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Heroes, written by Ken Mochizuki and illustrated by Dom Lee, follows a day in the life of Donnie Okada as he navigates racism, friendships, and family history to discover the meaning of heroism.

What I liked:

• I guessed what Donnie’s dad and uncle were going to do as soon as they said they would pick him up from school, but I still cheered inside my head when I flipped the page and saw them standing there. I don’t remember seeing any heroic representations of Japanese people in the non-Japan-sourced media I consumed as a kid. Even though I knew about the 442^nd, I heard about them in the context of history, of a piece with the concentration camps, and never saw them valorized in literature or other cultural media. I wonder how much sooner I might have looked into JA/Nikkei history if I’d been introduced to Heroes and similar books as a kid.
• The combination of underplaying achievements and badass reveals is so Japanese. さすが日本人。I also appreciate Mochizuki making a point to tell us Uncle Yosh never talks about the war or watches war-related television. I suspect most Japanese/Nikkei readers will note the subtle tension there and either take the implicit lesson from it or use it as a starting point for questioning the costs of war, decorated uniforms notwithstanding. I do wonder how many JA/Nikkei readers will follow the line of thinking all the way to discussions about the role of militarism in maintaining US/white hegemony and how utilizing this perspective to reflect on groups like the 442^nd might result in conflicted representations of Japanese American history.
• Dom Lee is an amazing artist! Looking at his hyper-realistic Asian portraits is just like leafing through a family album. Additionally, the detail with which he renders the facial features and body language of characters of different races suggests close observation of real-life scenarios. As I was reading, I found myself thinking, here is an artist who knows how it feels to experience racism and who has thought deeply about the visual aspects of those experiences. I would love to know what kind of references (photos or otherwise) he used to create these illustrations. To me, Donnie and his relatives look specifically Japanese – I can see bits of my own male relatives in their features – as opposed to the vaguely ‘Asian’-looking characters sometimes produced by non-Asian illustrators. Although I think there is a time and place for ‘generally Asian’-looking characters, as drawn by Asians, for a story deeply rooted in Japanese American history like Heroes, I very much appreciate Lee’s efforts to produce Japanese-looking characters. I would gift this book to any of my family members on the strength of the illustrations alone.

What I learned:

• It sounds like Donnie’s dad owns a gas station. This isn’t exactly a common occupation among contemporary JA/Nikkei and it got me thinking about what other types of occupations Japanese Americans found themselves in after the camps closed. I feel like this could segue into a broader discussion about classism and the significance of one’s socioeconomic status in our community today, but I think I need to do some more reading first. If I recall correctly, a few of the books on my TBR focus on JA/Nikkei experiences in the immediate postwar years, so those might be a good place to start.

Questions I had:

• Are the sunglasses references deliberate? In my post about another of Mochizuki’s picture books, Baseball Saved Us, I noted the appearance of sunglasses in the text and made some guesses about why they were so prominently featured. It seems funny to me how, in Heroes, we see our ‘heroes’ wearing sunglasses. Mochizuki even goes to the trouble of telling us in the text, through Donnie’s eyes, about their sunglasses, so I wonder if this is his subtle way of saying, ‘maybe the camp guards wore sunglasses back then, but look who wears them now!’
• In the illustration showing Donnie’s friends leaving the gas station after chasing him there, Lee depicts the white boy turning to look back at Donnie and his dad and uncle, while the Black boy walks away, facing forward. Why did Lee make this compositional choice? I can think of several interpretations, but my favorite is imagining Lee wanted to capture several layers of racial tension as succinctly as possible. At no point does the text indicate Reggie sees any kind of shared racial experience between himself and Donnie. Instead, Reggie is shown as consistently siding with white kids in designating Donnie the ‘enemy’ because of his Asian features. Nevertheless, I like to think Lee drew Reggie facing forward because he accepts, on some level, why it is wrong to conflate Donnie with the ‘enemy’ because of his race, whereas the white boy (whose name, frankly, I don’t recall) is looking back in defiance because he can’t or won’t acknowledge the racism at the root of his actions. Of course, I don’t actually know why Lee composed the illustration this way, but I wonder if other POC/Asian readers, especially kids, will draw the same conclusion I did.

Follow-up:

• I might read Passage to Freedom, Mochizuki’s third (I think) collaboration with Lee, though if I did, it would probably be mostly to enjoy more of Lee’s illustrations.