Japan: Hard Soap

A TV series reopens old wounds

In terms of plot, the show is merely the stuff of any normal television soap opera: rape, plunder, anguish, despair. But the yearlong Japanese TV series Sanga Moyu is causing a real-life melodrama of its own. Based on a popular novel, Two Homelands by Toyoko Yamasaki, it is the story of the Japanese-American Amoh family, immigrants to the U.S. whose national loyalties are tested by World War II. The homeland they choose does not choose them, and the Amohs live through racist humiliation, imprisonment in a California...

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