When bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese American college students were among the many young men enrolled in ROTC and immediately called upon to defend the Hawaiian islands against invasion. In a few weeks, however, the military government questioned their loyalty and disarmed them. In No Sword to Bury, Franklin Odo places the largely untold story of the wartime experience of these young men in the context of the community created by their immigrant families and its relationship to the larger, white-dominated society. At the heart of the book are vivid oral histories that recall their service on the home front in the Varsity Victory Volunteers, a non-military group dedicated to public works, as well as in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Illuminating a critical moment in ethnic identity formation among this first generation of Americans of Japanese descent (the nisei), Odo shows how the war-time service and the post-war success of these men contributed to the simplistic view of Japanese Americans as a model minority in Hawai`i.

Franklin S. Odo is Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program and editor of The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience.

"Franklin Odo has captured with much warmth and poignancy, the emotions of men who, though abandoned by their country, loved this country and proved it by repeatedly standing in harm's way to defend it."—Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D, HI)

"No Sword to Bury is a fascinating study of an often overlooked part of the story of Americans of Japanese ancestry in the World War II era. The Japanese American population of Hawai`i navigated its way through one of the most dangerous and transformational periods in U.S. history. Franklin Odo's use of personal stories of the men and women who made that journey reveals the choices that were made, the strategies that were used, and the lessons we all can draw from them."—The Hon. Norman Y. Mineta

"One of the strengths of No Sword to Bury is Odo's care in presenting a more layered, nuanced study of Japanese Americans and their role in Hawaiian history. What emerges is a portrait of a lively, diverse group of men who had mixed motives and feelings of what they did during the course of their lives."—International Examiner