Why am I passionate about this?
Although I was born in Seattle after the World War II years, my parents, grandparents, and aunts spent time confined at the Minidoka site, and they very rarely talked about “camp.” During the ‘80s and ‘90s, I worked as a newspaper journalist during the time of the movement to obtain redress, and I heard survivors of the camps talk about it for the first time. My acquired knowledge of the subject led to my first book in 1993, Baseball Saved Us. Since then, the camp experience has become like a longtime acquaintance with whom I remain in constant contact.
Ken's book list on the Japanese American World War II experience
Why did Ken love this book?
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?”
1 author picked Looking Like the Enemy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 8, 9, 10, and 11.
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. Mary endures an indefinite sentence behind barbed wire in crowded, primitive camps, struggling for survival and dignity. Mary wonders if they will be killed, or if they will one day return to their beloved home and berry farm. The author tells her story with the passion and spirit of a…