A Place to Belong (book)

Young adult novel by Cynthia Kadohata that tells the story of a Japanese American family's experience in postwar Japan from the perspective of an adolescent female protagonist.

A Place to Belong centers on the story Tachibana family told through the eyes of twelve-year-old Hanako in the year after the end of World War II. Before the war, they had run a successful restaurant in Gardena, California, but when they are caught up in the mass forced removal and incarceration of all West Coast Japanese Americans, they lose everything and end up in an American concentration camp. There, Hanako's father gives a conditional answer on the loyalty questionnaire , which is enough to get the family sent to Tule Lake . He is branded a troublemaker, is separately interned, and decides that the family will go to Japan where they will live with his parents who are peasant farmers outside of Hiroshima. The novel begins with their voyage to Japan and follows their difficult life there. While Hanako and her five-year-old brother Akira face hunger, desperate orphan children, and the difficulties of learning a new language and culture, they are buoyed by their grandparents' love and their parents' devotion to them. But the family has to face a difficult decision as to what the best path for their future will be.

While the novel takes place entirely after the war, it includes many references to life in the concentration camps. The family goes first to an unspecified assembly center , then to Jerome , prior to Tule Lake. The family is later helped by lawyer Wayne Collins , to whom the book is dedicated.

Author Cynthia Kadohata has written two prior books with adolescent Japanese American female protagonists there were set in the postwar period, The Floating World (1989) and the young adult novel Kira Kira (2004). Her 2006 young adult novel Weedflower was mostly set in Poston .

Might also like Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps, Young Reader's Edition by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald; The Invisible Thread by Yoshiko Uchida; The War Outside by Monica Hesse