Browse > Genre > Memoir
79 articles
Child Prisoner in American Concentration Camps (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 7-8
- Memoir
- Evils of racism, Family – blessing or curse, Immigrant experience, Working class struggles
- Available
Memoir of a childhood spent in American concentration camps by a Nisei educator and activist from Seattle.
Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoirs of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands
- Books
- Memoir
- Available
A Japanese American pediatrician reflects on his lifelong involvement with studying the effects of radiation on children, while also recalling his and his family's experiences during World War II.
Caucasian Boy at a Japanese Camp (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 7-8
- Memoir
- Coming of age, Companionship as salvation, Displacement
- Available
The son of the superintendent of schools at Tule Lake concentration camp recounts his experiences as a young boy there.
Some Lines for a Younger Brother... (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Death – inevitable or tragedy, Disillusionment and dreams, Growing up – pain or pleasure
- Limited availability
First person recollection of the author's younger brother centering on the impact the World War II incarceration had on him. The youngest of eight children, Tets was doted on by his older siblings, but devastated when his father died when he was eight. A few years later, he had become a demoralized teenager in Manzanar who began skipping high school classes upon his return to Los Angeles after the war. Joining the army to see the world, he is almost at the end of his hitch when the Korean War breaks out. Sent into combat, he is killed in action. Years later, the author recalls attending the first Manzanar Pilgrimage and seeing the image of Tets as a child once again.
Silver Like Dust (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Evils of racism, Family – blessing or curse, Power of the past, Role of women
- Widely available
Memoir published in 2011 centering on the author's grandmother, who slowly tells the author the story of her life and incarceration at Heart Mountain , over the course of several visits with the author. Her grandmother's detailed narrative from the perspective of a young woman of twenty when the war breaks out—the happy childhood in Los Angeles, the shock of war and forced removal, meeting her husband at the Pomona Assembly Center , marrying in camp, and having her first child there, before resettling in Seabrook Farms , New Jersey—is contrasted with the author's vastly different life as a contemporary young woman of roughly the same age when she begins the project. Having grown up in Pennsylvania, apart from her grandmother in Florida, the visits also allow the two women to really get to know each other for the first time. The book includes various brief historical snippets that provide …
Sleeping on Potatoes: A Lumpy Adventure from Manzanar to the Corporate Tower (book)
- Books
- Memoir
- Coming of age, Desire to escape, Displacement, Facing reality, Overcoming - fear, weakness, vice, Social mobility
- Limited availability
Memoir of a Nisei, from his early childhood as the son of a violent father and a loving mother, his experience incarcerated at Manzanar , his career as a successful physicist at Honeywell, and his years after retiring.
Song of Anger: Tales of Tule Lake (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Darkness and light, Displacement, Injustice
- Available
Reflections and observations of a social worker in Tule Lake segregation center during World War II.
Sideways: Memoir of a Misfit (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Coming of age, Convention and rebellion, Family – blessing or curse, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice
- Available
Memoir of a young Nisei woman who was born in the Minidoka , Idaho, concentration camp. The story focuses on her often strained relationships with her parents, grandparents, and eight siblings in 1950s Chicago.
The Block Manager: A True Story of Love in the Midst of Japanese American Internment Camps (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice, Self-preservation, Displacement
- Available
Incarceration memoir of a Nisei woman from Stockton, California, who becomes a block manager at the Stockton and Rohwer detention camps and who meets and marries her husband at the latter. The narrative follow the couple to Tule Lake and postwar Japan.
Though I Be Crushed: The Wartime Experiences of a Buddhist Minister (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Displacement, Immigrant experience, Injustice
- Limited availability
Translated memoir of an Issei Buddhist priest focusing on his wartime incarceration at several camps.
I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Rights - individual or societal, Motherhood, Displacement
- Widely available
The memoir of poet Toyo Suyemoto that spans her years of incarceration in Tanforan Assembly Center and later, at Topaz in Utah, from spring 1942 to late autumn 1945. The book, published in 2007 by Rutgers University Press, focuses on the quotidian life in an American concentration camp, while coping both physically and psychologically with the brutality of imprisonment behind barbed wire. The book is dedicated to Suyemoto's son Kay and details his short life from birth in Berkeley, California, to his first steps at Tanforan in a crowded horse stall, and finally to Utah where he developed a serious asthmatic condition and pneumonia in the harsh atmosphere of camp which eventually lead to his premature death. Suyemoto's memoir includes the impact of policies and wartime decisions on her family and the larger Japanese American community, bringing insight on complex and controversial questions of loyalty, citizenship and resistance. She also …
In Search of Hiroshi (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Family – blessing or curse, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice, Power of the past
- Available
Memoir by Nisei journalist Gene Oishi published by Charles E. Tuttle in 1988.
The Invisible Thread (book)
- Books
- Grades 3-5, Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 3-5, Grades 7-8
- Memoir, Children's
- Immigrant experience, Growing up – pain or pleasure, Expression through art, Facing darkness, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice
- Widely available
Memoir for young adult readers by the acclaimed children's book author that covers her charmed childhood in Berkeley, California, and her wartime incarceration during World War II.
Journey to Washington (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Self-reliance, Patriotism - positive side or complications, Empowerment
- Limited availability
Ghostwritten autobiography by Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawai'i, authored with Lawrence Elliott and published in 1967. One of the first autobiographies by a Nisei , Journey to Washington was published as Inouye was finishing his first term as a U.S. Senator from Hawai'i and preparing to run for reelection. The book covers his life up to that time, beginning with his grandfather leaving Japan to come to America to pay off a debt and ending with his father visiting the White House to visit President John. F. Kennedy. A success story that established a template for many Nisei memoirs to come, the book reinforced the " model minority " narrative then current. Reader's Digest also excerpted the book in its February 1968 issue. The book includes three forewords, by President Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.
Kubota (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Power of silence, Wisdom of experience
- Available
Short story/essay centering on the author's maternal grandfather, whom everyone called by his last name, Kubota. A Kibei from Hawai'i, Kubota had graduated high school in Hiroshima before returning to become a successful shopkeeper and community leader—as well as an avid fisherman—on Ō'ahu's North Shore prior to the war. Arrested by the FBI on the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kubota was one of the relatively fortunate ones, having been taken to Honolulu for questioning, but released after just a few days. Years later, Kubota lives with the author's family in Gardena, California, and repeatedly tells the teenager his World War II story, urging him not to forget it and to be his chronicler. The author is puzzled to find that other Japanese Americans not only didn't care to hear this story but were very reluctant to talk about their wartime exclusion and incarceration. After his grandfather's death, …
The Legacy of a Cemetery (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Reunion, Wisdom of experience
- Limited availability
First person reflections on a trip back to his hometown of Los Angeles by a man who had settled in New Jersey after leaving the Jerome , Arkansas, concentration camps some thirty years earlier. A visit to Evergreen Cemetery east of downtown Los Angeles brings back memories of his forced removal in 1942, remembrances of Nisei soldiers he knew who are buried there, and memories of his deceased family members.
The Little Exile (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 7-8
- Memoir
- Evils of racism, Family – blessing or curse, Female roles, Immigrant experience
- Available
Memoir by Jeanette A. Arakawa covering her wartime incarceration at the Stockton Assembly Center and Rohwer , Arkansas, concentration camp and postwar resettlement in Denver. Though written in the first person, her name and those of others in the book have been changed.
Looking After Minidoka: An American Memoir (book)
- Books
- Memoir
- Change versus tradition, Coming of age, Displacement, Female roles, Growing up - pain or pleasure, Immigrant experience, Love and sacrifice, Overcoming - fear, weakness, vice, Power of tradition, Will to survive
- Available
A third-generation Japanese American shares the multi-generational story of both sides of his family, from immigration to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and wartime incarceration, to resettlement and his own childhood.
Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir, Children's
- Evils of racism, Facing darkness, Family – blessing or curse, Injustice, Loss of innocence, Power of the past
- Widely available
Incarceration memoir of life at Pinedale Assembly Center , Tule Lake , and Minidoka , by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, a seventeen-year-old Nisei at the time of her and her family's forced removal from their Washington state farm. First published in 2005 by NewSage Press, it was followed by a young reader's edition in 2010.
Mackerel Sky (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Immigrant experience, Will to survive, Working class struggles
- No availability
Short story by Jeff Matsuda in which a young Sansei man recalls various stories about his Issei grandfather: visiting him and his grandmother when he was a child; recreating the old man talking about his youth in Japan and his early years as a laborer in the U.S.; and visiting him with his mother when he was in college, and his grandfather was a nearly deaf old man. In the process, the narrator recalls his grandfather's internment: as a fisherman on Terminal Island , he was arrested a week after Pearl Harbor and sent to Bismarck and then to an unspecified camp in New Mexico, while the rest of his immediate family spent the war years in Japan.
Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon (book)
- Books
- Memoir
- Coming of age, Displacement, Evils of racism, Facing reality, Growing up - pain or pleasure, Isolation
- Available
An Oregon-born Nisei woman shares her family's story, including her parents' efforts to establish a farm in Hood River, her childhood, and the impact of being taken from their home and incarcerated during World War II.
Manzanar and Beyond (book)
- Books
- Memoir
- Coming of age, Disillusionment and dreams, Displacement, Importance of community, Injustice, Rights - individual or societal
- Available
Prominent Nisei attorney recounts his life, including his experiences as the administrator of the hospital at Manzanar concentration camp and his role in landmark legal battles advocating for redressing injustices experienced by Japanese Americans.
Manzanar Daze and Cold Nights (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Desire to escape, Importance of community, Reunion
- Available
Posthumously published memoir by a Nisei man about his years at Manzanar during World War II.
Memoirs of a Certain Nisei (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Empowerment, Patriotism – positive side or complications, War – glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
- Available
Posthumously published memoir by Kibei war hero Thomas Taro Higa , translated from its original Japanese and published in 1988. The vast majority of the book covers events taking place during World War II.
Nisei Odyssey: The Camp Years (book)
- Books
- Memoir
- Displacement, Facing reality, Injustice, Patriotism - positive side or complications, Rights - individual or societal, War - glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
- Limited availability
Nisei's recollections of his experiences incarcerated in an assembly center and concentration camp during World War II as well as a recounting of various stories he remembers hearing from others both before and during the war.