My grandmother was a child when the Japanese attacked. For much of her early life, they were the enemy. She grew up in constant fear of them. She heard they were monsters; everyone was talking about it. She harbored fear and resentment for the Japanese people for many years after the war had ended.

But time moved on and the world changed around her. The Japanese man from California that fell in love with her oldest daughter was nothing like the soldiers from her childhood. The bitterness eventually faded.

Her racism came from a situation, a horrible one, in which a group of people could be held accountable. She attributed the actions of a relatively ethnically homogeneous group of people to the ethnicity rather than that specific group of people and realized much later in her life that she may have made mistake due to the emotional weight of the loss she had suffered.