In 1988, Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Company, one of Japan’s largest papermakers, bought an aging American paper mill in Port Angeles, Washington, a small milltown on the Olympic Penninsula. Evelyn Iritani set out to document the impact of this purchase, which had triggered fears among its unionized workers and others of a threat to their American way of life. What she discovered was a story that began not in the 1980s but 150 years earlier, when some of the earliest visitors from Japan to North America were washed up on a beach nearby. In An Ocean Between Us, Iritani presents the centuries-long relationship between Japan and the Pacific Northwest in four stories: the three Japanese sailors enslaved by a Native American tribe, a Japanese-American boy imprisoned during World War II, a pregnant American woman killed by a balloon bomb built by Japanese schoolgirls and floated across the ocean, and the American milltown confronting a new economic reality.