Nothing Left In My Hands: The Issei of a Rural California Town, 1900-1942

By Kazuko Nakane. Foreword by Naomi Hirahara. In 1978, Kazuko Nakane interviewed a number of immigrants from Japan who then lived in California's Pajaro Valley. Originally a class project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her findings were compiled into a book that was published in 1985 and immediately recognized as a classic account of a rural immigrant community. Nakane's book is now back in print in a new edition with a foreword by noted writer Naomi Hirahara. Nakane's detailed research and firsthand interviews with those still living in the Pajaro Valley in the early 1980s piece together a portrait of early Japanese American experiences, from the lives of buranketto men (bachelors who traveled from job to job with little more than a blanket around their shoulders) to the arrival of brides from Japan to the discrimination Japanese faced in the form of anti-immigrant legislation and their banishment to internment camps during World War II. Without Nakane's prescient effort