"Wase Time!": A Teen's Memoir of Gila River Internment Camp (book)

First person memoir by Kenneth A. Tashiro of his and his family's forced removal and incarceration at the Gila River , Arizona, concentration camp. After a brief introduction that introduces Tashiro's family, the story begins on Pearl Harbor day when Kenneth—nicknamed "Iggy"—hears about the start of the war after exiting an Abbott and Costello movie. He and his family move from Los Angeles to Del Rey in an attempt to avoid incarceration, but they are eventually removed from Sanger to Gila in August of 1942. His father, Kenji Tashiro, is a journalist, who becomes the editor of the camp newspaper , before leaving to join the army at age 37. His mother, eight months pregnant at the time of the removal, stays behind for a time, rejoining the family later with the baby girl. Twelve when he entered the camp, Tashiro's perspective is purely that of an active teenager, so there is relatively little on camp politics and civil rights, with the focus instead being on friends, sports, Boy Scouts, and other aspects of teenage camp life. The story ends when Iggy leaves camp in March of 1945 to live with an aunt and uncle in Minneapolis.

Might also like Manzanar to Mount Whitney: The Life and Times of a Lost Hiker by Hank Umemoto; Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp by Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey; Fox Drum Bebop by Gene Oishi