The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559,Mirror Lake Internment Camp

How would you feel if you and a group of people you know who are alike in some way were suddenly gathered up by the government, forced to sell most of their possessions, and then were shipped to an area surrounded by barbed wire and filled with run-down shacks? The area would be called an internment camp.

Neither you nor any of people would receive any legal advice or trials before they were shipped to the camp; none of you would even be charged with anything. The camp would be surrounded by high towers containing men with machine guns who could, if they felt someone was trying to escape, kill them.

You would also not have any idea how long you were going to be kept there. You could write letters to friends, but the letters would be heavily censored as would be any letters you receive. You would not have indoor plumbing. You would only have furniture you could build from scrap lumber. You would have to stand in long lines for almost everything.

Add to this the possibility that the home you left behind would be burned to the ground because you belonged to that specific group. It would probably not be a very pleasant experience, to put it mildly.

Yet this is exactly what was done during World War II to Japanese-Americans. Executive Order 9066 gave the government permission to do just that type of thing for "military necessity." As a result, 120,000 people were placed into these camps, seventy percent of them having been born in America to Japanese parents or Japanese-American parents.

This book is the story of a fictional young boy, Ben Uchida, who is taken to an internment camp along with the rest of his family except for his father who is taken somewhere else.

It's a very interesting book in many ways. The historical section is, as always, quite informative. The story itself helps bring alive the type of camp life the people had to live and shows very vividly how discrimination and prejudice can occur in the U.S. Just one of the various interesting things pointed out was that it was only the Japanese-Americans who were put into internment camps; not the Germans or the Italians who were also fighting at the time.

The only criticism I have of the book is that, at times, the language Ben Uchida uses seems a little too modern and a little too grown-up for someone of his age and time.

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For more factual information on the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II go here


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