We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.
-- Narrator (Come, Japanese! paragraph 4)

Importance: As the young Japanese women sailed toward their new lives in America, they still had nightmares that their fathers had sold them, as they had their prettier sisters, to work at a house of prostitution. It was a common practice in Japan for fathers to sell their daughters to become prostitutes in order to make money.

That the photographs we had been sent were twenty years old. That the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts.
-- Narrator (Come, Japanese! paragraph 24)

Importance: Once the Japanese women arrived in...