Monica Sone

After finishing her postgraduate work at Case Western, Sone became a clinical psychologist and social worker for the Catholic Community League, practicing for thirty-eight years. She married Geary Sone, and the couple settled in Canton, Ohio, where they raised four children. She died in Canton shortly after her 92nd birthday.

Sone offers a first-hand account of life at the Puyallup Assembly Center and at Minidoka, one of ten public concentration camps where Japanese Americans were detained during the war. Her account offers her observations of life in the camps and describes how its residents struggled to accommodate their situation. By the time Nisei Daughter was reissued in 1979, Americans were becoming increasingly aware of and sensitive to mistreatment of people of Japanese descent in the United States during World War II. The role of Nikkei in raising awareness to their internment story reflected in Sone's preface for the 1979 edition.

Sone's best-known work, the memoir Nisei Daughter, was originally published by Little, Brown in 1953. It tells the story of a Japanese immigrant family's life in the United States before and during the war. Sone's parents are from Japan (Issei), and their children are born in the States, making them Nisei (as in the title). The book explores the cultural differences the family faced before the war, both in the States and on a visit to Japan, and their incarceration during World War II. The story is told from Sone's perspective. The cover photograph of the original edition shows Sone and her sister Sammy smiling and sitting on the steps of the Carrollton Hotel, their father's establishment, in 1932.

Sone eventually received a scholarship to attend Hanover College, called "Wendell College" in her memoir, a Presbyterian school in Indiana. She finished her undergraduate degree at Hanover and in 1949 received a master's degree in clinical psychology from Case Western Reserve University.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded" and paving the way for the removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Sone was 21 when she and her family were "evacuated" from their home in Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood to the Puyallup Assembly Center, in May 1942. Three months later, the Itois were transferred to the War Relocation Authority camp at Minidoka, Idaho. In 1943, Sone was allowed to leave camp after passing the so-called "loyalty questionnaire" and relocated to the Chicago area, where she worked as a dental assistant and lived with a white Presbyterian minister and his family.

Monica Sone (September 1, 1919 – September 5, 2011), born Kazuko Itoi, was a Japanese American writer, best known for her 1953 autobiographical memoir Nisei Daughter, which tells of the Japanese American experience in Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the World War II internment camps and which is an important text in Asian American and Women's Studies courses.