Toshio Mori "The Sweet Potato"

There are very few web pages about Japanese American author Toshio Mori and his writing: all I can find at the moment is a blurb about the latest collection of his work by Akira Tofina. Here is a link to another of Mori's short stories from the collection, Yokohama, California: "The Woman who Makes Swell Doughnuts." It's on page 7 of this PDF publication.

For more historical context, after you look at the 1940s links for Ellison's story, see the brief chronology of Japanese American history by JANET. A massive resource is the UCLA Asian American Studies home page, which has hundreds of links. The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has some digital exhibits, including some great photography collections. For more on Mori's wartime experience, the Topaz Museum page--Topaz is the internment camp where Mori was held during the war years. Their "Resources" page also has a lot of links to related web sites.

Ideas to consider as you read the story, particularly concerning nation and identity: "home" and "abroad." How do those ideas function in this story? What about the connections between appearance and identity? And again the meanings of "American" and "America" come into play here. What about language? Can you tell when the characters are speaking English to each other and when they are speaking in Japanese? How can you tell?

The story is set on the last day of the 1939-40 World's Fair on Yerba Buena Island. You can read more about the fair here. What does the location off the coast in the Pacific Ocean add to the story's representation of "place?"

Massey again: places "are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations....their 'identities' are constructed through the specificity of their interaction with other places rather than by counterposition to them" (121). With this in mind, where is the "place" of this story? Can you define it?