Child Prisoner in American Concentration Camps (book)

Memoir of a childhood spent in American concentration camps by a Nisei educator and activist from Seattle.

The story begins in 1942 when the author, the third in a family of four Nisei girls, was five years old. On February 21, her oldest sister's birthday, the FBI and local police come to their home in Seattle and arrest her father, Masao Takahashi, a relatively prosperous foreman for an Alaskan fish cannery. The elder Takahashi is taken first to the immigration station in Seattle , then to various internment camps where he is held separately from his family. The author then recounts her family's incarceration story at the Puyallup Assembly Center —where the family is housed in both barracks in Area A and horse stalls in Area D—to the Minidoka , Idaho, War Relocation Authority concentration camp. The family eventually moves on to the Crystal City internment camp in August of 1944 where they reunite with their father after over two years. The family eventually moves back to Seattle in April 1946, where they struggle to make ends meet in the early postwar years. Nakagawa mixes her childhood recollections with the broader history of the incarceration and with the recollections of other members of her family. Nakagawa also refers to her adult experiences in re-examining her childhood perceptions and experiences—including those of a sexual assault at Minidoka. These adult reflections also lead to renewed sympathy for her mother's struggles to raise four children alone in the first two years of her incarceration.

Though the main narrative ends shortly after the war, an epilogue covers her participation in the Seattle hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians at which her father testified at age eighty-eight and afterward touches on her involvement with Hate Free Zone, an organization that advocated for Muslim Americans and other targeted by hate after the 9/11 attacks. Mits Katayama, a graphic designer and the author's brother-in-law, illustrated the book. The book also includes a brief reflection by DeeAn S. Nakagawa, the author's daughter, acknowledgments, and biographies of the author and illustrator. According to the "About the Author" section, Child Prisoner was based on a 2007 self-published manuscript for young readers titled Child Camp .

Though the narrative is historically accurate for the most part, there are a number of misstatements in the chapters that discuss Nisei military service during World War II. Nakagawa writes that Japanese American soldiers who were in the army before the war subsequently "received letters from the U.S. government terminating their service." (p. 127) While this was true for some, others were reassigned to menial duties, while members of the 298th and 299th Regiments of Hawaii National Guard were reorganized into the famed 100th Infantry Battalion . She also writes that "Nearly a thousand young men of Japanese descent left Minidoka concentration camp to voluntarily serve in the U.S. military" (128) and that "about 9,500" Japanese American soldiers were "killed in battle." About three hundred volunteered for the army from Minidoka, and her stated number of those killed in action is over ten times higher than the actual figure. See Japanese Americans in military during World War II .