What are the motifs in Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata?

Racism is a recurring idea. Set mostly in pre—Civil Rights era Georgia, the novel accurately portrays the treatment of Japanese Americans in the United States in the 1950s. Though they are U.S. citizens, the Japanese American characters in Kira-Kira are continuously treated as outsiders and excluded from mainstream society. In several instances, the Takeshimas encounter people who do not even recognize them as Japanese; at the motel, the front-desk woman assumes they are Indian or Mexican, and when Katie starts school the other students ask if she is Chinese or Japanese.