Desert exile

Early in 1942, only a few months after the United States joined the Second World War against Japan, the government began moving people of Japanese descent into confinement. About 110,000 people were held in camps without charges, a hearing, or access to a lawyer, though they had broken no law and most were citizens. Officials defended the policy as a matter of military need, yet no proof of disloyalty or sabotage was ever found against them.

This memoir follows one family through those years. Its author, Yoshiko Uchida, was a Berkeley native studying at the University of California when the war began. Looking back, she traces her parents' arrival and early life in America and her own childhood as a Nisei, the American-born second generation, in California. She describes the hostile public mood toward Asian Americans before the war and gives an intimate view of daily life in a Japanese American household.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her world changed quickly. Her father was taken by the FBI, and the family had only ten days to leave their home. They were housed in a converted horse stall with almost no privacy, then sent to the Topaz camp in the Utah desert, surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards, and dust storms. Earlier, the family was held at the Tanforan assembly center.

The book also looks closely at the endurance of the incarcerated Japanese Americans, especially the Issei, the immigrant first generation. Having already faced much hardship in a hostile country, they built community life, worked to educate their children, and sought to lead meaningful lives behind the fences. Uchida later wrote the children's book Journey to Topaz on the same experience.