The Journey and the Grove

As I stared at my Blogger dashboard this morning I was completely disappointed with myself. I haven't even touched this blog for a while. My "upcoming reviews" were never reviewed and I just let this thing sit out here in the blogosphere with nothing new to offer. As I said in the sidebar, this blog was really started just so I could keep track of books that I'm reading. My hope, my ideal I guess, is that in the future I can look back and read a review I wrote of a book and say, "Oh, I should read that again!" But, alas, I haven't blogged about any of the books I've read recently. That doesn't mean that I haven't been reading. Have I been reading! I've read a lot of good stuff, so for now I'm just going to forget about the books that I was previously hoping to review. Today I want to talk about two books that I just read that really hit me hard.

Yoshiko Uchida's Journey to Topaz is the heart-wrenching and heart-warming tale of a Japanese-American family's experience during World War II.

In 1941, the fictional character Yuki Sakane, then eleven-years-old, was sent with her mother and brother to a prison camp in the deserts of Utah. Her father had previously been taken to an internment camp. The reason? Her parents were both Issei, first-generation Japanese. They had lived in America for years and raised two children, both Americans by birth. But it did not matter. At a time when the world was at war, Japanese-Americans were treated as prisoners.

Journey to Topaz does, in fact, take the reader on a journey. This journey follows sweet Yuki through fear, heartbreak, and the love of friends and family. This book includes fictional characters; however, the story is all too true. The author's experience was very similar.

I must admit that I hadn't known much about the Japanese-American's plight during World War II. I'd heard about it, and I'm sure that I have read about it before, but reading Journey to Topaz opened up my eyes. I think it is interesting to read, even today, because it focuses so much on racial profiling. Isn't it interesting--at least it is to me--that America, the so-called melting pot, has always struggled with this topic? From enslaving African-Americans to worrying about profiling Hispanics, America has had no end of trouble with racial profiling. To think, the loyal Japanese-Americans were put behind barbed-wire fences just because their ancestors were born in Japan. It is a sad mark in America's history. It should never be forgotten, in the dire hopes that it will never be repeated.

Journey to Topaz was written for children, so that they might learn about this tragic time in history. However, I really enjoyed the writing style of this book and I think adults would really enjoy it too. It was very addicting; I think it only took me a couple of days to read it through!

The next book, So Far from the Bamboo Grove, took me only two days to read. Yoko Kawashima Watkins tells her story beautifully and poignantly. As an eleven-year-old, her Japanese family fled from northern Korea as World War II ended. On the back of my edition, the publisher has printed "10 UP" but I would warn against handing this to young children. If anything, I would suggest reading this aloud together so that you can talk about the issues brought up in this book. The topics involved include extreme instances of starvation, homelessness, rape, sickness, death, and violence in relation to the war. It is rather graphic. (Side note: I read most of this book before I went to sleep one night and it is haunting.)

But all that aside, this is a story that should and must be told. It is a very interesting picture compared to most World War books that I have read, mainly because this captures the story of someone on the other side of the war. It shows that the enemy is not always a terrible, murdering wretch. Sometimes the enemy is an eleven-year-old, Japanese girl who just wants to stay safe in her warm bed. If anything, readers of So Far from the Bamboo Grove should take away the fact that war has the ability to hurt everyone involved.

I really believe that no World War II book collection would be complete with out So Far from the Bamboo Grove.

Photos found through Google Images.