811.54 DEC, May Sky:  there is always tomorrow: an anthology of Japanese American concentration camp kaiko haiku
In one of the most shameful moments of U.S. history, thousands of innocent citizens of Japanese descent were interned in concentration camps in the western states. Among them were many amateur poets who were active in haiku societies and who did not stop writing during their confinement. Editor de Cristoforo, herself a former internee, has collected the poignant documents of human pain and hope that are those concentration camp haiku, and in her lengthy preface, she sets them in their artistic and social contexts. Although the preface is interesting and academically important, the poems themselves--simple in language, emotionally blunt--are the heart of this book. "Hand-cuffed and taken away / I see my husband / even today," one woman writes. "Women are busier than men / people are living in disarray / and there are irises," another records. And there is this: "Frosty night / listening to rumbling train / we have come a long way." A beautiful, important collection and an astonishing document of the human spirit.

921 HOU, Farewell to Manzanar
During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life. At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances. Written with her husband, Jeanne delivers a powerful first-person account that reveals her search for the meaning of Manzanar.

921 SON, Nisei Daughter
Monica Sone spent her childhood in pre-World War II Seattle, in a part Japanese, part American world. Dinner might be steak and pumpkin pie or pickled daikon, rice, and soy sauce; there was American public school during the day and the strict formality of Japanese school in the late afternoons. "I found myself switching my personality back and forth daily like a chameleon. At Bailey Gatzert School I was a jumping, screaming, roustabout Yankee, but at the stroke of three...I suddenly became a modest, faltering, earnest little Japanese girl with a small timid voice." Her memories of growing up are vivid and full of marvelous stories, showing the confusion, frustration, and enrichment of living within two cultures. These elements come together when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and Monica and her family are sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Idaho. Nisei Daughter describes the loss of property and the personal insults, the barbed wire and armed guards, the dust storms, horrible food, unfinished barracks, and barren land - and the efforts of the Japanese-Americans to maintain their ethics, family life, and belief in the United States. Monica Sone is furious at the blatant disregard of her civil rights, and yet ironically, it is during her time in the camps and afterwards in the Midwest that she finally brings together the various aspects of her heritage. Straightforward, searching, often funny, this is a highly readable account of one woman's experience living in many worlds.

921 TAK, To the Stars:  the autobiography of George Takei
Star Trek's Mr. Sulu may be famous for fictional adventures out among the asteroids, but his own life, especially the early years, down on terra firma has been adventurous, too. To begin with, adventure stemmed from the accident of birth. The first child of a Japanese American mother and Japanese immigrant father denied U.S. citizenship because of the naturalization quotas then in force, Takei went with them into internment camps, first in Arkansas and then in California, during World War II. After the war, the family settled in East L.A., where George began school and a lifelong appreciation for Latino culture. Later, his father managed a crosstown move that put George into a mixed-race, up-and-coming, middle-class neighborhood, and his first adventure in political action occurred when teenage George found summer work picking strawberries and discovered the paymasters cheating Mexican pickers. His reflections on politics and social issues round out and enhance his Star Trek memoir, making for an exceptional contribution.

921 UCH, The Invisible Thread
Growing up in California, Yoshi knew her family looked different from their neighbors. Still, she felt like an American. But everything changed when America went to war against Japan. Along with all the other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, Yoshi's family were rounded up and imprisoned in a crowded. badly built camp in the Nevada desert because they "looked like the enemy." Yoshiko Uchida grew up to be an award-winning author. This memoir of her childhood gives a personal account of a shameful episode in American history.

929.2 KES, Stubborn Twig:  three generations in the life of a Japanese American family
The Japanese immigrant experience is documented here in a detailed social history of three generations of an Oregon family. Beginning with the life of 16-year-old Masuo Yasui, who arrived in 1903 from an agricultural village in the Honshu region of Japan to work as a railroad laborer in Oregon's Hood River Valley, the book reaches to the lives of his grandchildren--lawyers, doctors, teachers and filmmakers--some of whom have married non-Asians. Kessler, a journalism teacher at the University of Oregon and author of six books, takes us through the obstacle course which Asian immigrants typically had to overcome, from the early exclusionary laws barring them from citizenship, to WW II internment camps. Her research into each of her subject's lives is diligent and she recounts the intimate tragedies (suicides, illnesses), the determination, hard work and family solidarity that characterized the Yasuis' rise to affluence and success. Kessler has created a praiseworthy chronicle of the "process and meaning of becoming an American, of promise and prejudice in a new land." As she writes in her preface, "Being an outsider is the quintessential American experience. It is, in fact, our single common bond.".

940.53 LEV, A Fence Away from Freedom
Loss of property, liberty, and in a few cases, life for Americans of Japanese descent, was the result of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February of 1944. More than 110,000 people were removed from their homes along the West Coast and moved to makeshift facilities in the interior euphemistically labeled "relocation camps." Levine has gathered together the personal testimony of 35 survivors, all of whom were children or teenagers at the time. These moving stories clearly demonstrate the depth of racial hatred present in the U.S. even before Pearl Harbor. That little or no protest was raised by the majority of Americans at the time doesn't seem surprising. What is astonishing, however, is how loyal most of the Japanese Americans remained to the U.S. government. The testimony gathered here tells of many young men who volunteered for the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team and fought with distinction in Europe. But readers are also told of those who resisted the government and the price that they paid for it. Conditions in the camps are described in great detail, including the many adaptations that people came up with to cope with internment and try to carry on a normal life.

940.53 MUL, Free to Die for their Country
In the many books written about the Japanese American internment during World War II, one aspect that has not been treated in much detail is what happened when the U.S. military decided to draft the same young men the government had locked away in internment camps. Muller (Univ. of North Carolina School of Law) takes a detailed look at the resisters at the Minidoka, Heart Mountain, and Tule Lake camps. Using interviews with 11 of the resisters, as well as government records, court cases, internment camp newspapers, and more, Muller investigates why the government reinstated the draft for Japanese Americans in 1943, considers why some of the Nisei resisted, and examines the trials, prison sentences, and lasting aftereffects on their lives. He also looks at the legal reasoning, or lack thereof, behind the verdicts; the Minidoka and Heart Mountain resisters were convicted, while the Tule Lake resisters were acquitted. Although all were pardoned in 1947, they still face criticism from family and from veterans, and most have remained silent until now.

940.53 NG, Japanese American Internment during World War II
The internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II is one of the most shameful episodes in American history. This history and reference guide will help students and other interested readers to understand the history of this action and its reinterpretation in recent years, but it will also help readers to understand the Japanese American wartime experience through the words of those who were interned. Why did the U.S. government take this extraordinary action? How was the evacuation and resettlement handled? How did Japanese Americans feel on being asked to leave their homes and live in what amounted to concentration camps? How did they respond, and did they resist? What developments have taken place in the last twenty years that have reevaluated this wartime action? A variety of materials is provided to assist readers in understanding the internment experience. Six interpretive essays examine key aspects of the event and provide new interpretations based on the most recent scholarship. Essays include: - A short narrative history of the Japanese in America before World War II - The evacuation - Life within barbed wire-the assembly and relocation centers - The question of loyalty-Japanese Americans in the military and draft resisters - Legal challenges to the evacuation and internment - After the war-resettlement and redress A chronology of events, 26 biographical profiles of important figures, the text of 10 key primary documents--from Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment camps, to first-person accounts of the internment experience--a glossary of terms, and an annotative bibliography of recommended print sources and web sites provide ready reference value.

940.53 OKI, Whispered Silences
In 1981, photographer Myers stumbled onto the dusty remains of the Japanese relocation camp of Manzanar in California. She set out to record the half-buried past of this and nine other camps, taking pictures of ruined barracks, tombstones, deserted gardens, moldering toys. Whispered Silences combines 65 of those stark duotone photographs of parched landscapes and forgotten objects with a smart, concise introduction to the Japanese American experience by Cornell historian Okihiro. Having survived horrifying conditions as plantation workers, indentured servants and picture brides, the first Japanese immigrants could only hope for better for their children, who, unlike them, could become citizens. But second-generation Japanese American citizens faced another hurdle in the paranoid racism that spawned a Bureau of Investigation report published in 1920 claiming that Japan was "bent on a 'program for world supremacy'" and, some 20 years later, the interning of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Okihiro uses poetry and memoirs of internees who recall trying to create victory gardens from the sandy soil or paper flowers from orange wrappings, a resourcefulness that parallels the "Spam sushi" of their parents' plantation experiences. Okihiro's interwoven personal reminiscence is entirely apt, and his father's story in particular is a metaphor. The elder Okihiro left Hawaii to train in a segregated battalion "knowing that his parents were in a little village just outside Hiroshima, that his brother was probably in Japan's military, that his own country distrusted him." He would eventually earn a Purple Heart.

940.53 PER, Personal Justice Denied:  Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
This book tells the extraordinary story of the incarnation of mainland Japanese Americans and Alaskan Aleuts during World War II. Although this wartime episode is now almost universally recognized as a catastrophe, for decades various government officials and agencies defended their actions by asserting a military necessity. Learn about the situation before Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066, Economic Loss, Relocation Centers, Germans and German Americans, and After Camp.

940.53 ROB, By the Order of the President:  FDR and the internment of Japanese Americans
On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why. Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy. By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.

940.53 STA, I Am An American:  a true story of Japanese internment
In clear and fascinating prose, Stanley has set forth the compelling story of one of America's darkest times- the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He has based his account on the experiences of Shi Nomura, who was sent to Manzanar in the deserts of eastern California when he was a high school senior. But the author weaves in more than absorbing personal details; he places the camps in a broader historical context, from Japanese immigration and the resentment it aroused to outstanding Japanese American service in the war. His meticulously researched volume is accompanied by numerous, fine period black-and-white photographs, many by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams; and he makes judicious use of maps. This eloquent account of the disastrous results of racial prejudice stands as a reminder to us in today's pluralistic society.


 

940.53 TAK, A Child in Prison Camp
When Shizuye Takashima, “Shichan” as she was called, was eleven years old, her entire world changed forever. As a Japanese-Canadian in 1941, she was among thousands of people forced from their homes and sent to live in internment camps in the Canadian Rockies. Although none had been convicted of any crime, they were considered the enemy because the country was at war with Japan. In this true story of sadness and joy, Shichan recalls her life in the days leading up to her family’s forced movement to the camp, her fear, anger, and frustration as the war drags on, and the surprising joys in the camp: a Kabuki play, holiday celebrations, and the ever-present beauty of the stars.


 

940.53 TAK, Double victory : a multicultural history of America in World War II
America's entry into World War II made comrades-in-arms of men and women from every region and every walk of life, united in the battle for freedom and against fascism. It is no small irony, historian Ronald Takaki observes, that the armed struggle for democracy abroad "was accompanied by a disregard for our nation's declaration that 'all men are created equal'" in the form of institutional racism of many kinds, from the segregation of African American units to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans and the refusal to grant asylum to Jewish refugees. In Double Victory, Takaki examines the many contributions of America's minorities to the war effort, celebrating the work of Mexican farm laborers and Anglo women welders, of Navajo code talkers and Filipino foot soldiers, who proclaimed themselves to be "men, not houseboys," of Chinese American combat nurses and Asian Indian gunners. These men and women, Takaki writes, made extraordinary sacrifices in their battle against enemies without and enemies within. Although their efforts were not always appreciated at the time, they helped set in motion the struggle for civil rights that would explode two decades later. Takaki's book is a welcome and much needed entry in the recent literature on the World War II era, and it merits the widest possible audience.


 

940.53 TAY, Jewel of the desert : Japanese American internment at Topaz
In the spring of 1942, under the guise of "military necessity," the U.S. government evacuated 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast. About 7,000 people from the San Francisco Bay Area--the vast majority of whom were American citizens--were moved to an assembly center at Tanforan Racetrack and then to a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Dubbed the "jewel of the desert," the camp remained in operation until October 1945. This compelling book tells the history of Japanese Americans of San Francisco and the Bay Area, and of their experiences of relocation and internment.


 

940.53 TUN, The children of Topaz : the story of a Japanese American internment camp : based on a classroom diary
The authors have constructed their text around an actual classroom diary kept by American children of Japanese ancestry, unfairly and unconstitutionally sent to prison camp during World War II. Selections of entries made by a third-grade class cover the period from March 8 to August 12, 1943. Under each date, the brief accounts are given, followed by extensive, well-researched commentaries explaining the children's writing. The youngsters reveal a lively interest in the world around them and a patriotic support of the war effort. The commentary details the bleakness and cruelty of their situations and amazing loyalty in light of the injustices heaped upon their families by the U.S. government and their fellow citizens. The well-chosen illustrations consist of fine-quality period photographs, a layout of the camp, and black-and-white reproductions of the children's crayon artwork. The photos are often quite moving and bring home the experiences described in the text. Here readers are exposed to nine-year-olds writing as it happened and are given a timely reminder for those who say, "It can't happen here.".


 

940.54 ADA, Born free and equal : the story of loyal Japanese Americans, Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California : photographs from the Library of Congress collection
On February 19, 1942, U.S. presidential order forcibly removed more than 110,000 persons from their homes to one of ten "war relocation centers" across the country. All were of Japanese ancestry, but two-thirds were American citizens. Ralph Merritt, then director of Manzanar War Relocation Center, asked friend Ansel Adams to photograph the center, set against the remote mountains of California's Sierra Nevada. The resulting effort, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans, written and photographed by Adams, was released in 1944 to the American public as a book and exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Reeling from the impact of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and unable to make the distinction between American citizens of Japanese ancestry and the Japanese enemy of war, Adams' message was essentially lost on the American public. In 1965, Adams donated his entire collection of Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress. Archie Miyatake, interned at Manzanar with his family and father, Los Angeles photographer Toyo Miyatake, wrote the introduction to this new edition. His father smuggled into camp a contraband camera lens and ground glass, making a camera from scraps of wood. Toyo said to his son: "As a photographer I have a responsibility to record life here at this camp so this kind of thing never happens again.".


 

940.54 BAI, City in the Sun
This engrossing study is focused upon the largest of these immense prisons—Poston, the City in the Sun—hastily erected upon the heat ridden and pestilential Colorado River Desert in western Arizona—isolated shack-city of 20,000 unhappy and bewildered souls. Here is the story of American citizens, treated as enemy aliens, and the frustrating problems when they were forced to adjust to an inhuman and unbelievable experience. The reaction of Poston’s angered and anxious populace, the revolt, and its magnificent resolution, all are sensitively and excitingly chronicled.

 

940.54 CON, Executive Order 9066:  the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans
The days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were dark days of the American spirit. Unable to strike back effectively against the Japanese Empire, Americans in the Western states lashed out at fellow citizens and resident aliens o Japanese ancestry. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, was the instrument that allowed military commanders to designate areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Under this order all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions to guarded camps in the interior.


 

940.54 COO, Remembering Manzanar : life in a Japanese relocation camp
Examine life in the Manzanar relocation camp in eastern California, where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were exiled between March 1942 and November 1945. Like many, the author feels the WWII confinement of American citizens, an act he deems "one of the most serious mistakes in our nation's history." Get a clear portrait of residents' living conditions and daily routines. The inclusion of quotes from those who lived at Manzanar gives the book a sense of immediacy as well as a sharp emotional edge. Reinforcing the bitter irony of this experience are such pointed comments as that of a then 12-year-old boy, who asks, "What's the use of studying American history when we're behind barbed wire?" Carefully selected photos (including some by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams) balance government-sanctioned and unofficial pictures of life in the camp.

940.54 INO, The Heart Mountain Story
Life in the internment camp, was not quite what was portrayed in the official War Relocation Authority photographs. The photographs of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center remained largely hidden until an exhibition in 1995.


 

940.54 KIK, Promises kept : the life of an Issei man
This is the story of the author's father, Saburo, through the eyes of his wife and child. They recall different parts of his past and the inner turmoil that disturbed him much of his life. Though his gambling habit, World War II, and incarceration in a concentration camp threatened to split the family apart, Saburo vows that his teachings and beliefs would help the family survive. They were promises kept.


 

940.54 KNA, Our house divided : seven Japanese American families in World War II
Knaefler utilized interviews published in 1966 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor to document the stories in Our House Divided . Fifty years ago, Japanese Americans were herded together, virtually imprisoned, and forced by the federal government to forfeit all vestiges of citizenship. Knaefler's family histories reflect the experiences of seven American families of Japanese descent who suffered from anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. One of her selections, for example, follows the five Yempuku brothers, four of whom left Hawaii for Japan in 1933. Only the eldest, Ralph, remained, and he later served in the American Army during the war. Younger brother Donald relates how, during the surrender proceedings, he saw Ralph, yet could not speak with him. Donald did, however, inform the rest of the family that Ralph was still alive, as they had no word during the war.


 

940.54 MAC, A Matter of Conscience : Essays on the World War II Heart Mountain Draft Resistance Movement
This book contains a collection of essays by this country's leading scholars in the field of Japanese American history. Look at the World War II draft resistance movement at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming. Explore what it was like for the young men detained there.


 

940.54 NEI, Strawberry days : how internment destroyed a Japanese American community
The poignant story of a Japanese American community torn apart by racism and WWII internment Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming 'edge city' on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries. Many of its farmers were recent Japanese immigrants who, despite being rejected by white society, were able to make a living cultivating the rich soil. Yet the lives they created for themselves through years of hard work vanished almost instantly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. David Neiwert combines compelling storytelling with firsthand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war. Ultimately, Strawberry Days represents more than one community's story, reminding us that bigotry's roots are deeply ingrained in the very fiber of American society.


 

940.54 ODO, No sword to bury : Japanese Americans in Hawaii during World War II
When bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese American college students were among the many young men enrolled in ROTC and immediately called upon to defend the Hawaiian islands against invasion. In a few weeks, however, the military government questioned their loyalty and disarmed them. In No Sword to Bury, Franklin Odo places the largely untold story of the wartime experience of these young men in the context of the community created by their immigrant families and its relationship to the larger, white-dominated society. At the heart of the book are vivid oral histories that recall their service on the home front in the Varsity Victory Volunteers, a non-military group dedicated to public works, as well as in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Illuminating a critical moment in ethnic identity formation among this first generation of Americans of Japanese descent (the nisei), Odo shows how the war-time service and the post-war success of these men contributed to the simplistic view of Japanese Americans as a model minority in Hawai`i.

940.54 UCH, Desert exile:  the uprooting of a Japanese American family
Yoshiko Uchida writes beautifully about her family, of life before the war, and of their internment during the war. The story illuminates the Issei and Nisei internment experience. It also pays tribute to her parents, their values, and to their generation.

FIC DEN, The Journal of Ben Uchida:  citizen 13559
Twelve-year-old Ben Uchida keeps a journal of his experiences as a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp in Mirror Lake, California, during World War II.