Desert Exile

Here, we receive an outline of Desert Exile’s narrative arc, and learn background information about the work of author Yoshiko Uchida and her family, who were among the thousands of Japanese-American citizens incarcerated in concentration camps by the United States government after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Uchida began her career writing children’s books and wrote this autobiographical account in 1982, after her parents’ deaths. We learn that as the book evolves, photographs illustrate the family’s path from their home in Berkeley, California to life in horse stalls converted into prisoner quarters in the concentration camps at Tanforan, in San Bruno, California, and the Uchidas’ experience at Topaz Relocation Center, in Utah. Instead of telling the formative moments of Uchida’s life, Desert Exile exploreshow incarceration deconstructed the lives and social fabric of Japanese-Americans.

Written by Traise Yamamoto, a professor at University of California Riverside, the Prologue introduces readers to the relationships between Issei, Nisei, Sansei, and Yonsei generations of Japanese-Americans: first-, second-, third- and fourth-generation, respectively: The “Sansei and Yonsei generations are largely given credit for pushing their elders towards remembrance and reparations, informed as their generations were by the civil rights movement” (x). The Prologue notes how Uchida “links the affirmation of Issei strength with the unconstitutional context in which that courage becomes legible” (xv).

Yamamoto opens and structures the Prologue by establishing a parallel between Uchida and artist Mine Okubo, another Nisei woman incarcerated at Tanforan and Topaz: “Your book was and will continue to be a great pictorial record for future generations” (ix), Okubo wrote to Uchida. Both women shared:

a commitment to ensuring through their work that subsequent generations of Americans—and particularly Japanese-Americans—had learned through their 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 (x).

We learn the two womenwere part of a much larger group of extraordinary Nisei and Issei women, and that while interned, Uchida’s mother wrote tanka (thirty-one syllable poems), which are included throughout the book. The Prologue also introduces us to Uchida, author of books such as The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales, and other books about her experience as a prisoner.