For Middle Grade Readers: Japanese-American & Japanese-Canadian Incarceration During World War II
If you have middle school students, I highly recommend reading both Stealing Home by J. Torres & David Namisato (2021) and Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About The Japanese American Incarceration (2024). Read these books alongside your children/students. When we learn more about our past injustices, we are less likely to ignore current and future injustices.
Stealing Home is a historical fiction graphic novel set in Canada during the 1940s. To be honest, I didn’t know Canada also incarcerated their Japanese-Canadian citizens during World War II. I thought only America had. This is a story of Sandy - a Japanese-Canadian boy growing up in middle class Canada. He loved baseball and playing with school friends, but when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Canada started rounding up the Japanese-Canadian citizens and imprisoning them in camps. Sandy’s dad was a doctor and spent much of his time in the camps taking care of all of the sick people. This story gets to the heart of what it means to call a place home. There is a struggle to find “home” when people are disconnected from each other, emotionally and physically.
Seen and Unseen is on this year’s Illinois Rebecca Caudill list; recommended for grades 6-8. This book is stunning. It is a nonfiction text that tells the story of the incarceration of Japanese-American people after the bombing of Pearl Harbor through the use of words, illustrations, and primary sources like photographs. Do not skip the information in the back. In the “Keeping Our Democracy Strong” section, Partridge writes, “We can bear witness to old injustices, learn from them, and do our best to ensure they never happen again.” Renowned photographer, Dorothea Lange had been against the United States governments’ incarceration of Japanese-Americans, but she accepted the government’s job offer to photograph the camps. She hoped to capture how undemocratic this program was; however, the government impounded many of the photos that they deemed “unfavorable” and only used the images that made the camps appear comfortable. Ansel Adams had not been a critic of the incarceration and did not take photos that made Manzanar Camp look like a grueling place. It is interesting to think how a photographer’s personal opinion shapes the way we view history. Author Elizabeth Partridge explains that in today’s age, we can document injustices with our cell phone cameras – in many ways, our current society can shape history through our own personal photographs.
Heart: What struck me in both of these books were the Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian people who felt they had to prove their loyalty to the United States/Canada. Even in the face of abuse, they fought to prove their worth. We see this question of which marginalized groups “belong” playing out right now in our national landscape.
Head: Many dangerous things happen when people are “othered.” When you see leaders targeting marginalized groups with their words and their actions, let that be a warning sign. Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian citizens were “othered” – they were discriminated against and their 5th Amendment constitutional rights were violated when they were imprisoned without due process under the law. Despite the extreme and unconstitutional “safety measures,” during this time, not one Japanese-American was found spying or sabotaging the United States. We have a lot to learn from this history.