Looking Like the Enemy

By Mary Matusda Gruenewald,

Book cover of Looking Like the Enemy

Book description

Mary Matsuda is a typical 16-year-old girl living on Vashon Island, Washington with her family. On December 7, 1942, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and Mary's life changes forever. Mary and her brother, Yoneichi, are U.S. citizens, but they are imprisoned, along with their parents, in a Japanese-American internment camp.…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked Looking Like the Enemy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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…

Want books like Looking Like the Enemy?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Looking Like the Enemy.

Browse books like Looking Like the Enemy

Book cover of When the Emperor Was Divine
Book cover of No-No Boy
Book cover of Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,487

readers submitted
so far, will you?

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Japanese Americans, Japanese internment, and presidential biography?