Takaki begins Chapter 1 by discussing an encounter with a taxi driver in Norfolk, Virginia. He had just flown in from San Francisco to give a keynote speech at a conference about multicultural education. The taxi driver, a white man in his forties, asks Takaki how long he has lived in the United States, and Takaki replies, “All my life” (1). He tells the taxi driver that his grandfather migrated from Japan in the 1880s, and his family has lived in the United States for over 100 years. Takaki notes that this is not the first time he has been asked this question, and he uses it as a starting point to discuss the main argument of his book, which is that minority groups in the United States are frequently “left out of history and America itself” (5).

Takaki connects this phenomenon to a “Master Narrative of American History” that depicts America as a country settled by European immigrants and Americans as white (4). To counter the master narrative, Takaki lays out his argument that America always has been and always will be a multicultural country. He discusses the historical contributions of numerous ethnic minority groups—Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Mexican Americans, and Muslim Americans.