A discussion of the social and political disenfranchisement of Japanese Americans after World War II. Caroline Simpson seeks to present a dramatic and revealing portrait of the role of the Japanese Americans in the cultural imaginary of the United States.

She revisits the Hiroshima Maidens project, an undertaking to bring young Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bombing to the United States for corrective surgery. Their treatments paid for by donations, the girls lived with American families in an experiment designed to celebrate the healing capacities of domestic life in the United States. Finally, she considers the experience of Japanese war brides of the 1950s, and the ways in which their treatment in the United States disguised racial hostility in a discourse of cultural pluralism.