Japanese‐American Relocation and Internment: Books

Beyond Loyalty is the powerful and inspiring story of a young man whose life and education were rudely disrupted by the U.S. government's imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Few Japanese Americans have written so frankly about the humiliation they felt during World War II.

This is not simply an account of the day-to-day life in the Tanforan and Topaz concentration camps where the author lived; it is also ... about the first generation immigrants who, having already endured so much in a hostile society, still retained a remarkable resiliency of spirit as they established a sense of community, saw to the education of their children, and tried to live productive lives even behind barbed wire. From Publisher

This intimate account conveys the reality of one woman's 1942 experience. Wrenched from their tranquil Pasadena community, Mrs. Egami, her husband and their four children struggle with unfamiliar, primitive, overcrowded camp conditions at Tulare Assembly Center in the Central Valley of California. From Publisher

In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines storytelling, watercolor, and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. In short vignettes snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events a ten-year-old girl develops into a teenager while confined. From Publisher

The author draws on interviews with fifty former Topaz residents, and on the archives of the War Relocation Authority and newspaper reports, to show how relocation and its aftermath shaped the lives of these Japanese Americans. From Publisher

To the writers in this book--novelists, memoirists, poets, activists, scholars, students, professionals--the WWII internment of Japanese Americans in the detention camps of the west is an unfinished chapter of American history.

This memoir is told from the heart and mind of a woman now over 90 years old who experienced the challenges and wounds of her internment at a crucial point in her development as a young adult.

Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community.

A novel on a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans whose hero is a white pacifist. He is Denton Jordan, a conscientious objector employed as an administrator by the U.S. government. Through his eyes is seen the mounting violence between the military, who have banned Japanese speech, and the resentful young inmates.

In Hiroshima, Japan, 1902, a woman born under the portentous Fire Horse Sign is married by proxy into the wealthy Matsubara family and sent to join her new husband in a new world-America. In California, 1942, this same woman, facing the sunset of her life rather than the dawn is sent to a Japanese internment camp with her daughter and granddaughter. This is her story.

Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. from Publisher

San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched. Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense-- one that leaves us shaken and changed. From Publisher

Barney Shallit evokes his WWII experiences and observations as a Jewish American social worker at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Using irony and satire to convey his bittersweet tales set in the barricaded compound where the U.S. government imprisoned so-called "disloyal" Americans of Japanese ancestry, From Publisher

What the Scarecrow Said is a rich and expansive novel of family, alienation, reconciliation and the cost of America's war on some of its own people. From Publisher

Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written, a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.

A photographic collection of arts and crafts made in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II, along with a historical overview of the camps.

This collection of paintings by the gifted artist, Chizuko Judy Sugita de Queiroz, is her memoir in art of her girlhood years imprisoned in a camp called Poston in the desolation of a desert in Arizona…Chizuko’s art is a powerful narrative of a shameful event in our history. It is also an evocative personal chronicle of the survival of a loving and resilient family. George Takei

Mine Okubo took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh, and if he is an American too, blush. Pearl Buck

Chiura Obata was one of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans forcefully relocated in 1942 from their homes and communities to the stark barracks of desert internment camps. 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 in the details of austerity and hardship, and strikingly lyrical in its portrayal of hope and beauty even in incarceration. Publisher's comment

The Japanese American National Museum, the UCLA Wright Gallery and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center collaborated to bring this collection of artwork together as an exhibit and as a book.

Based on the book published by U.S. Camera in 1944 with photographs and text by Ansel Adams."

Presents a collection of rare photographs depicting the Japanese camps in the Midwest to which Japanese Americans were confined during World War II.

Alinder investigates why photographs were made and how they have been reproduced and interpreted subsequently by the popular press and museums in constructing versions of public history. From Publisher

A comprehensive report detailing the evacuation, by the US Army, from the West Coast of the United States of persons of Japanese ancestry in the interests of military security during the spring of 1942. The considerations which led to the evacuation as well as the machanics of the operation are described in detail by the army.

Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians instigated by the Redress campaign of Japanese American internees in the 1980s. With a foreword by Tetsuden Kashima.