When the Uchida family was ordered to report to be imprisoned in the desert simply for being Japanese American, 20-year-old Yoshiko faced an impossible task. She and her family had been given just ten days to abandon their Berkeley, California home and surrender to the federal government, and Yoshiko had just ten days to find someone, anyone, to take care of their beloved dog.
Laddie, a Scotch Collie, had been part of the family since Yoshiko's childhood, and now, elderly and devoted, he needed a stranger's mercy. Yoshiko placed an ad in the "Daily Cal," UC Berkeley's student newspaper. A boy responded and took Laddie. Within two weeks, the dog was dead. It was the kind of loss that didn't make headlines -- no barbed wire in the photograph, no armed guards -- but it captured the intimate cruelty of what the government had done: not just imprisonment, but the quiet destruction of everything a person loved.
The Uchidas were among 120,000 people of Japanese descent -- about two-thirds of them U.S. citizens -- forcibly relocated to concentration camps following Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. The government claimed military necessity; newspapers fanned the flames with editorials like the one in the "Los Angeles Times" that declared, "A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched -- so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."
Decades later, a Congressional commission found no evidence of Japanese American disloyalty and concluded that the incarceration had been the product not of security concerns but of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts called it what it was: "The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful," he wrote. The original Supreme Court decision upholding the camps, he added, "was gravely wrong the day it was decided."
Uchida would spend her life making sure America never forgot. When she wrote her pioneering 1971 children's book "Journey to Topaz," she included the story of a family dog left behind who dies shortly after drawn directly from her own experience, as she confirmed in her memoirs "Desert Exile" and "The Invisible Thread." Uchida became an award-winning writer of children's books, all based on aspects of Japanese and Japanese American history and culture.
She is best known for her books on the concentration camp experience, the first such books for children written by a Japanese American author, including "Journey to Topaz," its sequel "Journey Home," and the picture book "The Bracelet." She also wrote two memoirs: the adult "Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family" (1982) and the young adult "The Invisible Thread." As she later explained, she wanted to write stories about human beings, not stereotypic Asians, noting that there were no books like that in the early 1950s when she started writing for children.
Though sickly as a child, Yoshiko graduated from high school in two and a half years and enrolled at UC Berkeley at age 16. But as she later wrote, "Pearl Harbor put an abrupt end to our 'days of innocence' and instead of attending the Cal Commencement, I received my diploma from the mailman in my horse stall at Tanforan -- a prisoner of my own country." She would recall feeling "degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed with a longing for home."
Yet rather than succumb to despair, she and her sister started a nursery school at the camp, and Yoshiko later became a second-grade teacher. Seeming to recognize the historic nature of her confinement, she documented her experience through drawings, paintings, journals, and letters. That determination to transform injustice into testimony made Uchida one of American literature's most important chroniclers of the Japanese American experience.
In May 1943, Uchida received word of acceptance at Smith College with a full scholarship, and she and her sister left the concentration camp on the same day -- Keiko to a job at nearby Mt. Holyoke. After finishing her M.Ed. at Smith, Yoshiko took a teaching job in Philadelphia, then moved to New York and worked as a secretary, which gave her more time to write. She submitted short stories to mainstream magazines and journals, resulting in a pile of rejection slips. Her breakthrough came with the 1949 publication of "The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales," which was met with great acclaim.
Over her career, Uchida wrote 34 books, received a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1952 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, and won numerous awards, including Commonwealth Club of California Medals and a Child Study Association of America Children's Book of the Year citation. She died in Berkeley in 1992.
In the epilogue of "Desert Exile," she explained why she had devoted her life to this work: "I wrote it for the young Japanese Americans who seek a sense of continuity with their past. But I wrote it as well for all Americans, with the hope that through knowledge of the past, they will never allow another group of people in America to be sent into a desert exile ever again."
To discover Yoshiko Uchida's powerful books for young readers, we recommend "The Bracelet" for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-bracelet), "Journey To Topaz" (https://www.amightygirl.com/journey-to-topaz) and its sequel "Journey Home" (https://www.amightygirl.com/journey-home), both for ages 9 and up
She is also the author of the acclaimed memoir for adult readers "Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780295994758 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/48hU4KX (Amazon)
For more books for children and teens about the internment of Japanese American, visit our blog post, “‘Dangerous Americans’: Mighty Girl Books About The Internment of Japanese Americans” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14199
