On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family’s possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today’s headlines.
Describes the events surrounding the internment of Japanese Americans in relocation centers during World War II. The reader’s choices reveal the historical details from the perspective of Japanese internees and Caucasians.
A chronicle of the incredible correspondence between California librarian Clara Breed and young Japanese American internees during World War II.
When the going got tough during World War II, America’s women got going. By the millions, housewives and mothers took off their aprons and stepped into factories, offices, hospitals-anywhere capable hands were needed to replace those of the husbands and sons now battling overseas. The eleven fictional stories in this remarkable collection are based on real women whose experiences were at once typical and extraordinary. Irene bucks rivets in an aircraft factory while Doris learns to pilot military planes. Marjorie survives the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while Jean spends three years under guard in a Japanese internment camp. Lucy joins the segregated Women’s Army Corp and Kathryn joins the Red Cross-shipping off to the front lines where she dances in combat boots with American GIs. From the topsy-turvy days following Pearl Harbor, through four long years of hardship, to the post-war campaigns to put women back in their place, these stories reveal the many facets of women’s lives as they gave their all for the war effort.
Based on a true story in the winter of 1943… Fourteen-year-old Tai Shimoda’s family has lost everything. Like many other Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II, Tai’s family has been forced to leave their home and move to Tule Lake Relocation Center-a desolate camp surrounded by barbed wire in northern California. Though he misses his home in Sacramento, Tai keeps busy at Tule Lake hanging out with friends and training for the judo tournament. But as tensions in camp rise, Tai’s brother, Ben, joins a group that has refused to swear allegiance to the United States. They call themselves the No-Nos. Tai’s father calls them Disloyals. Soon Tai must decide what he believes. Will he join his beloved brother and the No-Nos or, like his father, remain true to America?
Like any 11-year-old, Yuki Sakane is looking forward to Christmas when her peaceful world is suddenly shattered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Uprooted from her home and shipped with thousands of West Coast Japanese Americans to a desert concentration camp called Topaz, Yuki and her family face new hardships daily.
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp–with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation’s #1 hit: “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Tomi was born in Hawaii. His grandfather and parents were born in Japan, and came to America to escape poverty.
A Boy’s War” tells of a six-year old Australian boy, son of a missionary, who went off to Chefoo boarding school in China in 1939 and didn’t see his parents again until 1945. World War II intervened and he was interned by the Japanese in Weihsien camp in Shandong province, China.
Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to.
