Browse > Reading Level > Grades 9-12
40 articles
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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 .
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.
Farewell to Manzanar Educational Kit (curricula)
- Curricula
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Memoir, Drama, History
- Coming of age, Displacement, Evils of racism, Family - blessing or curse, Growing up - pain or pleasure, Injustice, Patriotism - positive side or complications, Power of the past
- Limited availability
In 2003, the Farewell to Manzanar Education Initiative distributed 10,000 copies of the Farewell to Manzanar Educational Kit to California public schools and public libraries. The kit consists of the book, Farewell to Manzanar and Related Readings (1998), a teaching guide for the book (1998), a VHS cassette of the Farewell to Manzanar made-for-television movie (1976) with an additional 35-minute classroom version, and a video study guide (2002). Separate elements of the kit are available for purchase (except for the video study guide).
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.
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.
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.
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.
A Teacher's Resource for Farewell to Manzanar (curricula)
- Curricula
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 7-9, Grades 9-12
- Coming of age, Displacement, Evils of racism, Family - blessing or curse, Growing up - pain or pleasure, Identity crisis, Injustice
- Widely available
This study guide developed in 1999 by Facing History and Ourselves with Voices of Love and Freedom is part of the "Witness to History" series that examines a literary work confronting the complexity of history particularly around issues of prejudice and discrimination. It is based on the 1973 edition of Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. In this memoir, Wakatsuki Houston traces her family experiences during World War II, when because of their Japanese ancestry, they are incarcerated at Manzanar, a concentration camp in the California desert.
Resistance at Tule Lake (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Injustice, Power of the past
- Limited availability
Documentary film that tells the story of the Tule Lake concentration camp, with a focus on the post-segregation period, through interviews with former inmates, archival images, and scenes from contemporary pilgrimages .
Within These Lines (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Children's, Historical Fiction
- Everlasting love, Losing hope, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice
- Widely available
Young adult novel by Stephanie Morrill centering on the forbidden romance between Italian American Evalina Cassano and Nisei Taichi Hamasaki in the San Francisco Bay Area against the backdrop of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Having met in the course of their families' businesses—Taichi delivers produce from the Hamasaki family farm to Cassano's Italian restaurant—they keep their romance secret from their families as the story begins in March of 1942. But the Hamasakis' forced removal to Manzanar throws another wrench into their hopes for a future together. The story ends at the end of 1942, with the December uprising serving as its climax, with a brief epilogue that takes place in 1950.
Beneath the Wide Silk Sky (book)
- Books
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
- Children's, Historical Fiction
- Coming of age, Evils of racism, Loss of innocence
- Widely available
Young adult coming-of-age novel by Emily Inouye Huey set in fictional Linley Island, Washington, in the weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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.
Success Story, Japanese American Style (article)
- Articles
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Non-fiction
- Overcoming, Social mobility
- Available
Often cited popular account of Japanese American "success" by a University of California demographer, one of several such articles to appear in the '60s and '70s.
Desert Exile (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Biography, Non fiction
- Injustice, Displacement, Evils of racism
- Widely available
Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family is an autobiography by noted children's book author Yoshiko Uchida that chronicles her experiences in the years before and during her incarceration in an American concentration camp during World War II. It was originally published in 1982 by the University of Washington Press and reissued with a new introduction by Traise Yamamoto in 2015.
Home Again (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Fiction
- Character - destruction and building up, Displacement, Evils of racism
- Available
A 1955 novel that tells the epic story of one Japanese American family from California, covering their prewar travails, their wartime incarceration, and their return to California after the war. The book was based in part on the experiences of the author's father, a former War Relocation Authority (WRA) resettlement officer.
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