The Marysville Chapter JACL maintains a library comprised of books and videos related to Japanese language and culture and the Japanese American experience before, during and after World War II.
The California State Library grant included funding for the acquisition of books related to the World War II relocation. Thanks to David Read, Executive Director of Yuba Sutter Arts, the driving force in the grant process, and Director/Curator of the Sutter County Museum Jessica Hougen, who placed the order for us, we have added the following titles to the collection.
Fred Korematsu Speaks Up
by Laura Atkins, Stan Yogi, Yutaka Houlette
Not enough students learn about the internment (better described as imprisonment) of Japanese Americans during World War II in the United States. But of those who do, even fewer learn about resistance by Japanese Americans. Fred Korematsu believed that what the U.S. government was doing was unconstitutional and fought his internment all the way to the Supreme Court. That is why this story should be in every classroom. Filled with photos, primary documents, and illustrations, Fred Korematsu Speaks Up tells Korematsu’s story, including how the case was reopened in 1983 when lawyer Peter Irons found hidden documents at the National Archives. With discussions of a “Muslim registry” in the news, this book couldn’t be more timely. Middle school and above. [Review by Rethinking Schools.]
Fred Korematsu liked listening to music on the radio, playing tennis, and hanging around with his friends—just like lots of other Americans. But everything changed when the United States went to war with Japan in 1941 and the government forced all people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes on the West Coast and move to distant prison camps. This included Fred, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan many years before. But Fred refused to go. He knew that what the government was doing was unfair. And when he got put in jail for resisting, he knew he couldn’t give up. [Publisher’s description.]
ISBN: 9781597143684 | Heyday Books
The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion, Volume 71
by Roger Daniels
This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.
Roger Daniels is Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. His many works include Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (1990), Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (1993), and Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890-1924 (1997).
University of California Press, 1977
Making Home From War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement
by Brian Komei Dempster
The sequel to the award-winning From Our Side of the Fence—personal stories of life after the WWII internment camps from twelve Japanese Americans.
Many books have chronicled the experience of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II, when over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were taken from their homes along the West Coast and imprisoned in concentration camps. When they were finally allowed to leave, a new challenge faced them—how do you resume a life so interrupted?
Written by twelve Japanese American elders who gathered regularly at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, Making Home from War is a collection of stories about their exodus from concentration camps into a world that in a few short years had drastically changed. In order to survive, they found the resilience they needed in the form of community and gathered reserves of strength.
Brian Komei Dempster is a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American). He received BAs in American ethnic studies and English from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in various journals and anthologies. Dempster is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps, which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society. His debut book of poems, Topaz, released from Four Way Books in fall 2013. He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member of Asian Pacific American studies at the University of San Francisco. Currently, he divides his time between teaching and serving as Director of Administration for the master of arts program in Asia Pacific studies.
Heyday Books, 2013
Peaceful Painter: Memoirs of an Issei Woman Artist
by Hisako Hibi
Edited by Ibuki H. Lee
Insight into the daily life of a woman who would not abandon her art or betray her spirit Born in Japan, Hisako Hibi came to America with her parents as a teenager. When she and her husband were relocated in 1942 to the Topaz internment camp in Utah they became teachers at the art school founded by Chiura Obata. In 1945 they moved to New York, where she found work as an apprentice seamstress. Hisako Hibi continued painting for the next forty years and, after she returned to San Francisco in 1954, she exhibited her work in numerous shows including several one-person events.
Her art, and the informal journals and notes that she kept during those years, are the basis for this book. Hibi’s work while interned largely reflected her life as a young woman, wife, and mother, and her later work reflects the same keen sense of clarity about different subjects. Taken together, her paintings offer an insight into the daily life of a woman who would not abandon her art or betray her spirit.
Published in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum.
Heyday Books, 2004
Life After Manzanar
by Naomi Hirahara and Heather C. Lindquist
From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given twenty-five dollars and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs. Hirahara and Lindquist weave new and archival oral histories into an engaging narrative that illuminates the lives of former internees in the postwar era, both in struggle and unlikely triumph. Readers will appreciate the painstaking efforts that rebuilding required, and will feel inspired by the activism that led to redress and restitution—and that built a community that even now speaks out against other racist agendas.
Naomi Hirahara is a writer of both nonfiction books and mysteries. With Geraldine Knatz, she cowrote Terminal Island: The Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor, which won a Bruckman Award for Excellence and an Award of Merit from the Conference of California Historical Societies. Her Edgar Award–winning Mas Arai mysteries have been published in France, Japan, and Korea. A former editor of the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she also curates historical exhibitions and writes articles and short stories.
Heather C. Lindquist is the editor of Children of Manzanar, a copublication by Heyday and Manzanar History Association, which received an award of excellence from the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2013, and she was one of several contributing authors to Freedom in My Heart: Voices from the United States National Slavery Museum, published by National Geographic in 2007. She has also written numerous exhibit scripts for museums, visitor centers, and national parks across the country, including Manzanar National Historic Site; the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Published in collaboration with Manzanar History Association.
ISBN: 9781597144001 | Heyday Books, 2018
Children of Manzanar
by Heather C. Lindquist
Children of Manzanar captures the experiences of the nearly four thousand children and young adults held at Manzanar during World War II. Quotes from these children, most now in their eighties and nineties, are accompanied by photographs from both official and unofficial photographers, including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake, himself an internee who for months secretly documented daily life inside the camp, and then openly for the remaining years Manzanar operated.
These photos and remembrances-most of them archival treasures from Manzanar National Historic Site, and many appearing here in print for the first time-vividly record a barren world of guard towers, barbed wire fences, and tarpapered barracks, while also capturing the remarkable resilience of children, shown skipping rope, doing homework, and growing up. You will see fear and anxiety when you look into their eyes, but you will also see that indelible spark of joyous abandon unique to childhood.
Heather C. Lindquist is the editor of Children of Manzanar, a copublication by Heyday and Manzanar History Association, which received an award of excellence from the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2013, and she was one of several contributing authors to Freedom in My Heart: Voices from the United States National Slavery Museum, published by National Geographic in 2007. She has also written numerous exhibit scripts for museums, visitor centers, and national parks across the country, including Manzanar National Historic Site; the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Winner of the 2013 Association of Partners for Public Lands.
Japanese American National Museum Store
Heyday Books, 2012
Uprooted: The Japanese American Experience During World War II
by Albert Marrin
On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor comes a harrowing and enlightening look at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II— from National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin.
With masterful command of his subject and a clear, conversational style, Marrin (FDR and the American Crisis) lays bare the suffering inflicted upon Japanese Americans by the U.S. during WWII. Marrin delves into cultural, political, and economic strains leading up to Pearl Harbor, documenting extensive racist beliefs on both sides of the Pacific. Perceived as unacceptable security risks after the attack, Japanese immigrants living on the West Coast (issei) and their children (nisei), U.S. citizens by birth, were sent to desolate relocation centers. Only nisei trained by the military as linguists or who served in two segregated Army units in Europe were spared the humiliation of prisonlike confinement. Marrin admirably balances the heroism and loyalty of both groups with the hostile reception they received after the war and the legal battles of the few nisei who resisted; their convictions were only overturned in the 1980s. A prologue and final chapter questioning whether national security can justify the limiting of individual liberties, during wartime or as a response to terrorism, bookend this engrossing and hopeful account. Archival photos and artwork, extensive source notes, and reading suggestions are included. Ages 12–up. (Oct.)
ISBN 9780553509366 | Knopf, 2016
Country Voices
by David Mas Masumoto
In Country Voices, the reader steps into the world of Japanese American family farms, hears a people speak simple truths, and tastes the sweat and sweetness of rich harvests and life’s struggles. Through oral histories, interviews, essays and stories, Country Voices not only describes the historical development of a rural community but also explores the cultural and spiritual growth of all its people. The ingredients of culture, land and the family come together into a moving account of a community. You don’t have to be Japanese to enjoy and relate to topics that include – preserving ethnic traditions through food and cooking, the struggles within a community over changing religion, the evolution of a family farm and the archaic way raisins are still made, or the everyday life people experienced during the Depression or the tragic drama of evacuation of Japanese farm families during World War II. Country Voices is part of all our histories. There are over 70 photographs, documents and drawings in Country Voices – each adds to the story and the voice of a community and people.
Del Rey, CA, Inaka Countryside Publications, 1987. A publishing project of the author himself, before his 1995 breakout and best-selling memoir, Epitaph for a Peach.
My Name is Not Viola
by Lawrence Matsuda
My Name is Not Viola exemplifies what happens when historic racism and government policies intersect. Hanae Tamura strives to live a dignified life under undignified conditions. She manages to find balance even after being forcibly incarcerated twice: once in the WWII Minidoka, Idaho Concentration Camp without due process and again as a mental patient. Her lifelong quest to deal with the long-term consequences of America’s betrayal is a must read for those who value liberty and justice for all.
Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center (concentration camp) during World War II. The circumstances surrounding his birth support the fact that there are least two Americas (one with less justice). As a writer his on-going challenge has been to advocate for ONE America with liberty and justice for all. Matsuda has written two books of poetry, a third in collaboration with Tess Gallagher, and a graphic novel about the Japanese American 442 WWII Regimental Combat Team. Chapter one and two of the graphic novel were animated by the Seattle Channel and both won regional Emmys, one in 2015 and the other in 2016.
Japanese American National Museum Store
Endicott and Hugh Books, 2019
Going for Broke: Japanese American Soldiers in the War against Nazi Germany
by James McCaffrey
When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans reacted with revulsion and horror. In the patriotic war fever that followed, thousands of volunteers–including Japanese Americans–rushed to military recruitment centers. Except for those in the Hawaii National Guard, who made up the 100th Infantry Battalion, the U.S. Army initially turned Japanese American prospects away. Then, as a result of anti-Japanese fearmongering on the West Coast, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were sent to confinement in inland “relocation centers.” Most were natural-born citizens, their only “crime” their ethnicity. After the army eventually decided it would admit the second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) volunteers, it complemented the 100th Infantry Battalion by creating the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. This mostly Japanese American unit consisted of soldiers drafted before Pearl Harbor, volunteers from Hawaii, and even recruits from the relocation centers. In Going for Broke, historian James M. McCaffrey traces these men’s experiences in World War II, from training to some of the deadliest combat in Europe. Weaving together the voices of numerous soldiers, McCaffrey tells of the men’s frustrations and achievements on the U.S. mainland and abroad. Training in Mississippi, the recruits from Hawaii and the mainland have their first encounter with southern-style black-white segregation. Once in action, they helped push the Germans out of Italy and France. The 442nd would go on to become one of the most highly decorated units in the U.S. Army. McCaffrey’s account makes clear that like other American soldiers in World War II, the Nisei relied on their personal determination, social values, and training to “go for broke”–to bet everything, even their lives. Ultimately, their bravery and patriotism in the face of prejudice advanced racial harmony and opportunities for Japanese Americans after the war.
Japanese American National Museum Store
University of Oklahoma Press, 2013
Barbed Wire Baseball
by Marissa Moss
Illustrated by Yuko Shimizu
As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope.
This true story, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, introduces children to a little-discussed part of American history through Marissa Moss’s rich text and Yuko Shimizu’s beautiful illustrations. The book includes author and illustrator notes, archival photographs, and a bibliography.
Literary Awards
- California Book Award for Juvenile (Gold) (2013)
- Pennsylvania Young Readers’ Choice Award Nominee for Grades 3-6 (2015)
- California Young Readers Medal for Picture Books for Older Readers (2018)
- Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Picture Book Honor (2013)
Marissa Moss has written more than seventy books, from picture books to middle-grade and young adult novels. Best known for the Amelia’s Notebook series, her books are popular with teachers and children alike. Her picture book Barbed Wire Baseball won the California Book Award gold medal. Moss is also the founder of Creston Books, an independent children’s publishing house.
Kendyl Yokoyama reads Barbed Wire Baseball.
Harry N. Abrams, 2013
Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II
by Eric L. Muller
One of The Washington Post’s Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001.
In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America’s history.
Eric L. Muller is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Nothing Left in My Hands: The Issei of a Rural California Town, 1900-1942
by Kazuko Nakane
A respected Japanese American historical text now back in print. In 1978, Kazuko Nakane interviewed a number of immigrants from Japan who then lived in California’s Pajaro Valley. Originally a class project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her findings were compiled into a book that was published in 1985 and immediately recognized as a classic account of a rural immigrant community. Nakane’s book is now back in print in a new edition with a foreword by noted writer Naomi Hirahara. Nakane’s detailed research and firsthand interviews with those still living in the Pajaro Valley in the early 1980s piece together a portrait of early Japanese American experiences, from the lives of buranketto men (bachelors who traveled from job to job with little more than a blanket around their shoulders) to the arrival of brides from Japan to the discrimination Japanese faced in the form of anti-immigrant legislation and their banishment to internment camps during World War II. Without Nakane’s prescient efforts to preserve these stories, much understanding of early immigrant experience in this country would have been lost. Now, with its republication, Nothing Left in My Hands is again available to those interested in the history of California’s immigrants and their contributions to American culture.
Kazuko Nakane is an independent art historian and writer currently residing in Seattle. She is a regular contributor to art journals and catalogs of Asian American art. Nothing Left in My Hands: The Issei of a Rural California Town, 1900-1942 began as a history project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was first published in 1985.
Heyday Books, 2008
Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment
by Kimi Kodani Hill
Chiura Obata was one of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans forcefully relocated from their homes, work, and communities to the stark barracks of desert internment camps during World War II. As an artist faithfully recording the world around him, Obata’s work from this period gives us a view into the camps that is at once honest and strikingly lyrical. Topaz Moon brings together more than 100 paintings and sketches from Obata’s internment period, from the stables at Tanforan, California, to the barracks in Topaz, Utah. Edited by his granddaughter Kimi Kodani Hill, these images are accompanied by a text that draws heavily upon the letters of Obata and his wife, Haruko, family documents, and interviews with family and friends.
Heyday Books, 2000
Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II
by Gary Y. Okihiro
During World War II over 5,500 young Japanese Americans left the concentration camps to which they had been confined with their families in order to attend college. Storied Lives describes—often in their own words—how nisei students found schools to attend outside the West Coast exclusion zone and the efforts of white Americans to help them. The book is concerned with the deeds of white and Japanese Americans in a mutual struggle against racism, and argues that Asian American studies—indeed, race relations as a whole—will benefit from an understanding not only of racism but also of its opposition, antiracism.
To uncover this little known story, Gary Okihiro surveyed the colleges and universities the nisei attended, collected oral histories from nisei students and student relocation staff members, and examined the records of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council and other materials.
Gary Y. Okihiro is an American author and scholar. Currently at Yale, he was a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City and the founding director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Okihiro received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976.
He is the author of twelve books, six of which have won national awards, and dozens of articles on historical methodology and theories of social and historical formations, and the history of racism and racial formation in the U.S., African pre-colonial economic history, and race and world history.
University of Washington Press, 2011
Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II
by Martin W. Sandler
While Americans fought for freedom and democracy abroad, fear and suspicion towards Japanese Americans swept the country after Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Culling information from extensive, previously unpublished interviews and oral histories with Japanese American survivors of internment camps, Martin W. Sandler gives an in-depth account of their lives before, during their imprisonment, and after their release. Bringing readers inside life in the internment camps and explaining how a country that is built on the ideals of freedom for all could have such a dark mark on its history, this in-depth look at a troubling period of American history sheds light on the prejudices in today’s world and provides the historical context we need to prevent similar abuses of power.
Martin W. Sandler is the author of Lincoln Through the Lens, The Dust Bowl Through the Lens, and Kennedy Through the Lens. He has won five Emmy Awards for his writing for television and is the author of more than sixty books, two of which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Among Sandler’s other books are the six volumes in his award-winning Library of Congress American History Series for Young People, a series which has sold more than 500,000 copies. Other books by Mr. Sandler include: Island of Hope: The Story of Ellis Island, Trapped in Ice, The Story of American Photography, The Vaqueros, America: A Celebration, and This Was America. Mr. Sandler has taught American history and American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Smith College, and lives in Massachusetts.
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013
Desert Diary
by Michael O. Tunnell
A moving primary source sheds light on the experience of Japanese American children imprisoned in a World War II internment camp.
A classroom diary created by Japanese American children paints a vivid picture of daily life in a so-called “internment camp.” Mae Yanagi was eight years old when she started school at Topaz Camp in Utah. She and her third-grade classmates began keeping an illustrated diary, full of details about schoolwork, sports, pets, holidays, and health–as experienced from behind barbed wire. Diary pages, archival photographs, and narrative nonfiction text convey the harsh changes experienced by the children, as well as their remarkable resilience.
In 1943, eight year-old Mae Yanagi stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with her classmates. Then, like any other third grader, she began a day of math, reading, and spelling. Mae’s teacher, Miss Yamauchi, always included time for the children to discuss what was happening in school and at home. Afterward she would summarize their words on a piece of art paper—a new page to be added to the class’s daily diary. Mae most likely couldn’t wait for her turn to decorate the day’s diary page with pencil and crayon drawings.
Lots of classrooms keep diaries—but this diary was different. It told the story of a strange and isolated school with children from uprooted families.
As a third grader, Mae might not have fully realized that her school day was anything but normal. Still, she must have understood that “liberty and justice for all” did not apply to her, her classmates, her teacher, or her parents. A year earlier she had attended school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her classroom was filled with children of many backgrounds, including white children and kids of Japanese American descent. Now nearly every face was Japanese, like her own. And when Mae looked out the window, instead of the green of Northern California, she saw a parched landscape framed by Utah mountains. Instead of regular houses, she saw row after row of what looked like army barracks. Beyond the barracks stood guard towers with searchlights and soldiers carrying rifles—and a barbed-wire fence.
Mae Yanagi, US citizen, was a prisoner.
Michael O. Tunnell is a retired professor of children’s literature and the author of several books for young readers, including Candy Bomber: The Story of the Berlin Airlift’s “Chocolate Pilot”, an Orbis Pictus Honor book. While writing Desert Diary, he had the privilege of interviewing Mae Yanagi and many of her former classmates from Topaz Camp. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.d
Charlesbridge Publishing, 2020
Rebel Lawyer
by Charles Wollenberg
Winner of the 2017 California Historical Society Book Award!
Fred Korematsu, Iva Toguri (alias Tokyo Rose), Japanese Peruvians, and five thousand Americans who renounced their citizenship under duress: Rebel Lawyer tells the story of the key cases pertaining to the World War II incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and the trial attorney who defended them. Wayne Collins made a somewhat unlikely hero. An Irish American lawyer with a volatile temper, Collins’s passionate commitment to the nation’s constitutional principles put him in opposition to not only the United States government but also groups that acquiesced to internment such as the national office of the ACLU and the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League. Through careful research and legal analysis, Charles Wollenberg takes readers through each case, and offers readers an understanding of how Collins came to be the most effective defender of the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population. Wollenberg portrays Collins not as a white knight but as a tough, sometimes difficult man whose battles gave people of Japanese descent the foundation on which to construct their own powerful campaigns for redress.
Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, is coeditor, with Marcia A. Eymann, of What’s Going On? California and the Vietnam Era (University of California Press, 2004) and author of Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Western Heritage, 1990) and Berkeley: A City in History (University of California Press, 2008).
ISBN : 1597144363 | Heyday Books, 2018