Yoshi is a Japanese American young girl. She has an older sister, Keiko, a mother and a father. She grew up in Berkeley, California, her father working at an import-export firm.
At the age of 12 she visited Japan, but felt somewhat foreign in that country, just as she feels foreign in the U.S. She gets along well with the neighbor's children, and the neighbors and their parents get along fine.
She goes from junior to senior high, graduating from high school early and going on to the University of California.
The above part takes up a little less than half of the book. The rest deals with Pearl Harbor and afterwards. One day Yoshi goes to study at the library, comes home, and finds her father has been taken by the FBI, and there's an FBI agent in the home. Her father was taken since he was a businessmen.
(One thing to keep in mind; these people were not charged with any crime at all. There was no formal arrest, no trial, no due process, no nothing like that at all involved. The people were simply taken and put places.)
Yoshi goes into how the interment process affected her and her family. They were housed in a former horse stall at the assembly center, and then were shipped to Tanforan.
She then talks about the life in the camp, how schools were set up, etc. Then they are sent to Topaz.
(She uses the term “concentration camps.”)
She also talks about the shooting that killed an internee. She then talks about worsening conditions in the camp that led to internal violence at the camp, which became a hotbed of angry young men, basically.
Then she covers the issue of getting volunteers for the military.
She finally gets to leave the camp when she gets a job outside it.
It's a really good book. She's also done a number of other books on the internment and on being Japanese American.
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Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
