The Soul Shall Dance grapples with many of the issues facing Japanese Americans in America such as assimilation, immigration, social, economic, and political status, and simply surviving in the cruelties of the 'California Dream' era.
It has various themes which are Identity, abuse, and Sexism.
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The themes of the soul shall dance are: The theme of identity is seen through many characters and social situations. 'Despite her masculine habits, Mrs. Oka was never less than a woman. She was no lady in the eye of social amenities, but the feminine in her was innate and never left her.'
''Thank you, we are fine', but sometimes Kiyoko-san's upper lip would pull over her teeth, and her voice would become very soft and she would say, 'Drink, always drinking and fighting.' In those times my mother would invariably say, 'Endure, soon you will be marrying and going away.'
Another theme was the abuse and caste system between the Japanese and Americans telling about the land problem and the abuse of people. The fact that the Japanese cannot own land in America and must leave every two years means they as families are unable to settle down. This leads to an inability to build up wealth, establish themselves socially, and be overall successful in the community and the American Economic environment. The dialogue discusses that they must find new rent elsewhere, which contrasts sharply with the discussion of how Kiyoko is finally becoming comfortable in her surroundings.
Examples of the themes of the Soul Shall Dance are:
- The Lives of the Japanese-Americans
In 1941, the Japanese, who were fighting alongside the Germans and the Italians against the Allied forces, were afraid that the United States, which had been isolated since the First World War, might change its mind and ally itself against them alongside England and Russia. So, to prevent such a thing, the Japanese air forces sneaked into the port city of Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, and bombed it, killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process. As a result of this, the Americans began to fear that the Japanese residents in their country might try and back up the army of their native land. Thus, on the order of President Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, the American government forced the Japanese-American people into camps, which the government called 'relocation centers', and deprived them of their liberty, and basic freedom of the American Constitution.
The caste system is a closed communal stratification system, where people of a region inherit their position based on some specific rules that have been followed by it since time immemorial. Like India, Japan also used to practice a twisted caste system, which had developed since the inception of the first Japanese empire.
The Japanese caste system consisted broadly of two categories: the Touchable class and the Untouchable class ('Burakumin' in Japanese). While the Touchable class is the actual four-tier hierarchical system of samurai, the peasants, the craftsmen, and the merchants (the ascending order), the Untouchable class was shunned and ostracized by the Touchable class executioners, workers in slaughterhouses, the undertakers, the tanners, and the butcher.
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