In the novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson uses the character Kabuo Miyamota to represent a more general concern of humanity. Through the trial of Kabuo and through flash backs, the author demonstrates the prejudice and hypocrisy of World War II society.

Prejudice comes in many forms, and not even a World War can justify it. Because of the prejudice that many Americans felt toward the Japanese during the post war era, Kabuo Miyamota was accused of murder. Without any evidence to support it, a doctor performing an autopsy suggests to the sheriff that if this death was a murder, then a Japanese man did it. The doctor makes this assumption ignoring the fact that anybody could have hit the man in the way that killed him, but because Kendo, which many people practice, originated in Japan a Japanese man must have done it. What is even more telling of this prejudice is that a jury would convict a man of murder without concrete evidence to support the conviction simply because the suspect is Japanese. The whole trial is reflective of today's society and the justice system. In the 1990's we still have prejudice fogging the minds of people, causing them to hate without cause. The problem Kabuo faces help the reader to put modern justice in a different light. It is because of prejudice that teenagers will beat a Vietnamese boy to death, or beat a boy with a pistol butt just because he is homosexual. It is these types of prejudices that the novel helps to explain and educate people about.

The hypocrisy displayed in, Snow Falling on Cedars, is appalling. During World War II, the American army rounded up all the Japanese in America and put them in internment camps. The government took their property and froze all of their assets. The Japanese Americans were treated like criminals without just cause. In the novel, Kabuo was forced to give up a sword that had been in his family for generations. His masamune was never returned to him. The government told the citizens that if they had anything that could be used as a weapon and didn't turn it over, they would be punished. Many of the farmers in the novel needed things like dynamite and shotguns in their work. When many Japanese returned to their homes, all of their belongings were gone, sometimes even property had been taken from them. Kabuo's family returned to what they thought was their strawberry fields, only to find it had been sold to someone else in his absence. The American public today makes a big fuss over what the Nazi's did to the Jews, and while Americans didn't kill the Japanese in the internment camps, they ruined many lives just the same. This novel shows the hypocrisy of society by telling Kabuo's families story in the American internment camps.

Often times novels are written to demonstrate a greater moral meaning than a plot. In the novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson uses the plight of Kabuo Miyamota to represent a more general concern of humanity. Kabuo's problems and trial demonstrate the worlds prejudice and hypocrisy.