The best books, fact and fiction, to interpret the Japanese American World War II experience

This novel is the reason I became a writer, for it showed me that we Japanese/Asian Americans had stories to tell, and we could write them.

Its protagonist is one who was labeled a “No-No Boy” for his response to two questions on the “loyalty questionairre” required to be answered in the World War II camps as to whether the respondent would be willing to serve in the U.S. military. Those who refused were not only members of a reviled race after the war, but were also ostracized by their own Japanese American community.

The novel’s powerful writing, questioning one’s place in America, is often spoken aloud in stage readings and, like me, became a catalyst for members of my generation to follow creative pursuits.

Most of the best books about the Japanese American World War II experience are memoirs by those who actually lived through it, and this is one of the best.

Removed along with her family from Berkeley, California and confined at the Topaz, Utah camp, pick any page and the reader will see Uchida’s skillful descriptions: “As we plodded through the powdery sand toward Block 7, I began to understand why everyone looked like pieces of flour-dusted pastry.”

Also, that I am a writer for young readers was trailblazed by Yoshiko Uchida who, along with her publisher, had the courage to write and publish her first book, The Dancing Kettle, and Other Japanese Folk Tales in 1949──during a time in America when hatred against all things Japanese still ran strong.

But the memoirs didn’t delve into the emotional and psychological impact of the forced removal and incarceration──until this unflinching one from 2005, and it’s another among the best.

Removed along with her family from their farm on Vashon Island, Washington and incarcerated at the Minidoka camp in Idaho, Matsuda Gruenewald, like most of those who underwent this experience, remained silent about what happened to them until she refused to be further confined by “the self-imposed barbed-wire fences built around my experiences in the camps.”

During a 2004 return to the Minidoka site, she wrote about her pilgrimage: “I had been saddled by feelings of paralyzing helplessness for so long. I wondered, Once I open up and start talking, will I also cry? And if I do so, will I be able to stop?”

Among fictional versions of the World War II camp experience, this one has been cited as, thus far, “the great camp novel.”

I consider it the “Apocalypse Now” of camp novels──a hallucinatory, abstract but visceral take on one family’s Berkeley to Topaz camp journey. Early in the story, as the Japanese American mother prepares to leave her home, and with families not allowed to take their pets with them, she kills their dog with a shovel and buries it in the backyard.

Written in short, clipped sentences, the novel continues with its highly original approach to this period in history.

A government report that doesn’t read like a government report.

In 1980, the U.S. Congress voted to form the Commission to extensively research the Japanese American World War II experience and make recommendations to remedy past government actions.

This is the most extensive and comprehensive coverage of that period in American history, which includes lesser-known facts such as the U.S. government-arranged abductions of Japanese Latin Americans, and the forced evacuation of the indigenous of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands in Alaska.

The Commission’s report led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, commonly known as “redress,” which mandated an apology and $20,000 each to living survivors of that experience.

This compilation has been my consistent go-to reference source, a mountain of research from which I have often excavated.