Home Again (book)

James Ewen Edmiston, Jr. (1912–59) was born in San Francisco, California, the son of James E. Edmiston and Florence Edna Edmiston. He moved to Oregon when he was eight, growing up in Medford. He starred as a high school tennis player, then attended the University of Oregon, where he majored in journalism. He later stated that from the time he was eight years old, his goal was always to be a writer. However, in the years after graduating, he worked at a variety of jobs to support himself and his writing career and married his wife Eleanor Elizabeth, five years his senior. They had three children, daughter Irene and twin sons James A. and Joseph Edmiston. By 1940, Edmiston was living in San Jose, California, and working as a school teacher at San Jose High School, doing adult education under the auspices of the New Deal agency WPA. In December 1940, he published a letter in LIFE magazine.

By 1950 Edmonton had moved his family to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was working there as a salesman for a soap manufacturer. In the years that followed, he began working as a Hollywood screenwriter. While he was signed for some unsuccessful projects, his first produced script of note was for a 1952 television film, The Leather Coat , featuring Raymond Burr. He then was credited with the original story for the 1954 RKO film Dangerous Mission , starring Victor Mature and Piper Laurie. He wrote the script for the 1956 Western film A Day of Fury , starring Dale Robertson.

Even as he embarked on his Hollywood career, Edmiston turned to a subject that had long preoccupied him: the wartime experience of Japanese Americans. Though he had become aware of anti-Japanese bigotry long before World War II, his interest was largely fueled by his father's experience working with the WRA, and the bigotry that the Edmiston family had faced for helping the returnees.

Edmiston decided to write a "documentary novel"—in the style made most famous by John Dos Passos—to tell the group history of the Issei and Nisei. He settled on the Mio family, an actual Japanese American family living in Sunnyvale, as the main characters, using some real names of both Japanese Americans and whites. In order to make a more persuasive case, he then added statistical and factual data on Japanese Americans. Edmiston later stated that he began work on his "documentary novel" right after the war, at a time when his father was still active working with the WRA. By 1946 he had completed a manuscript of some 1,000 pages—far too long for a commercial sale. Uncertain about what publisher might be interested, he held on to the manuscript. However, once he started having commercial success with his writing, he clearly decided to return to the project. Meanwhile, passage of the McCarran-Walter Act , which for the first time provided naturalization rights for Japanese immigrants, supplied him with the kind of "happy ending" he had sought. Edmiston submitted the manuscript to Doubleday publishers, who agreed to publish it.

The work, entitled Home Again , was published in January 1955. The book tells the story of two Japanese brothers, Toshimichimaru and Hirokichimaru Mio, who immigrate to the United States and become flower growers. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family is forced from their land and incarcerated at Santa Anita and then Heart Mountain . The family is divided by their camp experience. One son enlists in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team , while another joins the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and is a draft resister . It is interesting to contrast Edmiston's ambivalent portrait of the Fair Play movement with John Okada's classic novel No-No Boy , published two years later and centered on a draft resister. While the Mios' son is portrayed as sincere and even patriotic in his opposition to enlistment, he is also portrayed as manipulated by an older resistance leader (presumably based on Kiyoshi Okamoto ) whom Edmiston depicts as a pro-Japanese subversive hypocritically wrapping his support for the enemy in constitutional principle.

At the end of the war, the Mios return to the San José area. There they face hostility and attacks by nightriders. Thanks to a dedicated WRA resettlement officer, Sam Morgan (clearly based on James E. Edmiston), the family manages to return to their land. In an interview with the San Mateo Times (January 13, 1955), Edmiston made clear that he chose to write about his home region because of its generally positive treatment of the Japanese Americans: "It is areas like San Mateo, with their high percentage of well-educated, intelligent, and wealthy people, who knew the Japanese by association and who helped the WRA program more than anyone else." He added that many local people, especially society matrons from the Peninsula, had openly opposed the initial removal of ethnic Japanese. "Those who had gardeners who were Japanese, knew the Japanese, [while] the opposition came from the "dust bowlers' of the 'Grapes of Wrath' variety. Never was there opposition from a socially prominent or wealthy person; on the contrary, they aided in scores of ways."

The book was widely and sympathetically reviewed, though the reviews were mixed in assessing the book's literary merit. In the New York Times , Gladwin Hill wrote that "the author knows his subject intimately" and "has amassed enough fact, color and drama for an epic trilogy." However, Hill added, "But the wealth of his material has defeated him. Overwhelmed by the task of selection and organization, he has resorted to chronological recitation.... the creative magic that shapes the raw stuff of life into fiction is simply absent." Similarly, Alden Whitman in The Saturday Review wrote that the author "knows his Japanese-Americans well, and he writes of them with sensitivity and understanding," but laments that he "presents his vast mass of raw documentation in the form of fiction, a device that blunts and diffuses the book's emotional force." The Christian Century reviewer noted "a scenario-simplicity about the style which limits the depths that could have been sounded in more leisurely passage," while the reviewer in The Nation stated that while Edmiston "has written out of knowledge, and with love and anger," that "his knowledge, love, and anger are greater than his craftsmanship." The San Francisco Chronicle book review editor singled it out as a book "Worth Keeping In Mind" while Francis Witherspoon of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that "Doubtless not all the blows suffered by the Mios in the years of exile fell upon a single family. But so convincing is James Edmiston that we believe they actually did." ^[1]

The reception by the Japanese American community was generally positive, and described the sympathetic portrayal of the Mios by a wartime "friend." There was likely confusion (perhaps deliberate) over Edmiston's identity, such that many in the community believed that the author himself (rather than his father) had worked for the WRA. The book is approving of the accommodationist/assimilationist bent best represented by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and includes a quote from JACL leader Mike Masaoka opposite the title page: "This is the only book written about us that has guts. It should be in every Japanese American home." After being offered a copy of the book by the JACL, Utah Republican Congressman William A. Dawson recommended it to his fellow members of Congress, calling it "one of the clearest testimonials to democracy and our way of life that I have ever read."

It was extensively covered in the JACL's Pacific Citizen (PC) newspaper, and the national JACL office sold the book to members at a discount. No fewer than eight PC columnists noted the book (and/or the planned movie) in their columns, many mentioning it multiple times. Columnists Larry Tajiri and Tats Kushida also breathlessly followed the efforts to make the book into a movie, with producer Sam Jaffe and writer/director Michael Blackfort visiting with JACL officials, producing a completed script, and putting out a casting call via the PC. But after mid-1957, there is no further mention of the movie project. ^[2]

In the next years, Edmiston turned back to movie and television writing work, working in such diverse genres as comedy, mystery stories, and thrillers. Edmonton also worked on a series of collaborations with actor/director Cornel Wilde. One unique project for which he provided the scenario was The Incredible Jewel Robbery , a 30-minute silent comic film for TV's General Electric Theatre that featured the final performance of the comedy team The Marx Brothers.

In fall 1958, Edmiston travelled to Phoenix, Arizona to be present for the filming of Four Fast Guns , a western starring James Craig and Martha Vickers. While on the set he collapsed and was brought back to Hollywood. In February 1959 he died suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 47 years old.

Home Again went swiftly out of print and with the appearance of many more recent fictional accounts and memoirs—many by Japanese Americans themselves—has faded into obscurity. It nonetheless remains a historic landmark in literary treatments of Japanese American wartime confinement.

Home Again

This item has been made freely available in the Digital Library of Japanese American Incarceration , a collaborative project with Internet Archive .

Might also like: City in the Sun by Karon Kehoe; The Moved-Outers " by Florence Crannell Means; The Harvest of Hate by Georgia Day Robertson

Edmiston, James. Home Again . Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1955. 316 pages.

"Good News." Christian Century , March 9, 1955, 304–05. ["His energetic participation in the whole effort to save a tragically abused people (without worrying about saving ‘The People’s face) prepared him to tell the story with a passion and compassion that lift it out of the ordinary."]

Hill, Gladwin. "Tragic Uprooting." New York Times , January 30, 1955, section VII, 23. ["Properly organized, this book could have been made into a truly memorable novel. But the creative magic that shapes the raw stuff of life into fiction is simply absent."]

Komai, Khan. "'Home Again,' New Evacuation Novel, Paints Vivid Tale of Strife." Rafu Shimpo , Jan. 20, 1955, 1. ["A must reading for all Japanese… better than any novel to date that tells the story of the Japanese through evacuation and relocation."]

Marge [Umezuki], The New Canadian , Oct. 6, 1956, 7. ["The book is very entertaining in its treatment of the differing personalities, as well as informative on the history of the Japanese in America, which is readily applicable to Canadian Japanese."]

"Total or Totalitarian?" The Nation , September 3, 1955, 208. ["Mr Edmiston has written out of knowledge, and with love and anger. Evidently he chose the novel form in order to reach a larger audience than has been won for several excellent non-fiction works. Unfortunately his knowledge, love, and anger are greater than his craftsmanship."]

Whitman, Alden. " The Nisei in Wartime. " The Saturday Review , April 9, 1955, p. 22. ["Mr. Edmiston presents his vast mass of raw documentation in the form of fiction, a device that blunts and diffuses the book’s total emotional force."]

Witherspoon, Francis, New York Tribune Herald , January 23, 1955, 3. ["Doubtless not all the blows suffered by the Mios in the years of exile fell upon a single family. But so convincing is James Edmiston that we believe they actually did."]