The Searching

How do we define home? Who are our true friends? What is allegiance to country to love? There is only one way to find out… fight for it.

Arriving from Japan as a ten-year-old, Kenichi Sugano grew up consumed by comic book superheroes, baseball and camaraderie. Kenichi was a rough and tumble kid like any in America. When he was twenty that all changed, with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

World War Two paranoia gripped the American populace. Fueled by speculation, fear, retribution, and even greed, Japanese Americans were dispossessed, herded into internment camps, and treated lower than common criminals. Without any form of due process or legal protection their lives were torn asunder. Kenichi’s family, being recent immigrants, were thrust into the spartan, brutal Tule Lake Interment Center. Unable to endure the repression of the camp, Kenichi sets out to prove himself to his family, his lover, his country and himself.

Defying his father’s wishes Kenichi volunteers to fight for his family’s captors. Kenichi’s journey, beginning with the 442 squadron, spans from the blood-drenched bogs of Europe to the smoking, staggering corpse that was Tokyo in the final days of the war.

Through societies saturated with mutually flammable propaganda, and manipulated by the rampant hubris of military madmen, Kenichi valiantly serves his country and struggles for his identity. Nurtured by the true hearts of brave women and the steaming bloody hearts of dying friends, Kenichi stumbles to find a culture, and a love he can call his own.

One Japanese American’s search for self, in a time when humanity seemed intent on self-destruction.