in 1870, five years after the Civil War, former slaves became eligible for citizenship. But Japanese nationals, who had first legally immigrated to Hawaii in 1868, were, like the Chinese, excluded. By the early 1920s, more than twenty-five thousand legal immigrants from Hiroshima lived in the United States, more than from any other area in Japan. Yamaguchi and Kumamoto prefectures sent many immigrants, too. They were all aliens in a foreign land. Although nisei (second-generation) children like Harry and his siblings were citizens because they were born in the United States, their immigrant
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