YO S H I K O U C H I D AIntroduction by Traise Yamamoto

T H E U P R O O T I N G O F A J A PA N E S E A M E R I C A N FA M I LY

D E S E R TE X I L E

AFTER THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR, everything changed for Yoshiko Uchida. Desert Exile is her autobiographical account of life before and during World War II. The book does more than relate the day-to-day experience of living in stalls at the Tanforan Racetrack, the assembly center just south of San Francisco, and in the Topaz, Utah, internment camp. It tells the story of the courage and strength displayed by those who were interned.

“A sensitive, readable account that captures with insight and human warmth the feel of what it was like to be sent by one’s own government into exile in the wilderness. It is a work worthy of an unforgettable experience.” —Pacific Citizen

“In Desert Exile the happy life of a Japanese American family before [being removed to a] concentration camp makes their surrealist nightmare experience after December 7, 1941, all the more inexplicable and horrifying.” —San Francisco Review of Books

“Desert Exile is a beautifully written personal history. . . . Uchida’s intention was to illu-minate the Issei and Nisei internment experience on a personal level for the benefit of later generations. She has succeeded.” —Western Historical Quarterly

“Yoshiko Uchida has given us a chronicle of a very special kind of courage, the courage to preserve normalcy and humanity in the face of irrationality and inhumanity. Her family’s story, told in loving detail, brings alive the internment experience and is an important book for all Americans. It is not a history of the decisions that were made during this period; rather, it is the story of the human lives touched and molded by those decisions. As such, it is infinitely more important, and infinitely more precious.” —Senator Daniel K. Inouye

YOSHIKO UCHIDA (1921–1992) was born in Berkeley, California, and was in her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and interned. TRAISE YAMAMOTO is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body.

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Classics of Asian American Literature

U N I V E R S I T Y of W A S H I N G T O N P R E S SSeattle and londonwww.washington.edu/uwpress

ISBN 978-0-295-99475-8 Cover photographS: (top) Dorothea Lange, Dust Storm at Manzanar War Relocation Authority Center, 1942, National Archives. (bottom) Russell Lee, Los Angeles, California. Japanese-American child who is being evacuated with his parents to Owens Valley, 1942, Library of Congress.

uchida-cover-mech-v2.indd 1 1/22/15 10:31 AM

Desert exile

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� e Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

With a new introduction by

Seattle and London

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Copyright © 1982 by Yoshiko UchidaIntroduction to the 2015 edition © 2015 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of AmericaDesign by Dustin KilgoreComposed in Warnock, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 first appeared, in slightly altered form, in Yoshiko Uchida’s “Evacuation: The First Five Months,” California Monthly 77 (November 1966). A much abridged excerpt from chapters 7 and 8 also appeared in her “Topaz, City of Dust,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48 (Summer 1980).

University of WAshington Presswww.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataUchida, Yoshiko. Desert exile : the uprooting of a Japanese American family / Yoshiko Uchida ; with a new introduction by Traise Yamamoto. pages cm Originally published: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1982. isbn 978-0-295-99475-8 (paperback : alkaline paper)1. Uchida, Yoshiko. 2. Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945. 3. Tanforan Assembly Center (San Bruno, Calif.) 4. Central Utah Relocation Center. 5. Japanese Americans—California—Biography. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, American. 7. California—Biography. I. Title. d769.8.A6U25 2015 940.53'1779245092—dc23 [B] 2014050122

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Ansi Z39.48–1984. ∞

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In memory of my mother and father and all the Isseiwho were strong and of good courage

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Contents

Introduction: An Uncommon Spirit,

by Traise Yamamoto ix

1. The House above Grove Street . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. On Being Japanese and American . . . . . . . 26

3. Pearl Harbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

4. Evacuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

5. Tanforan: A Horse Stall for Four . . . . . . . . . 69

6. Tanforan: City behind Barbed Wire . . . . . . 84

7. Topaz: City of Dust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

8. Topaz: Winter’s Despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Epilogue 147

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ix

IntroductionAn Uncommon Spirit

In a brief May 1982 letter to artist Miné Okubo, Yoshiko Uchida writes that she is pleased Okubo enjoyed Desert Exile, which had been published a few months earlier. She asks whether Okubo rec-ognized herself in the humorous account of the artist at Tanforan who placed a quarantine sign on her door in order to be left alone to draw and paint. Uchida then continues:

It’s hard to believe 40 years have elapsed since those incredible horse stall days! The passage of time and the knowledge now of our gov’t leaders’ betrayal has increased my anger. I’m hoping many young people will read my book, as I know they have read and enjoyed your wonderful “Citizen 13660.” Your book was and will continue to be a great pictorial record for future generations.1

From what we can glean based on their work and anecdotes about the two women, Uchida and Okubo had very different per-sonalities, Okubo often being described as “gruff” and “a com-manding personality,” though one leavened with humor and kindness.2 Uchida’s work and letters, by contrast, seem to suggest a cheerful, outgoing, though steadily determined personality. What the two artists—both of whom were incarcerated at Tanforan and Topaz—shared and recognized in each other, however, was a cer-tain political alignment. Both felt an absolute certainty about the injustice of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, a need to witness what the Nikkei had endured, and a commit-ment to ensuring through their work that subsequent generations

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of Americans—and particularly Japanese Americans—would understand what the Issei and Nisei had learned through hard experience: that citizenship is no guarantor of rights and that the government and its actions can all too easily contradict and undermine the Constitution and the rhetoric of democracy.3

One of the accepted truisms about Nisei and Japanese Amer-ican incarceration during World War II is that shame and silence have generally been the response of a generation who learned early that being Japanese was a carceral offense. The Sansei and Yonsei generations are largely given the credit for pushing their elders toward remembrance and reparations, informed as their generations were by the civil rights movement and the growth of ethnic studies during the third world student strikes. But this widely accepted gloss on the Nisei response to the war is inac-curate in large part, if not completely, and too easily occludes a wholly different reaction from a significant number of Nisei both during and after the war. The very existence of the Tule Lake con-centration camps and the Department of Justice internment camp at Santa Fe—locations where those determined to be incorrigibly noncompliant, among other reasons, were incarcerated—attests to a substantial amount of anger and dissent among both Issei and Nisei. At the Poston camp, a widely circulated, anonymous, Nisei-authored poem, “That Damned Fence,” angrily referred to the barbed wire that surrounded the camp: “We’re trapped like rats in a wired cage, / To fret and fume with impotent rage.”4 Other Nisei resisted through legal routes, contesting the constitutionality of curfew, removal, and incarceration. While it is generally known that three Nisei men (Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui) filed suit against the U.S. government between 1942 and 1944, it is far less known that a twenty-two-year-old Nisei woman, Mitsuye Endo, filed a habeas corpus petition in 1942. The writ demanded that Endo be released from camp so that she could pursue legal avenues to protest being fired from her job and incar-cerated solely because of her Japanese ancestry. After a legal pro-cess that lasted more than two years while Endo remained in the Tule Lake concentration camp, the Supreme Court unanimously

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ruled in Endo’s favor in December 1944. Ex parte Mitsuye Endo was foundational in the decision to allow Nikkei to return to the West Coast.

Endo is just one of a group of extraordinary Nisei women—among them Monica Sone, Yuri Kochiyama, Hisaye Yamamoto, Mitsuye Yamada, Janice Mirikitani, Toyo Suyemoto, Wakako Yamauchi, Michi Weglyn, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Violet Kazue (Matsuda) deCristoforo, and, of course, Miné Okubo—who refused the silence that too easily has come to characterize the Nisei generation. Some, like Okubo, Sone, and Yamamoto, produced work centered around the experience of incarceration shortly after the war’s end; others recounted that experience from the distance of years.

Among this group of Nisei women, Yoshiko Uchida occupies a singular place. Unlike the others, Uchida addressed her work primarily to children and young adults. Uchida virtually created the field of Japanese American juvenile writing, publishing books for young readers steadily between 1949 and 1993. Only three of her more than thirty books were written for adults, including Des-ert Exile.5 However, it would be a mistake to see Uchida’s writing for adults as somehow more sophisticated or important than her work for juveniles, or to see these two bodies of work as sepa-rate rather than continuous. Indeed, Uchida’s books for children and young adults set the landscape for what Uchida would later accomplish in her work for adults.

In 1949, Uchida’s first book, The Dancing Kettle and Other Jap-anese Folk Tales, was published.6 A retelling of several folktales, the book was the result of Uchida’s two years (1952–54) as a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellow in Japan. While there, she studied various Japanese folk art and craft forms, as well as Zen philoso-phy, steadily gaining an appreciation for Japan and Japanese cul-ture. Of this period, Uchida wrote, “My experience in Japan was as positive and restorative as the evacuation had been negative and depleting.”7 Uchida’s time in Japan had a profound effect on her process of healing and on her writing: subsequent books also introduced the Japanese folktales that, with other folk art forms,

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had helped her to see her own Japanese heritage more positively. These collections could evoke a similar sense of pride in young Japanese Americans, as well as introduce Japanese culture to a non-Nikkei audience.

This was only one of Uchida’s purposes with regard to her young readers, however. Her second book, New Friends for Susan, published in 1951, introduces a young Japanese American protag-onist through whose point of view the story is narrated. While the plot focuses on the largely generic, and prewar, difficulties of start-ing out in a new school, the very presence of a Japanese American main character was itself significant. It provided a point of iden-tification for young Japanese American readers, and the narrative created an imagined space wherein interracial friendships were both possible and normative.

Uchida’s works for children and young adults fall roughly into four groups, in addition to her work on Nikkei incarceration during the war: Japanese folktales, stories about Japanese pro-tagonists in Japan, stories about Japanese American protagonists in the United States, and narratives that explore the relationship between Issei, or immigrant Japanese, and Nisei young people. This last group is particularly important, as Uchida foregrounds the misunderstandings or miscommunications between Japanese elders and Japanese American youngsters, but always with an eye toward rendering the Issei as fully and complexly human, rather than just as signs of foreignness and difference. That is due, in part, to Uchida’s two years in Japan, which she credited for her “new respect and admiration for the culture that had made my parents what they were.”8 Uchida’s respect and admiration for her parents and for the Issei resonate in her subsequent writing, and nowhere are both clearer than in her work focusing on the war years and their immediate aftermath.

In the wake of her mother’s death in 1966, Uchida turned for the first time to writing about the wartime incarceration of her family. One can surmise that Uchida may have waited to write about the events of the war until her parents could not read her books and have to revisit a difficult, humiliating, and painful time

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in their lives. Journey to Topaz, published in 1971, the same year as her father’s death, is dedicated, “In memory of my mother and father and for my Issei friends.” Written for young adults, Jour-ney to Topaz and its sequel, Journey Home (1978), are fictional-ized accounts based on Uchida’s family’s experiences just before, during, and immediately after the war. They feature a protagonist named Yuki who is eleven years old, nearly half the age Uchida was when she was sent to Tanforan and Poston.9 Both books have received national acclaim and are among the most widely read of Uchida’s works for young adults. The texts are striking in their level of detail and the extent to which Uchida is able to register complex forces in narratives whose momentum is determined both by the genre of fiction for younger readers and by the exi-gencies of the historical events portrayed. Equally striking, and moving, are Uchida’s depictions of Yuki’s Issei parents, who are never offered up as examples of either exotic or abject Japanese-ness. Rather, they are shown to be kind, compassionate, capable human beings—complete with the quirks of individual personali-ties—who must deal with the irrational, disorienting, and destruc-tive forces of wartime hysteria twinned with racism.

Writing the two Journey books seems to have spurred Uchida to pen a fully autobiographical account for an adult audience. Addi-tionally, the redress and reparations movement, which resulted in the establishment of the Committee on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1980 and the testimony of hundreds of former detainees in 1981, had collectively reawakened painful memories and reignited anger at governmental abuse of power. The social and political climate had also shifted, largely due to the civil rights movement and various ethnic power move-ments. Thus, the context in which Uchida wrote Desert Exile was markedly different from that in which, for instance, Monica Sone wrote Nisei Daughter (1953), another well-known autobiographi-cal account of a Nikkei family’s forced removal and imprisonment during World War II.10 While the two texts share some similarities in terms of approach and narrative strategy, Uchida’s text is more explicitly political and pointed in its purpose.11 Uchida makes ref-

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erence to the changed political and social landscape in the epi-logue to Desert Exile: “If my story has been long in coming, it is not because I did not want to remember our incarceration or to make this interior journey into my earlier self, but because it took so many years for these words to find a home.”12

Uchida’s evocation of home here is significant, as Desert Exile is a text in which homes are dismantled, lost, packed away, taken, and recalled in absence. Indeed, critic Sau-ling Wong writes that Uchida’s book is about “the un-doing of home-founding,” and that the photographs throughout the text are “a graphic rendition of this process.”13 The photographs Uchida includes visually outline the trajectory of the narrative: the parents’ early adulthood in Japan, the growing community of Nikkei and the establishment of social and religious organizations, and the Uchida family’s home life in Berkeley, California. Then, after Uchida’s account of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the personal photos give way to file pho-tographs that, as Wong notes, “are striking in their exteriorization and objectification of the Japanese Americans.”14 Instead of the likenesses of Mr. and Mrs. Uchida, and of Yoshiko and her older sister, Keiko, we see crowds of people standing amid luggage piled on the sidewalk or waiting en masse to board buses under armed guard. The photograph of the Uchidas’ Berkeley home gives way to one of the horse stalls at Tanforan and a wide-angle shot of the rows upon rows of barracks at Topaz. Wong observes that once the narrative of the war years begins, “There are no more photo-graphs of houses: home has been undone, and having to salvage from its ruins is not the same thing as home-founding.”15 In a sim-ilar vein, literary scholar Helena Grice argues that, in contrast to the tendency for autobiographical writing to “document formative moments” in the writer’s life, Desert Exile “charts the deformative moments of the internment experience and its aftermath.”16

While it is true that Uchida’s narrative and inclusion of photo-graphs attest to the deconstruction of notions of home and norma-tive trajectories of self-formation, Uchida’s discursive and visual texts also suggest, if not a counternarrative, a parallel narrative that combines a critique of the Nikkei’s wartime treatment with

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a deep appreciation for her parents and for Issei culture. Uchida’s respect for the Issei comes through clearly in a late passage from Desert Exile:

A Japanese American recently asked me how the fourth generation Japa-nese Americans could be proud of their heritage when their grandparents and great grandparents had been incarcerated in concentration camps. I was stunned by the question, for quite the contrary, I think they should be proud of the way in which their grandparents survived that shattering ordeal. It is our country that should be ashamed of what it did, not the Japanese Americans for having been its victims.17

Uchida here links the affirmation of Issei strength with the uncon-stitutional context in which that courage became legible. She fur-ther characterizes that context as shameful, a powerful indictment given the resonances of shame in Japanese culture. Uchida’s very vocabulary reflects the trend, beginning in the late 1970s, to refuse to adopt governmental euphemisms that had entered into the gen-eral parlance in the decades following the war. Thus, Uchida does not use the phrase “interned in relocation camps.” Rather, she uses the more forceful and legally accurate phrase “incarcerated in concentration camps.” Of note, also, is Uchida’s use of the word victim, which she does not deploy as an identity but as a signal of the Nikkei’s subjugation to a series of governmental edicts and orders over which they had no control. As her narrative makes clear, from beginning to end, her parents—and by extension, the Issei as a group—did not fall into passive lassitude, as the often misunderstood phrase shikata ga nai (“it cannot be helped”) might indicate. We might better understand the phrase to reg-ister something more akin to “it is what it is.” Coupled with the foundational concept of gaman, which is often simply translated as “perseverance” but which has deeper resonances as a way of enduring what seems unbearable with dignity, patience, and quiet strength, Uchida’s parents, like so many other Issei, carried on as best they could. Absence of victimized complaint should not be taken for compliance.

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Uchida’s parents, Dwight Takashi and Iku Uchida, were fifty- eight and forty-nine years old, respectively, in 1942. Both had been in the United States for at least twenty-five years (Uchida’s father for thirty-six years) and might have expected to enter into a well-earned retirement, having raised to young adulthood their two daughters, at that point twenty-one and twenty-five years old. However, Uchida’s father was taken for questioning by the FBI the afternoon of the Pearl Harbor bombing, not to be reunited with his family until they had been in Topaz for some time. Uchida’s mother and the two daughters were left to deal with the chaos of selling, storing, and packing their belongings for their forced removal to the hastily converted horse stalls at the Tanforan race-track in San Bruno, California.

Throughout Uchida’s description of these ordeals, her parents emerge as steady, warmly dignified, and gracious with regard to their daughters’ and their community’s well-being. Indeed, in a letter written to Uchida in May 1982 (clearly the letter to which Uchida replies in her 29 May 1982 letter quoted above), Miné Okubo focuses a great deal on the similarities between their par-ents. She writes:

Your story of your family is important and valuable because it brings out and explains the strong human ties and relationships between the Japan born and educated Issei parents and their American born and educated nisei children. The values, learn-ing, understanding and respect which can only come by living together. The parents hard work, struggles and [?] and dedication for a better life for their children. . . . I liked the dignity and humor that your parents radiated.18

In addition to the political commitments the two artists shared, they also both felt enormous respect for their parents and the gen-eration of immigrants they represented. Both believed that the American population at large, and the Sansei and Yonsei gener-ations in particular, did not have an appreciation for the cultural background, struggles, and legal limitations within which the Issei

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founded Japanese America. Okubo, in fact, takes the Sansei gen-eration to task. Many, in light of the 1981 CWRIC hearings, had begun to criticize what they saw as Issei and Nisei wartime com-pliance and passivity:

Your family story can help explain some of the whys of the evac-uation which the sansei the 3rd generation-children can’t seem to comprehend because they are living entirely a different time with liberated thoughts but have not lived or experienced the reality of people and life.

This is a more straightforward and acerbic version of Uchida’s own shock that later generations would ask how they could be proud of their background, given the history of removal and incarceration. But the force of Okubo’s feelings is evident throughout the whole of Uchida’s Desert Exile. The descriptions of her parents and the care with which she draws a portrait of the prewar Nikkei commu-nity implicitly make the argument that the Nisei and subsequent generations owe the Issei a great debt. “Because we Nisei were still relatively young at the time, it was largely the Issei who had led the way, guiding us through the devastation and trauma of our forced removal. . . . The evacuation was the ultimate of the incalculable hardships and indignities they had borne over the years.”19

Desert Exile progresses to a close with two last photographs, the only ones of the Uchida family since those depicting their pre-war life in Berkeley. In one, taken at Topaz, Uchida and her older sister are dressed in suits on the day they are to leave camp to begin the fall term at their respective colleges on the East Coast. The barracks form the pictorial backdrop, a reminder of what the daughters are leaving and what the parents must return to. It is a photograph that perhaps epitomizes the ethos of the Issei parents: to subordinate their own desires for their children’s presence to the necessity of supporting them so that they can physically, and hopefully psychically, leave the space of the camp. The final photo-graph, taken in 1950, shows the family gathered to celebrate Uchi-da’s grandmother’s eighty-eighth birthday. Thus, the sequence of

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photos representing removal and incarceration are bookended by those that attest to the family’s survival and cohesion after the war.

However, the visual rhetoric that emblematizes the survival of the family should not be taken as a habitual privileging of the heteronormative nuclear family, or as an indication that the expe-rience during the war had been a minor, character-building blip. Uchida makes clear that her own family’s experience is neither paradigmatic nor typical, noting that for many families, “the ten-sions of one-room living proved more destructive. Many chil-dren drifted away from their parents. . . . The concept of family was rapidly breaking down, adding to the growing misery of life in camp.”20 In order for families to remain intact, parents had to actively intervene to provide structure in an otherwise unstruc-tured, though constricted, environment. Uchida writes that her parents “helped my sister and me channel our anger and frustra-tion. . . . Our anger was cathartic, but bitterness would have been self-destructive.”21 The perceptive reader will note the presence of this anger throughout, and it is this same anger that Uchida reg-isters in her 1982 letter to Okubo when she writes, “The passage of time and the knowledge now of our gov’t leaders’ betrayal has increased my anger.”22 However, rather than fully articulating and performing that anger in the text, Uchida’s anger subtly motivates and shapes Desert Exile. She molds her anger to a pedagogical purpose, seeking to effect change rather than simply to tell a per-sonal story of what she and her family endured.

As she recounts in Desert Exile, Uchida served as an elementary school teacher while incarcerated at Topaz and upon her release attended Smith College, where she obtained a master’s degree in education. Though she taught for only a couple of years before deciding to devote herself to writing full time, that pedagogical impulse runs through all of Uchida’s work, though in an imagi-native and artistic rather than pedantic way. Her body of work is animated by several related key purposes: introducing Japanese culture and folk practices to non-Nikkei audiences; creating a Nikkei presence in children’s and young adult literature, whether through Japanese characters in Japan, Japanese Americans in the

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United States, or Issei and Nisei relationships; affirming the dig-nity and strength of the Issei generation; and writing about the wartime incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans.

Though Uchida began writing directly about Nikkei incarcer-ation during the war only in the latter part of her career, she was motivated from the very beginning by what had happened to the Issei and Nisei, the denigration of Nikkei identity and culture, the need for later generations of Japanese Americans to find “a sense of continuity with their past,” and the belief that all Amer-icans should not forget that the United States ran government- sanctioned concentration camps into which innocent civilians and American citizens were forced.23

However, we should also remember that Uchida was not a polemicist; she was a writer and artist. Her tools were not the manifesto, treatise, or tract but rather narrative, plot, and dia-logue—all underpinned and shaped by the complex interplay between memory and imagination. In this, we might well look to the influence of Uchida’s mother, Iku Uchida, who throughout her life wrote tanka (thirty-one-syllable poems) under the pen name Yukari. Uchida includes several of her mother’s tanka in Desert Exile, three of which close the main body of the narrative. Like the photographs, Yukari’s tanka provide a counternarrative that both registers and transforms raw experience. Uchida’s mother continued to compose tanka during her incarceration, and her poems note the stark, barren landscape, the dust storms, and the loneliness and isolation of those around her, even as her lyrical eye includes the wide-open sky and the beauty of the desert sunset. This combination of perspicacious observation and gentle lyri-cism seem to emblematize Iku Uchida’s personality. Though of an artistic bent and a gentle nature, she had nevertheless, as a twen-ty-four-year-old, crossed the Pacific by herself to marry Dwight Uchida, a man she had yet to meet. Uchida writes admiringly of her mother, as well as of all the Issei women, who “must have had tremendous reserves of strength and courage. . . . Theirs was a determination and endurance born, I would say, of an uncommon spirit.”24

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It seems appropriate to pay the same tribute to Yoshiko Uchida, who, over a body of work spanning more than forty years, affirmed Nikkei culture and gave voice to an experience that had threatened to permanently fracture Japanese America. But Uchida’s purposes extended beyond the Nikkei community: she wanted to use her writing to educate people so that what happened during World War II would not happen again to anyone, and she particularly founded her hopes in educating young people through her writing and frequent talks to primary and secondary school groups.

In a June 1983 postcard to Okubo, congratulating her on the reissue of Citizen 13660, Uchida sends busy greetings: “I know exactly what you mean about having no time. I’m feeling the same pressures from ‘walking the dedicated road.’ Did have a wonderful trip to Hawaii, however, where I spoke at a conference and some schools.”25 An artist, writer, and teacher at heart, Yoshiko Uchida was truly an uncommon spirit who walked the dedicated road.

Traise YamamotoUniversity of California, Riverside

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notes1 Many thanks to Dr. Hillary Jenks, director of the Center for Social Justice and Civil

Liberties, for bringing this and other archival materials relating to Uchida and Okubo to my attention. Yoshiko Uchida, letter to Miné Okubo, 29 May 1982, folder 1, box 20, Miné Okubo Collection, Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties, Riverside Community College District, Riverside, California.

2 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “A Memory of Genius,” in Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, ed. Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 186 (“gruff”). Greg Robinson, “A Tribute to Miné Okubo,” in ibid., 181 (“a commanding personality”).

3 Nikkei refers to anyone of Japanese descent and Issei to immigrant or first-generation Nikkei in the United States. Nisei, Sansei, and Yonsei denote, respectively, second-, third-, and fourth-generation American-born Nikkei. It is important to note that although the Nisei are referred to as second-generation, they are actually the first American-born generation.

4 Anonymous, “That Damned Fence,” Japanese-American Internment Memories, n.d., http://japaneseinternmentmemories.wordpress.com/ category/ japanese- internement- poetry/ (15 June 2014).

5 In addition to Desert Exile, Uchida wrote a novel for adults, Picture Bride (1987; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Uchida also authored a somewhat anomalous book, We Do Not Work Alone: The Thoughts of Kanjiro Kawai (Kyoto: Kawai Kanjiro House, 1973), which is based on conversations Uchida had with Kawai, whom she got to know well during her fellowship in Japan.

6 Yoshiko Uchida, The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folktales (New York: Har-court, Brace and Company, 1949).

7 Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 152 (page 153, this volume).

8 Ibid., 152 (page 154, this volume).9 Yoshiko Uchida, Journey to Topaz (1971; reprint, Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2004).

Yoshiko Uchida, Journey Home (1978; reprint, New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1982).10 Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (1953; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press,

1979).11 For an extended discussion of Sone’s and Uchida’s autobiographies, see chapter 3

in Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

12 Uchida, Desert Exile, 154 (page 155, this volume).13 Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance

(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 136.14 Ibid., 137.15 Ibid., 137–38.

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16 Helena Grice, Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women’s Writing (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 175.

17 Uchida, Desert Exile, 148 (page 149, this volume).18 Again, my thanks to Hillary Jenks for alerting me to this letter. Okubo’s handwriting

and the fading of the ink make for diffi cult reading. I have transcribed the quoted passages to the best of my ability. Th e bracketed question mark indicates where the original is illegible. Miné Okubo, letter to Yoshiko Uchida, 14 May 1982, folder 1, box 43, Miné Okubo Collection, Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties, Riverside Community College District, Riverside, California.

19 Uchida, Desert Exile, 142 (page 144, this volume).20 Ibid., 123 (page 124, this volume).21 Ibid., 148 (pages 149–50, this volume).22 On the representation of anger in Uchida’s narrative, see chapter 3 in Yamamoto,

Masking Selves, Making Subjects.23 Uchida, Desert Exile, 154 (page 156, this volume).24 Ibid., 6 (page 6, this volume).25 Yoshiko Uchida, postcard to Miné Okubo, 15 June 1983, folder 1, box 70, Miné Okubo

Collection, Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties, Riverside Community Col-lege District, Riverside, California.

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