Hayawo Kiyama was born in 1936 and grew up in Japan during the second world war. His autobiography, transcribed and edited by Christine Willis, captures the life and culture of that place and time as well as his and his family's suffering during the war. He learns to fish to help feed his family, and studies martial arts. There was great poverty and deprivation, and eventually the shock to the whole nation as well as his community and family of the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Hayawo's father is throughout critical of his less-than stellar scholarship, and he redoubles his efforts to succeed, hoping to please his father and help his family.

His circuitous route to his eventual home and business captures the life of an immigrant farm worker and his struggles to make enough money to go out on his own and not be dependent on his wealthy employer. Later, after years of struggle, he immigrated to the United States because of the strong dollar. He worked as a field laborer and eventually started his own family and became a U.S. citizen and founded a judo dojo school. This is an inspiring story of determination and hard work as well as a study of working and middle class Japanese in the middle of the twentieth century, and of what it was like for an immigrant in California in the late twentieth and early twenty-first.