This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

According to the Author’s note at the end of the novel, Fukuda was inspired to write This Light Between Us by two separate historical facts: “Anne Frank had an American pen pal” and “A subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, by a segregated all-Japanese American military unit” (379). Combining these two facts, Fukuda highlights something that historians have often pointed out: the many parallels of the discrimination faced by Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor and of the persecution suffered by Jews during the Holocaust. Up until Part 3, Alex and Charlie’s stories tend to parallel each other, though the stakes ultimately prove more dire for Charlie and her family.

The desire to find a common enemy to unite against is a common response during times of crisis and is often abused by authoritarian and fascist regimes to gain power. This was the case with the Nazi Party, which seized power using the instability of German society during the Weimar Republic, blaming the country’s problems on its Jewish population. The Nazis drew on common antisemitic beliefs, leading to the systemic discrimination, and later the mass murder, of much of Germany and Europe’s Jewish population. Charlie experiences this systemic discrimination during the German occupation of France. In her letters to Alex, she depicts the growing hostility of her country. Her later letters pine for the freedoms she enjoyed as a young girl, especially all the places she used to go. As time progresses, Parisian Jews are subject to a curfew (which Charlie breaks when she goes to the cinema and walks around Paris at night) and forced to wear yellow Stars of David in public to identify them as Jews (this makes Charlie ashamed). Eventually, France’s Jewish population is rounded up and sent to concentration camps, their property seized, their lives upended.

Alex experiences much the same treatment in America. While Alex felt othered by the incident with the school bus when he was young, Bainbridge Island is more of an integrated community than other parts of America. The issei have been there long enough to establish themselves as part of the community; the opening chapter of Part 1 even depicts White families joining the mostly Japanese congregation. The attack on Pearl Harbor tears this world apart. The Japanese are treated as potential enemies, always under the suspicion of being more loyal to Japan than America, even though many of them have never even seen Japan. Just as Charlie experiences in France, a curfew is placed on the Japanese community. However, no identifying mark, like the Star of David, is needed to identify the Japanese community. While most Jewish people look like any other white person, the racial differences between white people and Japanese are already obvious enough to the members of Alex’s community. Historically, this type of ignorant profiling ironically led to situations where people of Chinese or even Hispanic descent were sent to Japanese concentration camps. After being rounded up—a process that was dubbed as an “evacuation” by the American authorities—the imprisoned Japanese Americans had a real fear that the government would simply dispose of them. Instead, 120,000 or more Japanese Americans spent the duration of the war in concentration camps. While the treatment of the imprisoned Japanese Americans was much better than the treatment of Jews sent to concentration camps, their imprisonment was still unfounded and unjust.