Browse > Reading Level > Adult

41 articles

1
2

Enemy Alien (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Displacement, Evils of racism
Limited availability

Bilingual memoir by Kiyo Hirano of her World War II experiences as an "enemy alien" is a rare example of an Issei woman's first-person perspective of the American concentration camps. Enemy Alien (Japanese title: Tekikoku gaijin) was translated into English by George Hirano and Yuri Kageyama and published by Japantown Arts and Media Workshop (JAM) Publications in 1983. Hirano's Japanese-English biographical account of her incarceration at the Merced Assembly Center and Amache and of her resettlement was originally written as an assignment for a creative writing class at the Japantown Arts and Media Workshop in San Francisco, and eventually published by the organization.

Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir, Art
Coming of age, Expression through art, Growing up – pain or pleasure, Immigrant experience, Oppression of women
Widely available

Concentration camp memoir by a Nisei artist. Ten years old at the time of the wartime incarceration, Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey was sent to Santa Anita Assembly Center and Amache with her older brother and Issei parents. Evolving from captions that accompanied displays of the author's postwar paintings, Gasa Gasa Girl intersperses stories of life in the camps with recollections of happier days with her parents, brother, and aunts in Hollywood, California, before the war. The book is illustrated by twenty-eight color reproductions of her watercolor paintings that depict both her external and internal lives during the war, as well as a like number of family photographs, archival photographs, and photographs of key objects mentioned in the text. Published by the University of Utah Press, the book includes an foreword by historian Cherstin Lyon.

Gasa-Gasa Girl (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Family – blessing or curse, Greed as downfall, Power of the past
Widely available

The second mystery novel in Naomi Hirahara's "Mas Arai Mysteries" series, Gasa-Gasa Girl finds the Kibei crime solver in New York where he reconciles with his estranged daughter and unravels the mysterious death of a wealthy Nisei businessman.

Gaijin: American Prisoner of War (book)

Books
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Graphic novels
Coming of age, Displacement, Isolation
Widely available

Gaijin: American Prisoner of War by Matt Faulkner is the story of a hapa teenage boy's struggle living in post December 7 San Francisco, California. 13-year-old Koji Miyamoto discovers that life being biracial (his mother Adeline is white and his father Ichiro is Japanese) is just as difficult inside an incarceration camp as it was outside in the city after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Written for 5th through 8th grade readers, this graphic novel has a distinctive style of elongated caricatures colored with dark reds, yellows, blues, and browns.

A Question of Loyalty/The Betrayed (play)

Plays
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Limited availability

Play authored by Nisei playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi set in Tule Lake and centered on the dilemmas brought on by the loyalty questionnaire . The main characters are Tak Fujimoto, a country boy loosely based on the playwright, and Grace Tamura, a sophisticated city girl from Seattle, who fall in love in the concentration camp. But they are divided by the loyalty questions and go their separate ways. The play's second act is set forty years later, when Grace, a widowed redress activist from Chicago, visits Tak, a divorced farmer in Fresno, prior to a camp reunion.

Stanley Hayami, Nisei Son (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Evils of racism, Growing up – pain or pleasure, Patriotism – positive side or complications, Role of men, War – glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
Widely available

Book built around the wartime diary and letters of Stanley Hayami that document his incarceration at the Heart Mountain , Wyoming, concentration camp and his military service in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team .

Sayonara Slam (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Power of silence, Power of the past, Family – blessing or curse
Widely available

The sixth book in Naomi Hirahara's Mas Arai Mysteries series finds the Kibei gardener caught up in unraveling the mysterious death of a Japanese journalist covering the World Baseball Classic in Los Angeles. As in the other books in the series, Mas's Hiroshima hibakusha past and the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans play key roles in the plot.

Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Biography, Memoir
Displacement, Immigrant Experience
Widely available

Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps relays the life story of Seiichi Higashide (1909–97). The book was translated from Japanese into English and Spanish through the efforts of his eight children, and was first published in 1993 by E&E Kudo. A second edition of the book was published in 2000 by the University of Washington Press, with a new foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner, professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University and author of Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States ; a new epilogue by Julie Small, co-chair of Campaign for Justice-Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans; and, a new preface by Elsa H. Kudo, the author's eldest daughter.

Swimming in the American: A Memoir and Selected Writings (book)

Books
Adult
Adult
Memoir, Poetry
Coming of age, Growing up – pain or pleasure, Wisdom of experience, Working class struggles
Widely available

Memoir by Nisei playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi (1922–2019) told in short prose vignettes, poetry and a play.

To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Memoir
Coming of age, Disillusionment and dreams, Displacement, Family - blessing or curse, Growing up - pain or pleasure, Identity crisis, Importance of community, Love and sacrifice
Widely available

Famous actor and celebrity recounts some of the most important periods of his life, including his early childhood spent at Rohwer and Tule Lake concentration camps.

American in Disguise (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Identity crisis, Wisdom of experience
Available

American in Disguise is Daniel Okimoto's account of his search for identity in America and Japan. The book was originally published in 1971 by John Weatherhill, Inc, with a foreword by James Michener.

American Scrapbook (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Historical fiction
Identity crisis, Family
Widely available

Novel set in Manzanar and Tule Lake by prolific writer Jerome Charyn and published in 1969.

Betrayed Trust: The Story of a Deported Issei and His American-Born Family During World War II (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Memoir
Coming of age, Disillusionment and dreams, Displacement, Heartbreak of betrayal, Identity crisis, Immigrant experience, Losing hope
Available

A Nisei shares his family's heart-wrenching experience of wartime incarceration and the complex background behind their decision to go to Japan instead of staying in the U.S. after the end of the war.

Beyond Loyalty: The Story of a Kibei (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Memoir
Evils of racism, Growing up – pain or pleasure, Individual versus society, Role of Religion – virtue or hypocrisy, Self – inner and outer
Widely available

Memoir of Kibei scholar Minoru Kiyota (1923–2013) that focuses on the difficult World War II years that saw him incarcerated in American concentration camps and eventually renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Originally published as a Japanese language autobiographical novel in 1990, it was translated and reworked into an English language memoir published in 1997 by the University of Hawai'i Press.

A Bridge Between Us (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Coming of age, Role of women
Widely available

Critically acclaimed 1995 novel by Julie Shigekuni that is both a multi-generational family saga about a Japanese American family in San Francisco and a coming-of-age novel centered on a fifth-generation Japanese American woman growing up in a four generation household. The story—which includes the family's incarceration at Heart Mountain —is told from the perspectives of four women of different generations who live together in the family home in San Francisco.

Blood Hina (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Family – blessing or curse, Hazards of passing judgment, Heroism – real and perceived, Love and sacrifice
Widely available

The fourth book in the Mas Arai Mysteries series by Naomi Hirahara finds the Kibei gardener coming to the aid of his best friend, Haruo Mukai, whose impending wedding is interrupted by accusations of theft and by his sudden disappearance.

California Generation (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Coming of age, Identity crisis
Limited availability

Popular 1970 novel by Jacqueline Briskin that follows a group of students from the class of 1960 at fictitious California High—one of them a Sansei born in Topaz —through the touchstone events of the turbulent decade. Though a first novel, California Generation was widely promoted and launched Briskin's career as a best-selling novelist.

Calling Tokyo: Japanese American Radio Broadcasters During World War II (film)

Films and Video
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Documentary
Patriotism - complications, War - glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
Limited availability

Documentary film directed by Gary T. Ono that tells the story of a small group of Japanese Americans recruited out of the concentration camps to work for the British Political Warfare Mission (BPWM) and Office of War Information (OWI) as translators and broadcasters of propaganda aimed at Japan. The small group—eight who worked for the OWI and four for the BPWM—were mostly Kibei and worked out of a Denver studio. Both groups translated American news reports that were made into radio scripts and broadcasts transmitted by shortwave radio. The operation later moved to San Francisco in February 1945, when Japanese Americans were allowed to return to the West Coast.

Color of the Sea (book)

Books
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Young Adult, Historical Fiction
Coming of age, War - glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
Widely available

A coming-of-age novel by first time novelist John Hamamura centering on a Kibei raised in Japan, Hawai'i, and California and that climaxes with his wartime experiences that include arrest, the Military Intelligence Service , and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book won an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association in 2007.

Snakeskin Shamisen (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Lost honor, Power of the past
Widely available

The third novel in Naomi Hirahara's "Mas Arai Mysteries" series finds the gardener/detective back in Southern California in 2002 where he tackles a murder case in the Okinawan American community.

Strawberry Yellow (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Injustice
Widely available

The fifth book in Naomi Hirahara's Mas Arai Mysteries series finds the Kibei gardener back in his hometown of Watsonville for the funeral of a relative. But the apparent murder of an anti-GMO activist and the suggestion by his widow that the deceased relative may have been murdered plunge Mas into another mystery.

Summer of the Big Bachi (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Adult
Fiction, Mystery
Facing darkness, Greed as downfall, Power of silence, Power of the past
Widely available

Mystery novel by Naomi Hirahara that was the first to feature her Kibei hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) gardener protagonist Mas Arai.

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 …

Issei and Nisei: The Internment Years (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Displacement, Importance of community, Role of religion - value or hypocrisy
Available

Memoir of a young Issei Episcopal clergyman based in Washington state during the trying years of World War II. Published in the fall of 1967, Daisuke Kitagawa 's account was among the first book-length first-person accounts of the Japanese American incarceration.

A Jive Bomber's Christmas (play)

Plays
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Musical
Importance of community, Optimism - power or folly
Widely available

Musical play set in a World War II concentration camp by Saachiko and Dom Magwili. First produced for the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in 1994, A Jive Bomber's Christmas became a holiday tradition in Los Angeles, enjoying a nine-year run and subsequent revivals in Los Angeles and in Hawai'i. The play was based in part on Saachiko Magwili's childhood memories of Heart Mountain and shares a structural similarity with Dom Magwili's earlier Christmas in Camp , first produced at East West Players in 1981.

1
2