Passage IV

Sad Journeys, Brave Exiles

Two authors of young-adult fiction have taken the tragic events of their lives and created powerful stories for us to learn from. During World War II, the United States and Canadian governments, whose countries border each other, unjustly relocated many people, of Japanese descent. They were uprooted from their homes and imprisoned in distant internment camps.

Yoshiko Uchida was born in 1921 in Alameda, California. She is studying at the University of California when war between the United States and Japan was declared. The internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans began soon after that. Uchida and her family were temporarily housed in a horse stall at Tanforan Racetrack and then finalized their journey at Topaz, a bleak internment camp in the Utah desert. Uchida's award-winning novel Journey to Topaz describes this experience that took place during the course of World War II. This book portrays both the persecution experienced by Japanese Americans and it's determination to maintain their pride and traditions.

Joy Kogawa was born in 1935 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Like Uchida, Kogawa, and her family were removed from their home and relocated by the government, first to the interior of British Columbia, then to a farm in Alberta. Kogawa has woven these experiences into an intense and beautifully written novel. Obasan depicts a family fractured by war and by the loss of home, property, community, and civil rights. As with Uchida, Kogawa's have the strength to embrace hope and understanding until the end of World War II.

The internment of American and Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry represent a low point in the history of those countries—a sad combination of racial prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of leadership. As Yoshiko Uchida writes in her autobiography Desert Exile: "I ask [each new generation] to be vigilant so that such a tragedy will never happen to any group of people in America again."