for anything that seemed Japanese in a disloyal way, whatever that meant.”

After learning about the Pearl Harbor attack, Sumiko’s family immediately starts burning anything that associates them with loyalty to Japan. Sumiko’s reaction highlights her family’s innocence. None of them is sure what might be considered disloyal because they are all loyal to the US. 

“Sumiko knew one of the things that made her different from the rest of the family, one of the things that made her more American than her cousins, was that she didn’t feel haji, or shame, quite as much as other Japanese did, maybe because she hadn’t attended a lot of Japanese school. All the Issei were steeped in the culture of haji.”

Kadohata highlights shame as an aspect of Japanese culture by contrasting Sumiko’s reaction to Mr. Ono’s arrest with everyone else’s. Sumiko is more Americanized than the rest of her family, so she doesn’t feel shame like the rest of the family or recognize what may cause another Japanese person to feel shame. This quote exemplifies how Kadohata infuses Japanese language and culture into the novel as well as Sumiko’s identity as both Japanese and American.