When I wrote Love in the Library, the true story of my maternal grandparents who met in a Japanese American incarceration camp during WWII, I did not start the story with Pearl Harbor. I made this choice on purpose. Leading with the state line of justification for the deep injustice that followed is, in my opinion, a mistake with several insidious repercussions. To start, a justification for the unjustifiable will always minimize the cruelty, absurdity, and violence of the disproportionate reaction. It will also minimize the pain of survivors — sure you were uncomfortable, but what was the US supposed to do, not defend itself? — and treat their lives as acceptable collateral damage. It will also occlude the climate of injustice and racism that preceded it. As if Japanese Americans had been whole-heartedly embraced by the American community until their ancestral nation attacked us; a claim that would be both ahistorical and deeply naive. This is not a decision I made with the intention of brushing aside the American deaths on December 7th as if they did not matter. Of course they do. But mourning and the honest recounting of history are things that can happen simultaneously, or entirely separately. These are not mutually exclusive practices. And when we recount history, we are learning to understand that the pain of marginalized people can no longer be ignored. Grave injustice can always be rationalized in the moment, though it can rarely bear the scrutiny of even a vague attempt at rigorous hindsight.
—Maggie Tokuda-Hall, from "Justifying the Unjustifiable: Why Japanese Americans Must Stand with Palestine," in the Denshō Catalyst