Journey to Topaz

Not rated. By Yoshiko Uchida. I'm not rating this book, because I'm not here to talk about the quality of the work — though it is well-written.

Every American should read this book, or inform him/herself by some similar means. This book is a fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a young Japanese girl of Berkeley after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

I have looked on the web and seen other accounts of the precise locations Uchida describes. This is not a sensationalized story. If anything, she understates the horror and disgrace of the U.S. government's "internment" (i.e., imprisonment) of West Coast Japanese families during the latter half of World War II.

At this story's beginning, Yuki is eleven years old. Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her father — a first-generation Japanese-American and businessman — is taken away by the FBI to Montana, for interrogation, along with thousands of other civic leaders in West Coast Japanese communities. She does not see him for more than a year. Meanwhile, she, her mother, and brother, and thousands of other Japanese-Americans, are shipped from "camp" to "camp", starting in fairgrounds and racetracks in the Bay Area, later moving to the middle of the Utah desert, in an internment program which had no strong rationale behind it — only paranoia.

Reading this book in the wake of the New York City attack was especially thought-provoking. I kept thinking of all the Arab-Americans who were detained and interrogated afterward. I've heard some people say that they wouldn't mind a decrease in civil liberties in favor of greater security, but it's easy for them to say. Can we already have forgotten the crime of our government against those thousands of families, displaced, stripped of their jobs, belongings, and dignity, imprisoned in their own country?

Easy for you to say, if you are white.

Posted by Lisa on April 28, 2002 08:49 AM