Ironic innocence
The irony of the opening is that children are asked to encounter racism without understanding it. The irony of their innocence illustrates the true stupidity and brokenness of racist points of view, because to a child, race seems to be one kind of thing, but because of the home lives of her classmates and the influence of their parents, she sees that they have been trained to look down on her.
The irony of names
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare penned the famous question, "What is in a name?" That's the question this story asks too, because ironically, the author's name, Monica Sone, is actually not her real name in Japanese. She is actually Kazuko Sone, but for political reasons, her family made her to go by Monica, which is less marked. A name change is ironic by the virtue of a name's purpose, to identify someone. For Kazuko, it removes identity from her.
The irony of death
The death of her brother is untimely, and it is unexpected, so it is ironic in those dramatic ways, but also it is ironic for a child to die, because one never suspects such a fate, and then also because Kazuko is forced to deal with the issue of death at her own young age, when death is so clearly an issue far beyond human understanding.
The irony of asthma
Ironically, Sone's real experience of asthma works perfectly as a synchronous symbol for her inability to survive American racism. She becomes paranoid, which is a feeling asthmatics are typically used to, because they live in the fear of breathing attacks, which are deathly and scary, by the way. To need air but to not be able to breathe, that is truly horrifying. The irony of it is that air is invisible, so only Sone knows what her breathing feels like. The stakes are also ironic, because a mistake could mean death.
The internment and blame
When Pearl Harbor happens, that is bad news for America, but arguably, it was most destructive to Japanese Americans who were scapegoated in a moment of national panic and herded to concentration camps, which of course they didn't call concentrate camps, but were detainment facilities where an entire ethnicity was removed from the population and forced into a criminal sentence, basically. The irony is that, although Sone's family is Japanese, that doesn't mean she enjoys Japan attacking America. The internment is ironic because it is completely counterintuitive and blatantly horrifying behavior for a major world government.
