Journey to Topaz (50th Anniversary Edition) Read online

  In memory of my mother and father and for my Issei friends

  Copyright © 1971 by Yoshiko Uchida

  Reprinted under special arrangement with the Regents of the University of California.

  Foreword © 2022 by Traci Chee

  All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Uchida, Yoshiko, author. | Chee, Traci, writer of forward.

  Title: Journey to Topaz : a story of the Japanese-American evacuation / Yoshiko Uchida ; foreword by Traci Chee.

  Description: 50th anniversary edition. | Berkeley, California : Heyday, 2022. | Audience: Ages 9-12 | Audience: Grades 4-6 | Summary: “This much-loved and widely read classic is the moving story of one girl’s struggle to remain brave during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. This fiftieth anniversary edition features new cover art, a refreshed design, and a new foreword by Traci Chee”-- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021040937 | ISBN 9781597145589 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Japanese Americans--Forced removal and interment, 1942-1945--Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Japanese Americans--Forced removal and interment, 1942-1945--Fiction. | World War, 1939-1945--United States--Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.U25 Jo 2022 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040937

  Cover Art: Patricia Wakida

  Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

  Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

  Published by Heyday

  P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709

  (510) 549-3564

  heydaybooks.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 Strangers at the Door

  2 The Long Wait

  3 A Lonely Christmas

  4 Ten Days to Pack

  5 Inside the Barbed Wire

  6 Home Is a Horse Stall

  7 A New Friend

  8 Ken Spoils a Party

  9 A New Rumor

  10 Goodbye, Tanforan

  11 A Home in the Desert

  12 Dust Storm

  13 A Last Visit

  14 Tragedy at Dusk

  15 Good News

  16 Another Goodbye

  17 Hello, World

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I have always believed that the right book at the right time can change someone’s life, and that’s never been more clear to me than in my experience with Yoshiko Uchida. A pioneer in Japanese American children’s literature, Uchida released her first book, a collection of Japanese folktales, in 1949 and continued to write, prolifically and unapologetically, about Japanese and Japanese American subjects, characters, and history until her death in 1992. I turned seven that year, and I couldn’t have articulated it to you then, but at a time when my own identity as a Chinese and Japanese American was still forming, reading Uchida’s novels showed me that it was not only possible but wonderful to be part of more than one community—Chinese, Japanese, American, Chinese American, Japanese American, and more—to belong to many, in all their complexity and contradiction and beauty.

  Little did I know that my connection to Uchida’s work ran even deeper than that. Born in 1921, Uchida was a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American, who spent her childhood and young adulthood in Berkeley, California, where at age sixteen she graduated from high school and began attending UC Berkeley. Meanwhile, less than twenty miles away, my Nisei grandparents, also born in the 1920s, were growing up in Japantown, San Francisco. It’s unlikely that their paths would have crossed at the time, but soon all of their lives would be transformed by World War II and the Japanese American incarceration.

  Anti-Asian racism has existed in this country for centuries, but when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the resulting war hysteria led to a renewed surge in anti-Japanese sentiment, from personal attacks to sweeping executive and legislative changes that systematically stripped Japanese Americans—a term I use here to include first-generation Issei, who were at the time prevented from obtaining naturalized US citizenship, as well as their American-born descendants—of their opportunities, freedoms, and basic civil rights. Then, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which laid the groundwork for the mass eviction of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Forced removals began shortly thereafter, as tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were rounded up into temporary detention centers before being shipped to more remote locations, known then as “relocation centers”—now “incarceration camps.” By the end of World War II, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry had been incarcerated by the US government.

  This history is at the core of Journey to Topaz: A Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation. Like so many other Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area, Yoshiko Uchida and her family were impacted by the mass eviction and incarceration, sent to the Tanforan temporary detention center in April 1942 and later shipped hundreds of miles east to the Central Utah Relocation Center, commonly known as Topaz. Inspired by some of Uchida’s own experiences, Journey to Topaz wasn’t the first novel on the Japanese American incarceration, but it was the first novel on the Japanese American incarceration written for children. Through the character of young Yuki Sakane, we are offered intimate glimpses into these massive injustices: Yuki watching her father being taken by the FBI; Yuki mourning the loss of their home and family dog in the eviction; Yuki struggling with the inhumane conditions at Tanforan, a former racetrack; Yuki finding her courage while she, her family, and her friends are forced to live behind barbed-wire fences at Topaz.

  The journey from the Bay Area to Tanforan to Topaz is one that many families, including both Uchida’s and mine, endured in 1942. Near the end of April, as both Yoshiko Uchida and the fictional Yuki Sakane were being evicted from their homes in Berkeley, across the bay my grandmother, aged thirteen, was experiencing a similar struggle. After being forced out of their apartment in Japantown, she and her family arrived at Tanforan only to discover that they, too, were to live in one of Tanforan’s old horse stables—eight people to a stall meant for a single animal.

  Later that year, my grandparents, like the Uchidas and the Sakanes, made the train ride across California and Nevada to the high desert of Topaz, Utah, where they would be imprisoned for the next few years. My grandfather—several years younger than Uchida, who was twenty at the time of the eviction, and several years older than eleven-year-old Yuki—finished high school there. He got his first job there. He met my grandmother there, and when he was drafted into the army in 1945, he wrote love letters to her back in camp.

  As a child I was an avid fan of Uchida’s books, particularly A Jar of Dreams (1981) and The Best Bad Thing (1983), which I read over and over again, but Journey to Topaz wasn’t a book I had when I was a kid. When I finally found it as an adult, I couldn’t help but wonder if my grandparents had known Uchida, passed her in the dusty streets, stood in line with her at the post office, or sat beside her in one of the mess halls. It’s certainly possible—Uchida, who was assigned to Block 7, lived one block away from my grandmother in Block 8. Both Uchida and Yuki were relocated out of camp two years before my grandparents, but for a small span of time between
1942 and 1943, they watched the same sunsets, braved the same dust storms, and suffered the same injustices. The history from Journey to Topaz was my history—it was personal to me in a way no other book had ever been—and reading it made me feel like the past was close, surrounding me in a way I hadn’t understood until then.

  Journey to Topaz was first published in 1971, when many Japanese Americans were active in the Redress Movement, which demanded reparations for the mass eviction and incarceration in the form of legislative changes, recognition of wrongdoing, and monetary compensation. As a direct result of this movement, in 1980, Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to study the effects of the displacement and imprisonment and to make recommendations for redress. The CWRIC reported its findings in 1982 and 1983, but it took another five years before the federal government passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which not only granted a formal apology and financial reparations to every surviving detainee, but also allocated funds for public education on the Japanese American incarceration. As with any hard-won victory, redress and reparations were not above criticism, but for many people they provided an opportunity to begin processing and healing from the incarceration, the effects and echoes of which we continue to feel to this day.

  In 2017, as I was drafting We Are Not Free, my own novel about the Japanese American incarceration, I was struck again and again by how the events of the past reverberate into our present: community leaders rounded up by the FBI, children imprisoned in detention centers, people of color murdered by law enforcement, citizens tear-gassed in the streets. It’s the twenty-first century, eighty years after Pearl Harbor and fifty years after the publication of Journey to Topaz, and equality and justice are still not guaranteed to all. In this country, marginalized communities—including Asian American Pacific Islander, Black, Indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ+, refugee, and immigrant communities, to name but a few—continue to be othered, singled-out, incarcerated, abused, and attacked.

  The past is never just the past. Although the events of Journey to Topaz may seem distant, these stories remain urgent and immediate, for they hold up a mirror to our present. Bearing witness to the eviction and incarceration of Yuki Sakane and her family reminds us that there is a history here that needs to be acknowledged, a pattern that needs to be addressed. It reminds us that there are injustices that need undoing now. There are causes that need voices now. Reading Journey to Topaz in the twenty-first century can be heartbreaking and infuriating, but I also hope it is empowering, especially to young people, because even if we can never truly right the wrongs of our past, we can still act—right now—so that we do not have to carry these wrongs into the future.

  Traci Chee

  Northern California

  September 2021

  PROLOGUE

  It has been many years since I first wrote Journey to Topaz and more than forty years since the United States government uprooted 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without trial or hearing, and imprisoned them behind barbed wire. Two-thirds of those Japanese Americans were American citizens, and I was one of them. We were imprisoned by our own country during World War II, not because of anything we had done, but simply because we looked like the enemy.

  Today we know, in spite of the government claim at the time, that there was no military necessity for this action. Today we know this gross violation of our Constitution caused one of the most shameful episodes in our country’s history. Our leaders betrayed not only the Japanese Americans, but all Americans, for by denying the Constitution, they damaged the very essence of our democratic beliefs.

  In 1976 President Gerald R. Ford stated, “Not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans . . . we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American.” In 1983 a Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians established by the United States Congress concluded that a grave injustice was done to Japanese Americans and that the causes of the uprooting were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of leadership.

  Journey to Topaz is the story of what happened to one Japanese American family during this wartime tragedy, then called “the evacuation.” Although the characters are fictional, the events are based on actual fact, and most of what happened to the Sakane family also happened to my own.

  I would ask readers to remember that my characters portray the Japanese Americans of 1942 and to recall that the world then was totally different from the one we know today. In 1942 the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard and ethnic pride was yet unborn. There was no awareness in the land of civil rights, and there had yet been no freedom marches or demonstrations of protest. Most Americans, supporting their country in a war they considered just, did nothing to protest our forced removal, and might well have considered it treasonous had we tried to resist or protest.

  Told to demonstrate our loyalty by doing as our country asked, we had no choice but to trust our government leaders. We did not know then, as we do now, that they had acceded to political and economic pressure groups and imprisoned us with full knowledge that their action was not only unconstitutional, but totally unnecessary.

  I hope by reading this book young people everywhere will realize what once took place in this country and will determine never to permit such a travesty of justice to occur again.

  Yoshiko Uchida

  Berkeley, California

  January 1984

  1

  STRANGERS AT THE DOOR

  It was only the first week in December, but already Yuki could feel the tingling excitement of Christmas in the air. There was, of course, no sign of snow, for it never snowed in Berkeley except for the winter when she was six and a thin flurry of flakes had surprised them all. Yuki remembered how she had run outside, stretched her arms wide and opened her mouth, thrusting out her tongue so she could feel the snow and taste it and gather it to her in any way she could before the flakes reached the ground and disappeared. Today looked like snow weather for the sky was gray and murky, but only with fog that blew in cold and damp from San Francisco Bay.

  Yuki stood close to the fireplace with its burning oak logs and lifted her skirt to feel the warmth as she waited for Mother to fix lunch. On such a cold gloomy Sunday, it felt especially good to be close to a fire and think glowing thoughts about Christmas. It wouldn’t be long before a tall fir tree with its fresh green forest smell would be standing in the corner of the living room and the kitchen would be filled with the wonderful scent of Mother’s butter cookies.

  Yuki thought happily of the presents that would soon gather under the tree. She had already decided to get Mother a soft blue chiffon scarf to go with her Sunday church coat, some wool socks for Father and maybe a tie or a record for her older brother, Ken. It was hardest to find something good for Ken. Now that he was going to the university, he seemed to live in a changed world and to be almost a different person. He was eighteen and suddenly it was no longer football and baseball and basketball alone that fascinated him. He liked girls.

  “I’m a girl,” Yuki reminded him periodically. “Why don’t you take me to the movies?”

  But Ken only laughed. “I like girls over sixteen,” he explained. “You’ve still got five years to go, and besides that, you’re my sister. That makes you an entirely different specimen altogether!”

  Yuki sometimes looked at herself in the mirror, wrinkling her nose at the round full face and the straight black hair that fell to her shoulders. She would push aside her bangs and contemplate the possibilities. How would she look when she was sixteen anyway? Not very good, she decided, but she wasn’t going to let that bother her, at least for now.

  “Yuki Chan!” Mother roused Yuki from her reveries about Christmas and her older brother. “Lunch is ready. Will you go outside and call your father?”

  Yuki hurried toward the back door, stopping on the way to get some dog
biscuits for Pepper. Father was out in the yard tying up the last of the white chrysanthemums and burning old leaves. He hadn’t been home from church an hour and already he was hard at work outdoors where he loved to be.

  Father went to church each Sunday because he believed it was the proper thing to do. He didn’t read the Bible each day as Mother did, and Yuki wasn’t even sure he said his prayers every night before going to sleep. In fact, she suspected that if he had his way, he would have preferred working in his garden on Sunday to sitting in the small Japanese church in Oakland listening to Reverend Wada, their minister from Japan, and hearing the drone of the reed organ wheezing out the seemingly endless hymns. “You know,” he had once said to Mother, “sometimes God seems closer out there in the fresh air with the flowers and trees than in our sanctuary.” But when he talked like that, Mother wouldn’t even dignify his comment with an answer.

  As Yuki went out the back door, Pepper came bounding up the steps to meet her, barking and wagging his tail and running in circles around her. He knew Yuki had some biscuits for him, just as he knew that Mother or Father or Ken would. They all spoiled Pepper terribly, but in return, Pepper gave them every ounce of love that he had stored in his lively black body.

  “Down, Pepper!” Yuki commanded, and then, still playing with Pepper, she shouted to her father. “Come on in, Papa. Lunch is ready.”

  Father raised his shears to show that he had heard, but he quickly disappeared again behind the chrysanthemums. Yuki knew she’d have to call him at least two more times before he’d even begin to think about coming inside. She took her time, stopping to peer into the fishpond, stirring the water to see if the big gray carp would rise to the surface, his mouth open wide expecting some food. It was a shabby trick, but one that Yuki couldn’t resist occasionally just to see if the old carp was alive and alert.

  As Yuki studied the murky depths of the fishpond, she heard Mother ringing her small black bell. Mother didn’t like shouting to people, so instead she rang her bell and when she did, it meant that everyone should hurry.