Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Questions 27 & 28

Questions 27 & 28

Yamashita, Karen Tei

Hardcover

General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $30.00

ISBN10: 1644453819
ISBN13: 9781644453810
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 464
Weight: 1.68
Height: 1.36 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.26
Language: English

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates--who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military--whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them--many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan--to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.

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