It tells the story of a Japanese-American in the aftermath of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Despite his struggles with his family and some members of the community, Ichiro maintains a friendship with Kenji, a Japanese American who fought for the U.S. and badly injured one of his legs.

Through Ichiro's story, Okada examines what it means to be American in a post-war society whose non-white communities are struggling to find their places.

On 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii.

After Pearl Harbor, all citizens of Japanese ancestry had been classified 4-C, "enemy aliens", and denied entry into the armed forces.

Regarding the first, some respondents thought that by answering yes, they were signing up for combat duty in segregated units, expected to fight while their families continued to be confined in the camps.

[1] Approximately 300 young men served time in federal prison for refusing to join the military from camp.

[4] Found in a used book store by Jeff Chan in 1970, he and fellow Asian-American writers Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong reached out to the Okada estate to first try and meet with John Okada, then when they discovered that he had died, to acquire the rights to reissue the book under their Combined Asian-American Resources Project (CARP) label in 1976.

[5] Penguin Random House published an edition of the novel in 2019, claiming that it was in the public domain and was never registered for copyright protection, sparking a controversy within the literary community for its failure to consult with the Okada estate and disregarding the struggle Okada and CARP had in attempting to publish the work.

The play had its world premiere on 26 March 2010, at the Miles Memorial Playhouse in Santa Monica, California.