How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He was, his son remembered, morally meticulous, and though Ishmael might strive to emulate this, there was nevertheless this matter of the war—this matter of the arm he'd lost—that made such scrupulosity difficult. (4.19)
This is Ishmael thinking about how different he is from his father, attributing their differences to his participation in the war and all he endured there.
Quote #2
"He got hit pretty hard with something fairly flat, Art. Puts me in mind of a type of gun butt wound I saw a few times in the war. One of those kendo strikes the Japs used." (5.52)
Even a decade (ish) after World War II ended, you can see that people still think a lot about the war during the novel's present-day timeline. Here, Horace Whaley sees a head wound (one that ultimately turns out to be from a boat) and concludes it's got to be from a kendo-esque strike.
Quote #3
The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything. (7.14)
The novel takes us through the period after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when Japanese Americans were forced to enter internment camps. Here, we get the perspective of the fictional fishermen of San Piedro on these events.