Fans pick 100 books like When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration During WWII

This book is a classic and of the first that I read on the subject. It’s a concise introduction to this shameful moment in America’s WWII era history that carefully explains how decades of anti-Japanese sentiment along the West Coast reached a peak following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But Daniels also provides in-depth detail on what life was like for Japanese Americans who spent some of if not most of their time during the war behind barbed wire and how they struggled to return to “normal” when released from the camps. Most importantly, the book has a compelling concluding chapter that asks its readers, “Could this happen again?” Daniels doesn’t give an answer but encourages us to read more and think about the legacy of incarceration.

The title says it all: This is a book if you want to dig a little deeper into what incarceration meant and means for all Americans. Featuring different, shorter essays by leading scholars on the Japanese American experience during the war, I love this book for its collection of insights from different historians who approach the topic in their own, distinct ways. If you’re short on time and want a quick read on the many angles on incarceration from motivations to experiences to the movement for a formal apology from the US government, this is one to check out.

If you and your family were ordered from your home by your government, deprived of your constitutional rights, and sent to a remote internment camp, would you volunteer to risk your life fighting for your country? Thousands of young Japanese American men did just that when they were isolated as possible spies and traitors after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Eighteen thousand of these young men signed on as members of the Army’s 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed entirely of second-generation Japanese Americans, and distinguished themselves as some of the bravest Americans who ever lived. Sent into battles that at times looked purely suicidal, the 442nd became “the most decorated unit of its size and length of service in American history.” Brown’s riveting account follows four of these young men and a fifth who became a conscientious objector and eventually landed in prison, all the while fighting… show more.

Was it just Japanese Americans who were detained during the war? I found myself asking this question before I started researching this topic. Sadly for me, Russell’s book was not yet published. While there are many books that detail the experiences of Germans and Italians (citizen and nationals) with internment, this book focuses on two young, American-born women—one German American, the other Japanese American—and the trials and tragedy they faced when they were detained and deported to Germany and Japan because their parents were foreign-born and eventually returned to the United States. I normally am skeptical of books described as telling “little-known” or “unknown” stories, but this book truly is an examination of an understudied event in the larger story of wartime panic, prejudice, and discrimination.

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?”

This book explores family history and heritage, but this time with time travel. The art here is gorgeous, and I love how Kiku discovers more about her family’s legacy of resilience and strength through her time travel.

This book, while it takes place in America, made me think of my mother who grew up in Japanese occupied Korea―she was forced to give up her Korean birth name for a Japanese name; forced to go to Japanese school and bow to large portraits of Emperor Hirohito; forced into the war effort at age twelve only to lose a finger while sewing buttons onto Japanese Imperial uniforms; Meanwhile, in America, a similar and heart-wrenching story unfolds in Weedflower, a story of innocent Japanese Americans going about their lives when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, Japanese Americans are no longer considered American―they are the enemy.

Twelve-year-old Sumiko has always struggled to fit in, but when the war breaks out, struggles turn to fear for her and her family, so much so, they have no other choice but to burn all precious possessions from Japan including photos of family members… show more.

I did not initially include this book until I took a class of middle school English students to the library and more than half of them went to the graphic novel shelves. Who better to tell the story of the U.S. version of concentration camps – internment camps for loyal U.S. citizens of Japanese descent – than George Takei of Star Trek fame (and more)?

Pictures really do tell more than a thousand words. Takei’s autobiographical novel offers moments of joy but paints an infuriating picture of the United States at its worst in the Twentieth Century. The loyalty of Takei’s father to the nation that imprisoned the family and so many others can seem like a contradiction, but it is perhaps the most rewarding component of the book. The illustrations are excellent.

Much of the general public knows the great performance of the segregated Nisei (2nd generation Japanese American) unit in World War II, but few are still familiar with the Nisei draft resisters.

Eric Muller’s book tells the story of these men, who were drafted from incarceration camps—and then imprisoned in federal prisons for refusing to serve. Over 80 of these resisters came from Heart Mountain, where they had organized around a group called the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, but men from other camps also resisted. Their message was unanimous: they love the United States but will not serve before their families are freed.

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.