4 | From Confinement to Containment | Temple University Press and North Broad Press

YOSHIKO UCHIDA was just beginning her career as a children’s author when she wrote with excitement to her parents in 1950. A year earlier, the New York–based publisher Harcourt, Brace and Company released her first book, The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales (1949). The work contained stories that Uchida had heard as a child, and she adapted them for young American readers, hoping the collection would contribute to building better cultural relations between the United States and Japan after World War II. Yet the book was not the main topic Uchida discussed in her letter. Instead, she told her mother and father about meeting with a New Yorker magazine editor who encouraged her to create adult short fiction about the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans. The editor suggested that Uchida provide accounts based on her family’s experiences to edify the periodical’s subscribers. Thus inspired, Uchida confessed to her parents, “I’ve had the whole evacuation story inside of me for so long—just waiting to be written. I certainly hope I can be successful in this venture.”¹ The possibilities for making her mark on the literary world at this time and in this fashion appeared promising indeed.

A prolific author of essays, short stories, and more than thirty books, Uchida was a major figure in American culture, with a career spanning the late 1940s to the early 1990s. Her range of topics was impressive: children’s books on Japanese folktales, essays on Japanese folk traditions, young adult stories with characters from Japan and the United States befriending one another, children’s and adult fiction and memoirs about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, and narratives with historical and modern-day Japanese protagonists. To the general public, Uchida was a beloved, award-winning writer who displayed a nuanced sympathy for her characters that appealed to all ages. That many of her books still appear in print attests to her continued popularity. Despite this profound influence in the United States, Uchida’s body of work has attracted only slight critical attention. Especially lacking are studies on her texts produced in the early Cold War era. It was during this time that the author developed not only her understanding of cultural relations between the United States and Japan but also the themes, characters, and narrative strategies she would later apply to her works on the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans.

Although the breadth of topics Uchida covered was extensive, her legacy rests on her writings about the incarceration period.² More than any other author, Uchida conveyed to generations of young readers the fraught history of a nation that valorized the ideals of liberty and democracy while denying basic rights and privileges to Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. As early as 1950, however, she focused on writing for adult audiences about this matter. Uchida sent drafts of short stories to the top periodicals of the day, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Made-moiselle, Woman’s Day, Esquire, and others. Yet many of these pieces went unpublished, as she collected reams of rejection letters from these esteemed journals. At the same time, the declined work revealed her ambition to reach mainstream consumers.³ These compositions were also crucial to developing Uchida’s thinking on the mass confinement and were published in revised form during the 1970s, two decades after she initially expressed enthusiasm for the subject when corresponding with her parents. Journey to Topaz (1971) and Journey Home (1978) were her first and most familiar young adult books about the imprisonment and its aftermath. The texts fictionalized many of her family’s grueling experiences at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a former racetrack in California; then at Topaz, a War Relocation Center in the Utah desert; and finally, on their return home to California after the war. She produced two memoirs as well: one for adult readers, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family (1982), and another for adolescents, The Invisible Thread (1991). The wartime incarceration also appeared as a plot device in the novel Picture Bride (1987) and in a children’s illustrated book, The Bracelet (1993). The reasons for Uchida’s success with these publications, and for the scholarly interest they attract, are not hard to fathom, considering the historical and cultural contexts from which they emerged. By the 1970s and onward, the civil rights movement, the Japanese American reparations movement, and the growing attention to multicultural literature created a more amenable environment to address the consequences of this tragedy.⁴

Reviewers, publicists, and Uchida herself consequently portrayed her lifework as one that started with adapting Japanese folktales and creating young adult fiction about Japan for an American readership. This focus made sense in light of the new alliance and cultural interest emerging between the United States and Japan. Only later in her career, as this conventional understanding goes, did she emphasize the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans. Uchida, however, was a more complex and wide-ranging author than this image presents. Although she failed to publish work on the mass incarceration in the early Cold War era, she still thought deeply about it, disclosing a simultaneous interest in Japanese American experiences and in U.S.-Japan relations that persisted throughout her body of work.

In this context, Uchida presents an aspect of the “Japanese/American” dynamic in which the opposing and overlapping relations between each signifier changed over the course of her life. When coming of age before the Pacific War, Uchida showed little interest in U.S.-Japan relations, considering herself thoroughly American. She tried to remain distant from her Japanese ancestry, seeing it as an unwelcome, though always present, attribute that emphasized her foreignness within the United States. But this desired separation from her ancestry and her longing to participate in white society without racial stigma was impossible, given the nation’s broader history of excluding people of Asian descent from the American mainstream. Uchida realized this conundrum with more clarity as she matured. Although she wanted to be “American, not Japanese,” the federal government marked her family and community as “Japanese, not American,” resulting in their wartime incarceration. The bloody conflict between her native and ancestral lands proved a major turning point, pressing her to reflect on how both parts of this Japanese/American configuration informed, developed, and complicated one another through their mutual histories. By the late 1940s, Uchida embraced what Japan and its culture offered, positioning herself through her writings as a cosmopolitan mediator, as she extended her views of the world and of her own American life.

This transition in Uchida’s thinking began with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the signing of Executive Order 9066. Daunting as confinement was, it also fostered Uchida’s appreciation of her Japanese ancestry, a reaction that most Japanese Americans did not share. At the war’s outbreak, many responded with shock and disbelief at the news from Pearl Harbor. The Issei and Nisei knew racial prejudice firsthand and sought to disassociate themselves from their ethnic background as a survival strategy. To eviscerate any trace of their ties to Japan, they destroyed or hid letters, books, artwork, clothes, and other artifacts that would link them to the enemy. This purging, however, could not stop their looming displacement. Yet, for Uchida, the forced removal and life in the camps awakened, rather than repressed, her interest in Japanese culture. What she endured throughout the war prompted a growing valuation of her family background. In retrospect, Uchida acknowledged to a fuller extent her parents’ travails during this time, and realizing what they taught her contributed to a strengthened desire to tell their stories as well as her own. The improved postwar relations between the United States and Japan also inspired her to appreciate her ancestral heritage. Her research and writing about a rich folk tradition arose from these new perspectives.

Uchida’s curiosity about Japan and her work on folktales likewise encouraged, rather than overshadowed, her desire to write about the confinement of Japanese Americans. She initially expressed her thoughts and observations in a wartime diary and a scrapbook, later reworking these compositions into short story drafts. After the war, she addressed these experiences in other media, including press interviews for her folktales, undeveloped fictional sketches, autobiographical pieces, and correspondence with editors, friends, and family members. The early Cold War era in this way proved vital to developing Uchida’s fiction and memoir writing on the mass imprisonment, aided by her interest in Japanese folktales and in postwar Japan. For her, teaching children to appreciate a common humanity and its different cultures lessened the chances for global conflicts and for racially discriminatory acts, such as the uprooting and imprisoning of Japanese Americans, from occurring again. Thus, rather than seeing her texts on the mass imprisonment as simply a product of late-twentieth-century national developments that centered on the civil rights movement, we can find their origins in earlier efforts that aligned with her international interests stemming from the postwar period. Examining the temporal and topical range of Uchida’s work through her entwined interests in Japan and Japanese Americans from the late 1940s onward can then enrich our thinking about how she confronted the legacies of war and confinement through a transpacific cultural framework.

A Family Uprooted

The main source that inspired Uchida to write about Japanese culture and about the wartime confinement was her Issei parents. Dwight Takashi Uchida emigrated from Japan to Hawai‘i in 1903, when he was nineteen years old. He worked on the islands as a Japanese-language teacher before moving to San Francisco three years later. He then relocated to Seattle to live with his mother and one of his sisters, who had previously moved there from Japan. During these perambulations, the young man had ambitions of attending Yale medical school, but the plan never materialized since he felt financially obligated to help bring his other sisters to the United States. He found work in Seattle at a general merchandise store for a year and managed another in Portland for nine years. In 1917, Mitsui and Company, a Japanese trading firm, admired his management skills and hired him to work for its San Francisco branch office. Dwight Uchida also married Iku Umegaki that year. Dwight and Iku had never met before, but they had shared the same professors at Doshisha University, a Christian institution in Kyoto, Japan. The two also came from similar backgrounds: their fathers had been samurai who then moved into the professional class after the Meiji Restoration. Both patriarchs died young, leaving their families to fend for themselves. As adolescents working at menial jobs and sometimes living with relatives, Dwight and Iku became resourceful and empathized with others who struggled. The Doshisha professors, sensing kindred spirits in their former students, suggested that Dwight and Iku correspond with one another. The pair did so for a year, exchanging letters and photographs before Iku came to the United States as a picture bride to join her intended husband.⁵

Settling in the Bay Area, Dwight and Iku raised Yoshiko and her elder sister Keiko (or Kay) there. In her memoirs, the author depicted her parents as polar opposites in personalities: he with his good-natured garrulousness, business acumen, and pragmatism, she with a quieter, more artistic sensibility. Iku, however, was open and generous in her own way. While attending Doshisha University, she studied British literature and taught English to Kyoto factory workers. Yoshiko often wondered at her mother’s courage when coming to the United States at a young age, without friends or family, to start a new life with a husband who already had associates and his mother and sisters with him. Because of their father’s professional status, Yoshiko and her sister enjoyed a childhood spent in relatively stable material comfort, despite the hardships of the Great Depression and the housing restrictions on Japanese Americans in Oakland and Berkeley, where the family rented dwellings. The Uchidas also maintained social contacts across the Pacific, hosting Japanese visitors—ministers, students, businessmen, and others—who luxuriated in the household’s food, the opportunities for conversation, and other kindnesses. Yoshiko remembered a satisfying and romanticized childhood while portraying in a lighthearted manner the usual resentments when growing up. Her sister Kay, four years older, relished bossing the younger sibling around. The Japanese visitors presented another problem as an ever-present intrusion that Yoshiko felt took parental attention away from her. She complained that the Japanese-language church services that the family attended were too lengthy and onerous. Her parents’ socializing and organizing with other congregants afterward only prolonged her boredom and misery (6–16).

As Uchida matured, she became more aware of the prejudices that Japanese Americans encountered and endured. The family had to call ahead to see if swimming facilities or hair stylists in town would accept them to avoid the humiliation of being turned away in person. She expressed the desire to date white students but was never asked out by them; it was her belief that her ethnicity prevented such romantic pairings. These circumstances led her to examine the contradictory status of being an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, given its opportunities and its limitations. What readers gain from the author’s memories of her early years is a well-crafted depiction of a middle-class Japanese American family in the 1930s. This background, understood in all its joys and its indignities, provided important material from which Uchida constructed many of her characters and stories about Japanese culture and about the mass confinement.

The coming war with Japan only intensified Uchida’s feelings of alienation and endangerment. When the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, she was studying for final exams as a senior at the University of California at Berkeley. Like other Japanese American families, the Uchidas waited anxiously to see what would happen next. Within hours, the FBI began detaining the male heads of Japanese American households for questioning. The agents eventually appeared at the Uchida home, taking Dwight into custody because of his employment with Mitsui. The three women were left wondering about his whereabouts for several weeks. They later learned that the FBI had moved Dwight to San Francisco for initial screening and then to a Justice Department detention center in Missoula, Montana, with other Japanese men. Although he posed no threat, authorities held him for five months and censored his correspondence to the family.⁶

In February 1942, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 mandated the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. By late April, the Uchida women received word from federal authorities to pack up or sell their belongings within ten days. They were then evicted from their Berkeley home and escorted by the U.S. Army to waiting buses (52–68). Yoshiko noted in her wartime diary: “I remember . . . the tears we had to fight back on seeing armed guards at every door way . . . [when] climbing onto the bus, and driving past our home, not knowing when we would ever return.”⁷ On May 1, they arrived at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a former racetrack in San Bruno, California, to live with eight thousand other Japanese Americans in converted horse stalls that still reeked of manure. Other hardships made their new lives challenging. The soldiers who guarded them were a constant and ominous presence. People waited in long lines for meals, to do laundry, and for almost everything else. The bathrooms had few walls inside them to ensure privacy. The food initially consisted of bland bread and canned sausages. Yoshiko was troubled by a litany of ailments, induced by the meager diet and by the stressful circumstances. But some good news appeared a week after their arrival. Dwight Uchida, released from the Missoula detention center and looking worn and slimmer from the strain, joined his family at Tanforan after those months of separation and anxiety.

In September 1942, the War Relocation Authority moved the Uchidas and several thousand others on crowded railway cars to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. Located in the desert, this camp delivered another tormenting experience for its Japanese American inmates. Barbed-wire fences surrounded the area, while armed guards in watchtowers kept vigil over it. Similar to conditions at Tanforan, the wooden barracks were shoddy, the food was tasteless, people rushed through their washing before the hot water ran out, and no one had any privacy. The weather itself became a determined foe, with its extreme daytime heat and nighttime cold. Further misery came from the punishing dust storms that arrived with sudden ferocity, whipping people’s bodies and unsettling their minds (102–120).⁸ Uchida wanted to record every aspect of what she saw and endured, writing fervently in her diary with posterity in mind. In an entry dated September 27, 1942, she wondered at the distressing circumstances under which Japanese Americans lived and how they had reached such a point. “We are at Topaz as I write these recollections,” she remarked. “I need not write them down, for they have been stamped indellibly [sic] in my mind . . . but the mind fails, and someday . . . sometime . . . some other[s] may want to read this . . . these notes of an event which has never before happened in the history of this country, and which I hope cannot and will not ever happen again to any other group of people.”⁹

Even at this moment, Uchida longed to give narrative shape to how this catastrophe for Japanese Americans and for the nation would be remembered. The scale of such a tragedy demanded it. Yet her diary at this point revealed uncertainty about the future: “What lies ahead of us no one know[s].”¹⁰ She realized, too, that the processes of memory, both her own and the nation’s, were unreliable and constantly shifting over time. How could she then translate this stark past into something redemptive? “Evacuation . . . what fear and dread that single word caused,” she mused while still behind barbed wire, “what heart-ache and anxiety, no one will ever know. No one except those who actually lived through those terrible months as an alien enemy, or a descendent of one.”¹¹ Uchida’s concerns about what might be ignored or forgotten, or remembered in ways that failed to elucidate wartime sufferings, affected much of her imprisonment writings. That the mass confinement might become unknowable to future generations also compelled her to write professionally, informing her children’s books and other works decades later.

As seen in Uchida’s early efforts, the wartime dislocation and the ensuing concerns affected not only her physical health but also her sense of self, challenging her prior notions of what it meant to be an American of Japanese ancestry. Thus the author’s desire to foster cultural understanding among different populations framed her stories for young readers, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting throughout her career. She achieved this goal by focusing on several related themes in her works for children: the power of Japanese folk culture to increase global understanding, the search for purpose in postwar Japan, and the documenting of ethnic diversity in the United States. These three topics corresponded with one final matter that emerged from the postwar era: Uchida’s longing to convey her memories of the wartime imprisonment.

Japanese Folktales and Cold War Cosmopolitanism

Throughout the postwar era, Uchida made a name for herself as an author of folktales and young adult fiction with modern-day Japanese and Japanese American protagonists. Well before the advent of mainstream interest in multicultural literature, she offered U.S. audiences a look into the distinct yet overlapping worlds of Japanese and American cultures. Her adaptations of Japanese folktales and her other works for children gained prominence in part because of the broader contexts of the early Cold War. As the United States sought to secure anticommunist partners in the Pacific, foreign policy makers, social critics, and cultural producers wanted to educate the American public about the importance of accepting overseas Asians as capable and loyal allies. To achieve this objective, Hollywood films, popular fiction, magazine coverage, and Broadway musicals portrayed Asians as people who shared the same desires and interests as Americans. Venues in popular culture served to create sentimental bonds between American audiences and Asian subjects to produce mutual understanding intended to overcome the political differences among diverse populations across the globe. At the same time, these attempts at establishing cultural connections coincided with U.S. efforts to consolidate access to overseas markets and resources.¹²

Uchida’s children’s books and other writings from the late 1940s to early 1960s were part of this larger movement to assist Americans in comprehending their new relations to other regions and peoples. The Japanese folktales revealed her espousal of a Cold War cosmopolitanism to combat discrimination and to advocate for democratic ideals throughout the wider world. Sensing the postwar possibilities for both the United States and Japan, Uchida wanted her tales to convey the shared joys and yearnings of children everywhere in the hopes of decreasing future hates and misunderstandings among them. But Uchida rejected the idea of inflicting American mainstream views on other nations or cultures in a one-sided manner, knowing how material self-interest and racism in the United States played a major part in her incarceration. Instead, she encouraged a multilateral approach, in which peoples would learn from one another in a more wide-ranging, cosmopolitan manner. Japan itself would be a vital resource to help American children understand other societies and to broaden their global sensibilities. In turn, as the Japanese attempted to adopt liberal democratic reforms, Uchida argued that they needed to develop their own versions of social restructuring that suited their specific purposes. The author thus espoused the tenets of liberalism (democracy, individualism, multiculturalism, representative governing), but without the authority of the United States to enact them. On a deeper level, she did not or could not articulate an alternative vision of what a more cosmopolitan world would look like without liberal ideals reinforcing it, or having the problematic power of a liberal state to guide it. This message of acceptance and understanding, however limited, became evident in her young adult novels set in postwar Japan that she composed after traveling there in the early 1950s. As later shown, the visit contributed to her shifting views of both American and Japanese cultures and to her emergence as a cosmopolitan writer.

Two of Uchida’s earliest publications, The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales (1949) and The Magic Listening Cap: More Folk Tales from Japan (1955), are collections of traditional stories she adapted for American consumption. In the wake of the war’s destruction, she felt that the younger generation had to develop an appreciation for, rather than a fear of, cultural and ethnic differences. The central message she wanted to impart in these works, then, was twofold: that all children share the same interest in reading a good story, and that they should embrace the diversity of peoples and cultures delineated within her narratives. The Japanese folktales became an appropriate medium through which to accomplish these goals.

Although Uchida hoped that her tales would have wide appeal because of their commonality with other stories from around the world, she also acknowledged that they were not fixed in content or in meaning. As Jack Zipes notes, the supposed universality of folktales “has more to do with the specific manner in which they were constructed historically as mythic constellations than with common psychic processes of a collective unconscious.” These stories, he continues, “are constantly rearranged and transformed to suit changes in tastes and values” instead of remaining as unchanged universal truths.¹³ Uchida was cognizant of the pliable nature and transmission of folktales, even as she embraced the notion that her stories had universal appeal. In the preface for The Dancing Kettle, she admitted: “I have retold [these tales] in my own words, and have taken the liberty of adapting them so they would be more meaningful to the children of America.”¹⁴ Uchida thus positioned herself as a cultural broker between the United States and Japan to help acquaint American readers with various peoples and societies to embolden cooperation rather than conflict. But she offered insights that served another purpose. On the domestic front, publicizing the folktales and the intention to create more tolerance allowed her to talk about her family’s experiences of racial discrimination and the wartime confinement.

Book reviewers recognized the historical and cultural significance of Uchida’s publications. As the Saturday Review of Literature remarked in 1949, most books that translated Japanese folktales into English were out of print in the postwar era, thus making Uchida’s efforts in The Dancing Kettle “an important work.”¹⁵ This new availability led other critics to broader conclusions about the folktales’ relationship to the unsteady state of international affairs. Also reviewing The Dancing Kettle, the New York Herald Tribune noticed about Uchida’s aspirations: “In the author’s hope that these tales will help [us move] toward ‘one world,’ she joins Dr. [F.S.C.] Northrop’s theory of the possible meeting of East and West through mutual understanding of cultural heritages.”¹⁶ Here, the columnist refers to the Yale philosophy professor who published The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (1946). Northrop’s thesis focused on how the shared cultural systems within nations, as opposed to divisive political ideologies, could foster a more peaceful age. For U.S. audiences, the importance of Asia to American interests could enhance cultural sympathies to curtail worldwide wars. “The time is here when we must understand the Orient if we would understand ourselves,” Northrop wrote, “and when we must learn how to combine Oriental and Occidental values if further tragedy, bitterness, and bloodshed are not to ensue.”¹⁷ No evidence suggests that Uchida read, or was familiar with, Northrop’s writings. Reviewers of her work, however, saw in it similarities with the general patterns of thought that pervaded postwar American culture about creating international goodwill through cultural understanding, despite whatever differences remained. This point applied to not only the world in general but also children’s literature in particular. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted about The Magic Listening Cap in 1955, “Increasing interest in world affairs in our day makes it easy to see that now a knowledge of other lands, peoples and customs have [sic] become a basic essential of education.”¹⁸

These lessons of acceptance in children’s books paralleled the growing interest in Japanese culture in the United States, particularly in the 1950s. Uchida’s works corresponded with others that highlighted the comparable experiences that American and Japanese children shared, as well as their unique cultural traditions. Around the time Uchida published her two books on Japanese folktales, Taro Yashima’s The Village Tree (1953), Plenty to Watch (1954), and his Caldecott Honor–winning Crow Boy (1955) also encouraged interest in Japanese culture. Yashima was born in Japan and spent his early adulthood there developing his skills as an artist. He and his wife later migrated to the United States as political refugees who opposed the militarists in imperial Japan. Yashima worked for the American government during the war and then made his living as a writer and artist in New York City.¹⁹ Both The Village Tree and Plenty to Watch arose from his daughter’s questions about his own youthful days in Japan. The former work begins with some queries for the reader: “Do you know a country far, far to the east, that we call Japan? Do you know, there too we have many children like you?”²⁰ The “you” here carries a double meaning, with collective applications. Initially, it refers to Yashima’s daughter, the original audience for the book. The children of Japan, the author implies, are similar to her in ethnic ancestry and in racial appearance. Yet, since The Village Tree was also intended for American children of all ethnic backgrounds, the “you” also applies to them, especially when Yashima describes the common joys of playing outside amid the wonders of nature.

Reviewers in the United States appreciated Yashima’s works, as they did Uchida’s, for their portrayals of childhood and of Japanese culture. One book critic declared that Yashima’s drawings in The Village Tree were “more than likely to evoke self-identification whether the reader be in Tappan, N.Y., or Buntok, Borneo.”²¹ A reviewer for the Washington Post made a related comment about Plenty to Watch, which depicts the sights, sounds, and curiosities of street life that a boy observes as he walks to school. This text, she remarked, would provide American children with “an understanding of Japanese life and an awareness that everywhere people have similar needs which they meet in accordance with their own resources and desires.”²² Children in the United States or in Asia, in metropolitan areas or in small villages, would recognize the joys and marvels of outdoor adventures, freed from any adult presence. Yet the critic also considered each locale and each population’s specific needs that defied universal standards. The desire for understanding also meant that differences required acceptance, no matter what the circumstances. Crow Boy offers an example of embracing each person’s individuality. The title character, a shy and quirky boy named Chibi, is at first alienated from his classmates because of his peculiar behavior. As the book progresses, however, they learn to value Chibi’s manners, especially when he displays a remarkable talent for imitating the sounds of crows. Guided by an understanding teacher, Chibi’s acceptance by his now impressed classmates marks the triumph of a cosmopolitan worldview, as demonstrated for American readers by the book’s Japanese schoolchildren.

In Uchida’s case, the publicity for her children’s works on Japanese folk culture provided her a platform not only to promote The Dancing Kettle and The Magic Listening Cap but also to talk about the forced removal of Japanese Americans. Indeed, the memories of World War II and of her confinement influenced her to write children’s books about Japan in the first place. Uchida recounted for newspapers across the nation the story of how she and her family became targeted as enemy aliens because of the racial hostility directed against Japanese Americans. The details of her comments to the press followed the same pattern. She told of the prewar discrimination in housing when she lived in Berkeley. She recounted how Japanese Americans had to form their own social outlets while attending the university there. She relayed the anger she felt when receiving her college diploma while she was behind barbed wire at the Tanforan Assembly Center. As Uchida observed in a 1955 interview in the Oakland Tribune to publicize The Magic Listening Cap, “My diploma was delivered to me by mail. Of course that really did not matter—but I minded. O yes, indeed, I minded!” That she received her diploma in the mail was not the main issue; this event “really did not matter.” It was what the act represented that kindled her resentment. Even though she was a U.S. citizen, that status was endangered because of her race and ancestry. Uchida emphasized the purpose for connecting her past imprisonment with adapting Japanese folktales. “If I could write in such a way as to build a bridge across the differences in customs and ways of living,” then children could recognize the shared humanity among others and refrain from prejudicial actions against what they considered foreign, strange, and threatening.²³ The implication was clear to anyone purchasing her books or reading what she said about them with regard to her past spent at Tanforan and Topaz. The texts were to educate younger generations to appreciate ethnic differences and, more specifically, to ensure that the imprisonment of Japanese Americans or any other minority group would never happen again in the United States. As developed in Uchida’s later books on the wartime confinement, her critique was not so much against mainstream society, of which she longed to be a part, or against the liberal state, but the pervasive racism ingrained within them.

Many of the stories in The Dancing Kettle and The Magic Listening Cap chart the commonalities among diverse peoples by providing lessons that are prevalent in other cultures’ folkways. One critic pointed out as much for The Dancing Kettle: “Most of the familiar characters common to fairy tales the world around are found in this collection.”²⁴ In both The Dancing Kettle and The Magic Listening Cap, inanimate objects, trees, and animals take on anthropomorphic qualities. The works also contain otherworldly stories occupied by princes and princesses, beneficial and malcontent gods, witches and soothsayers, and other characters found in folktales around the world. In their interactions with one another and with human protagonists, these characters highlight acts of generosity and gratitude, or greed, trickery, and shortsightedness. Circumstances that involve good or ill fortune also emerge. The title stories from each book, for instance, center on magical objects: a teakettle that sings and dances, and a cap that helps its wearer understand the thoughts of nature. Each item benefits poor yet sincere elderly men. These characters, described as “a good and generous man” in The Dancing Kettle and “an honest old man who was kind and good” in The Magic Listening Cap, profit materially from their associations with these objects.²⁵ The dancing kettle brings its owner riches from the entertainment it offers to the villagers, while the listening cap helps its wearer learn from birds and trees how to heal a dying wealthy man, who then rewards the poor one with gold coins. Yet these unanticipated turn of events never instigate greed. Instead, the aged protagonists express their gratitude toward spiritual leaders or beings, content with the more comfortable life they now have.

Other tales in Uchida’s collections depict incidents of trickery, with the weak taking advantage of the strong, or the trickster getting its comeuppance for deceiving others. These stories hardly differ from those in Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or African and African American folklore that portray morality tales through animals. In The Dancing Kettle, the tale “The Rabbit and the Crocodile” is reminiscent of the Brer Rabbit character in African American folk tradition. In Uchida’s version, a white rabbit on an outer isle hopes to visit Japan’s main island. He accomplishes this wish by tricking a crocodile and its friends to form a bridge with their bodies so the rabbit can cross over the water. Yet, instead of gratitude, the rabbit boasts of its mastery over the crocodile’s gullibility. The latter, however, enacts its revenge by capturing the rabbit and tearing off all its fur. Only when a kindly god restores the rabbit’s white coat does the animal realize the errors of its ways. In The Magic Listening Cap, “The Fox and the Bear” tells the story of the fox tricking the bear into growing food for them both. Yet once the bear realizes this duplicity, he has the last laugh, getting a horse to drag away the fox by its tail.

Responding with enthusiasm, elementary school teachers and their students across the United States composed volumes of correspondence to Uchida about her folktales. Classes often focused on Japan as part of learning sequences on international issues, with children writing appreciative notes to Uchida about what they discovered. One boy from Wichita, Kansas, exclaimed to the author in 1959: “I thought I would tell you that I think your books The Magic Listening Cap and The Dancing Kettle are the best books I ever read.”²⁶ Administrators expressed their appreciation as well. A supervisor of public elementary schools in Springfield, Massachusetts, saw the value of The Dancing Kettle for her students. At the book’s release in 1949, she wrote to Uchida, “The preservation of the best of the Japanese stories is a great service to the people of Japan and a real gift to our children.”²⁷ In her responses, Uchida never missed a chance to reiterate her main objective by noting the similarities among cultures and the need to appreciate their differences. Replying to a teacher from Springdale, Arkansas, in 1952, Uchida remarked, “I was glad to learn that you were using [The Dancing Kettle] in connection with your study of Japan. I think that teaching children about the ways of people in other lands is one of the best ways to bring about the ‘one world’ which we all seek so desperately these days.”²⁸

Uchida’s folktales appealed to Japanese American critics and audiences too, when they recognized her contributions as a Nisei writer. Surveying the literary landscape in 1949, the San Francisco–based Nichi Bei Times saw The Dancing Kettle as part of a growing body of nationally recognized work by Japanese American authors from the East Bay Area. The paper noted that Toshio Mori’s short story collection, Yokohama, California, appeared shortly after Uchida’s folktales and that Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 had been released three years earlier. In the reviewer’s mind, a golden age of Nisei writing appeared forthcoming in the aftermath of the war’s degradation of Japanese Americans. The Pacific Citizen took another approach, declaring Uchida’s work an important global resource. The adapted stories in The Dancing Kettle, the periodical observed, “have humor, action and a host of characters that deserve an international reputation and should . . . become part of the folk literature of the world.” The reviewer hoped as well that Nisei parents would confer these tales onto their Sansei children. The book would then foster or continue an interest in Japanese culture for future generations of Japanese American youth. Implied in this point was that these children would appreciate their ancestral heritage. Yet learning from these tales would also combat the shame associated with this background, spurred by World War II and by the racial discrimination that their communities endured in the United States.²⁹

Just as Uchida wanted her folktales to broaden American children’s attitudes, she aimed to extend her appeal to Japan as well. Writing to her editor, Margaret McElderry, Uchida asked, “Do you think there is any possibility of having [The Dancing Kettle] approved by the AMG [American Military Government] and used in Japanese grade schools as supplementary English readers?” She also inquired of McElderry in 1953 if the publishing company could distribute the book to U.S. Army post exchanges in Japan for American schoolchildren there.³⁰ By promoting her work, Uchida acknowledged a desire to advance democratic reforms in Japan and to strengthen alliances with it. Indeed, Japanese readers valued her efforts at rebuilding relations across the Pacific. One correspondent in Tokyo lavished praise on The Dancing Kettle in 1949, noting “A book like that . . . can be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of age. . . . [I]t can do much in furthering international understanding and good will.”³¹ A fan from Nagano wrote in 1955 about The Magic Listening Cap, “I believe . . . your gentleness and kindness for humankind . . . in your work will be . . . gifts to children of all the world. . . . [T]hank you . . . [for being] a represent[ative] of your mother land Japan.”³² Both Japanese and Japanese Americans took pride in Uchida’s accomplishments, viewing her as an important cultural broker within a transpacific community founded on a common ancestry. But they also understood the broader issues at stake. By adapting aspects of Japanese culture in her American works, Uchida participated in larger efforts to encourage worldwide friendship that attempted to offset the past sufferings from the Pacific War and the new tensions of the Cold War.

Reorienting Postwar Japan

Uchida’s interest in Japanese culture was not particularly robust during her childhood. She notes in her memoirs that, when growing up in Berkeley in the 1920s and 1930s, the Uchida family ate Japanese food, worshipped at a Christian church with services conducted in Japanese, and observed Japanese holidays and traditions. This ancestral culture was for the young girl part of a daily ingrained ritual but also something she reluctantly endured. Often it challenged her sense of being an American, something she considered herself to be first and foremost. But she inherently knew and acknowledged later that the overlapping worlds of the Issei and Nisei contributed to shaping her attitudes, beliefs, and values. In her memoir for young readers, The Invisible Thread, Uchida reveals her initial longing for the power, attractiveness, and greater social ease that whiteness could grant her. “How wonderful it would be, I used to think, if I had blond hair and blue eyes . . . [o]r a name like Mary Anne Brown or Betty Johnson.”³³ As in other ethnic autobiographies, Uchida recounts the difficulties of coming of age segregated from, but also living within, the white American mainstream. Although she avoids a more developed interiority or a more pronounced rebuke of white supremacy in her work, she still discloses the resentments and insecurities of being marked as alien, while negotiating between the nation’s predominant values and behaviors and her parents’ influences.³⁴

At one point, Uchida recalls resisting her mother’s desires that she and her sister learn to read and write Japanese to communicate with extended family across the Pacific. “We wanted to be Americans, not Japanese!” she exclaims. Language itself, and a “foreign” one at that, would only serve to estrange her further from her attempts to assimilate or to become invisible (15). Uchida expands on how this feeling of not belonging led her to distance herself from her parents, who embodied the “alien” presence of the Japanese in the United States. In Desert Exile, she notes: “Many of us Nisei tried to reject our own Japaneseness and the Japanese ways of our parents” (42). The Issei’s clothes, habits, food, and inability to speak English fluently presented a burden and a betrayal to their progeny. The behavior of Uchida’s mother was especially bothersome. When meeting Japanese friends in public, Mrs. Uchida would bow incessantly, proving a source of constant embarrassment for the Nisei daughter. Iku Uchida made evident what Yoshiko sought to escape: the “peculiar” customs of the Issei that she feared would accentuate her own foreignness by association.

This dual identity would become more complicated when Uchida traveled as a child with her family to Japan to visit relatives in the 1930s. She reminisces in The Invisible Thread how she felt caught between two worlds. On the one hand, Uchida enjoyed the adventure of meeting her parents’ extended families, of visiting temples and shrines, and of enjoying other new experiences. She also felt relieved that she could fit into the wider Japanese population. “Here, at least, I looked like everyone else,” she writes. “Here, I blended in and wasn’t always the one who was different” (52). On the other hand, she could not escape her own alienation in Japan. Although she understood Japanese when spoken to, she could not read the language and spoke it haltingly. Uchida and her sister also dressed and acted differently from their peers and elders. Asserting her sense of American identity, she admits homesickness: “I missed my own language and the casual banter with friends. I longed for hot dogs and chocolate sodas and bathrooms with plumbing.” Despite this yearning for home, Uchida realized the difficult position in which she found herself: “The sad truth was, in America, too, I was perceived as a foreigner” (52). Not only was she caught between two worlds; she felt that she belonged to neither.

These sentiments were no mere self-pity on her part. The outbreak of World War II brought Uchida’s feelings of estrangement to full-fledged tragedy for her and other Japanese Americans in the United States. But the youthful complacency she displayed toward her ethnic ancestry began to dissolve in the cauldron of her wartime experiences. What the American nation suspected as a sign of disloyalty among the Issei and Nisei now offered something she could embrace afterward to challenge racial prejudice at home and to help develop better transpacific relations between two erstwhile enemies.

A significant moment for Uchida’s budding career came in 1952, when she won a Ford Foundation fellowship to study the arts in Japan. This visit offered opportunities to develop her appreciation of Japanese culture as well as to see friends and relatives. Even so, she continued to struggle to see how she fit between two cultures, reflecting on how her American citizenship presented possibilities and privileges in Japan that the Japanese themselves did not have, even as she shared in their racial ancestry. For Uchida, Japan in the postwar years was both wasteland and wonderland. She began recording her travels and experiences there in stereotypical American ways. The author saw the nation as backward, dirty, and lacking in the modern necessities that she was used to back home. Material deprivation among the populace was still rampant, and this state of want made her appreciate her life back in the United States all the more. At the same time, Uchida remarked on how visiting Japan gave her the chance not only to study its cultural forms but also to deepen her own understanding of the United States. She was already familiar with racism before the war and during the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. But seeing how the U.S. occupiers implemented democracy in Japan also made her more reflective about both the ideal’s promises and its limitations when applied to other lands. Uchida certainly supported American attempts to democratize Japan. Yet she also warned her Japanese readers and listeners against embracing too much of Western culture. She advised instead that Japan develop its own styles of democratic living that harmonized with its ancient traditions. Thus Uchida’s overseas interactions complicated her views of each nation, and she acquired a more cosmopolitan outlook that led her to advocate for multilateral exchanges that served more than just American interests.

Arriving in Tokyo in October 1952, Uchida wrote to inform her parents in Oakland about the family and friends she visited, the wonderful food she ate, and the sites she saw. Ambling throughout the city, however, Uchida still described Japan as “primitive and crude” or “a poor country with so many problems.”³⁵ When touring a public park (once the Imperial Gardens) with relatives in Shinjuku, a ward of Tokyo, Uchida particularly enjoyed the chrysanthemum beds. But she also compared the plants there to the populace of Japan. “All [of the gardens] were very formal and shaped to certain molds,” she noted to family members back in California, “and I thought they were just like the Japanese people.” “Instead of growing freely and naturally,” she continued, “they are molded and shaped and constantly disciplined all their lives, and so are very unnatural in their behavior.”³⁶ With this characterization she sought to explain how the Japanese could have followed an emperor, and especially the militarists, during the war. Also evident was her hope that liberal democratic reforms would help them to grow “freely and naturally” to align more with American values and interests.

When Uchida landed in Kyoto a month later, however, shifts occurred in her thinking about the country. Part of this change in mind-set started with her thoughts about being an American of Japanese ancestry in Japan. She noticed the opportunities that her U.S. citizenship provided, a status that did little to offset the detriments of being a Japanese American in the United States during the war. The U.S. occupation, although officially ended by the time of her visit, remained a part of how she negotiated the country. The American military presence in and around Kyoto allowed her special admittance to tourist sites and archives. She also gained entrance to guarded venues, such as the Imperial Palace grounds, that no ordinary Japanese person could access. On the one hand, “to have a Japanese face brings no special privileges,” she noted about herself and about the native populace. On the other hand, having Japanese features but also “an American passport is often a ticket of admission to many interesting places.”³⁷ Uchida realized the benefits of being an American citizen to her travels and her work. Yet occupying this position was also a humbling experience that complicated her transpacific sensibilities. The privileges she enjoyed made her more attentive to the social inequalities she saw between white Americans in Japan, with whom she identified as a U.S. citizen, and a Japanese population that looked like her.

Uchida thus amended her earlier understanding of Japan, just as she recalibrated her outlook on the United States. In January 1953, she wrote home, “Right now, America seems to me a smooth, shiny, brassy, efficient machine.” Indeed, she elaborated, “American life seems very shallow as I look at it from over here—and too preoccupied with physical ease and comfort.” Japan, however, is “a rather old and soiled tea cup made of clay, simple, but with much depth.”³⁸ Living in postwar Japan accentuated Uchida’s thinking about the limits of American culture and modernity, including their effects on people’s attitudes, while her appreciation of Japanese values and traditions continued to grow. From this vantage point, she critiqued the degree to which American democracy and mass consumerism could benefit other peoples and nations. Instead, she valorized a sense of authenticity about Japan, which affected her desire to see and experience it in part, ironically, as an American tourist and consumer.

The author admitted her enthrallment with Japan and the limits of American influence on it in a March 1953 interview for the Mainichi, a major Tokyo-based newspaper. Uchida’s personal education developed alongside her realization that Japan, with “its poverty, its unsanitary conditions, its low standard of living . . . differed from American life.” Yet, after having spent five months there, Uchida confessed, “Those purely physical aspects of Japan have become increasingly unimportant to me.” “I have come to understand and respect Japanese culture,” she continued, “and have found much to admire in the serenity and beauty of its many art forms.” In Uchida’s mind, American materialism and individualism posed a great danger to Japan, and she felt that they should not indiscriminately adopt all U.S. tenets and practices. As she cautioned her Japanese readers, parts of U.S. culture “are only very superficial aspects of American life, and yet, they seem to be incorporated into Japanese life as a part of ‘democracy.’”³⁹ She did not desire to see Japan develop into a miniature version of the United States. Rather, she urged the Japanese to selectively approach how they would fit American ideals and values into their own culture.

Uchida’s two books for young adults set in postwar Japan reflect this position: Takao and Grandfather’s Sword (1958) and The Full Circle (1957). Her storytelling took new directions, revealing to American readers the folk culture of modern Japan in the former work and, in the latter, how the Pacific War and the U.S. occupation affected Japanese youths’ sense of their social responsibilities.

Takao and Grandfather’s Sword is a fictional tale about a young Japanese boy in Kyoto who desires to help his father in the pottery business. In this celebration of folk culture, Uchida elaborates on the tensions between tradition and modernity, with Japanese culture consisting of both. Arrietty’s Notes, a publicity vehicle for the book’s issuer, Harcourt, Brace and Company, suggested about the author, “This talented young Japanese-American has a special gift for interpreting the ancient and modern ways of Japan to American children.”⁴⁰ Uchida wanted her American readers to know that, despite the U.S. occupation, Japan was no ordinary developing nation. It already had a proud sense of modernity that coexisted with its ancient traditions. In this way, Uchida shared a view advanced by another Cold War cosmopolitan, the University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield. Redfield argued that a society’s particular traditions were vital to guiding and shaping its modernization process. Although they accepted the premises of Western liberalism, both the children’s author and the anthropologist believed that the universal values binding humans together still depended on appreciating the cultural differences expressed through localized customs.⁴¹

Uchida’s interest in Japan’s artistic traditions coincided with her portrayals of its innovations. Part of her strategy when writing about Japanese folk culture was to display the roots of an already existing democratic practice to American audiences. Describing the influences that went into composing Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, Uchida noted her attraction to mingei (folk arts). An idea advanced through the Folk Arts Movement by three of its main artists—Yanagi Soetsu, Kawai Kanjiro, and Yamada Shoji—mingei captured Japanese interest in the late 1920s and continued throughout the 1930s and into the war.⁴² For Uchida, the lure of mingei was its artists’ appreciation of ordinary material used by ordinary people. Yanagi, Kawai, and Yamada, she wrote in 1955 for the magazine Craft Horizons, “expressed a common desire to tell the world how they had uncovered objects of uncommon beauty among the ordinary articles used by the rural folk of Japan in their everyday lives.”⁴³ Uchida’s embrace of folk culture was vital to understanding the version of Japan that she wanted to transmit to American readers. She made the connection clear when dedicating Takao and Grandfather’s Sword to her friends in the Folk Arts Movement. But, as she stressed, postwar Japan would still have to chart its own course within this broader rubric. Unlike the United States, as Uchida continued in the Craft Horizons piece, “Japan . . . is one of the few industrialized countries of the world [that] maintains a fairly healthy balance between machine and handmade articles.”⁴⁴

In Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, the boy Takao and his family struggle to make a living through folk crafts. The demands of modern production and consumerism do not so much threaten as pressure those who participate in the ancient ways of making pottery. Takao’s father is financially dependent on Mr. Kato, an unscrupulous middleman, and the network of local shop owners who sell the wares. Manufacturing demands are made clear through Mr. Kato, who also has associations with buyers in the United States, marking how global exchanges are connected to consumer desires. Mr. Kato tells Takao’s father that one purchaser sailing for America needs twenty-five tea sets within the next three weeks. Mass production and consumerism link Mr. Kato and his client to the demands of efficiency, with little appreciation for how a more traditional society creates finer wares. Takao’s father initially resists such a request, noting the difficulties in mass-producing handicrafts in short order. “It is not wise to hurry the making of a beautiful thing,” he cautions.⁴⁵ But he relents to keep his business solvent. Takao in response likens the predatory and materialistic Mr. Kato to an old dragon, with the smoke pluming from a pipe held between his gold teeth. Increasing the family’s ire, Mr. Kato also covets Takao’s samurai sword, a valuable relic bestowed on the boy by his deceased grandfather.

The plot develops around Takao’s guilt when a series of consequences arise from his mistakes and immaturity, especially when the family workshop and pottery catch fire from his negligence. Strengthened by strong winds, the flames destroy his father’s work in progress. The boy offers to compensate for the family’s loss by selling his grandfather’s sword and giving the profits to his father to begin crafting again. An old and mysterious gentleman, Mr. Yamaka, buys the sword. But, touched by Takao’s concern for his family’s business, Mr. Yamaka agrees to finance the new production of ceramic wares. He then chastises Mr. Kato, revealing himself as the owner of the local shops on which the middleman relies. Mr. Yamaka returns the sword to Takao, realizing that its value extends beyond any monetary worth, and thanks the boy for befriending him. In this way, Uchida suggested how market forces should not overly determine personal relationships, which she feared would happen if Japan followed the path the United States wanted it to take. Yet she still maintained a selective amount of faith in these same liberal foundations on which she thought modern societies should be established.

The Full Circle focuses on one family’s experiences in imperial and occupied Japan, based on the real life of Umeko Kagawa, the daughter of the prominent Christian leader Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa. Published by Friendship Press, an organ of the National Council of Churches, The Full Circle intended to show American readers Umeko’s “hopes and dilemmas . . . shared by teenagers the world over.” More specifically, Uchida wanted to disclose her subject’s “problems in adjusting to a postwar world similar to those that confront many young people in Japan.”⁴⁶ Thus, in one sense, the book is similar to Uchida’s other works, in that she employs a Cold War cosmopolitan framing of friendship to show how to bridge the cultural gaps between the United States and Japan. At the same time, Uchida delves into the wartime and postwar history of Japan to offer more complex and humane portraits of its people. The second goal, however, reinforces the first: all peoples and nations suffered during the war, but Japan still needed to rebuild on its own terms.

The book’s title refers to how Umeko Kagawa initially resists the legacy of her famous father’s work in Japan, but then comes “full circle”—that is, to understanding and embracing this legacy—and realizing its larger social value. As young girls, Umeko and her friend Kazu desire independence from their families and from Japan’s cultural traditions. Umeko wants to be a writer or an actress rather than enter an occupation that, like her father’s, requires personal sacrificing for the good of the community. Indeed, this service to others has a price. As Uchida writes, “Father was always so busy with his work, sometimes Umeko felt that she really did not know him very well” (13). But Umeko is also oblivious to the broader implications of living in a militarist state, barely absorbing the concerns of her parents. As a twelve-year-old in 1941, Umeko cannot fathom the ensuing horrors that her family and her nation will endure once the United States enters the Pacific War.

Not until the attack on Pearl Harbor does Umeko realize what is coming, when Dr. Kagawa and his friends become suspects of the Japanese government because of their Christian pacifist beliefs. Although Umeko fails to comprehend the whole of these developments, the text also delineates the elders’ worries about their inability to stop the militarists. Hearing the news about Pearl Harbor, Umeko thinks to herself, “She couldn’t suddenly hate America as an enemy country. So many of the missionaries who had come to work in Japan were Americans. How could she possibly hate them?” (28). The Full Circle in this manner highlights through the Kagawa family the anti-militarist tendencies that certain parts of the Japanese population advocated. This portrayal would then give hope to Americans that Japan could reject its imperial past and sympathize with U.S. interests. The Full Circle also emphasizes the opportunities for Christian conversions in postwar Japan, with these issues coming together in Umeko’s mind. During the hardships of war and defeat, she then acknowledges the value of her father’s labors on behalf of a wider spiritual community and his work as a postwar mediator between occupied Japan and the American forces.

Uchida admired Dr. Kagawa’s Christian pacifist beliefs, but she also suggested that a pluralist democracy would offer a better foundation on which to construct Japan’s future. She trusted that the nation’s prospects would include Christian elements. Yet the Japanese needed to encompass other beliefs too. Uchida raised this point in her 1953 interview with the Mainichi, when she expressed a desire to see postwar Japan adopt more democratic practices without hewing toward the crass materialism they engendered. She also hoped that Japan would retain many of its traditions, including non-Christian ones. This idea is evident in Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, in which the community practices Buddhism. Uchida at one point even admitted to the allure of Buddhism when meeting Kawai Kanjiro, one of the master artists of the Folk Arts Movement. Kawai, she wrote in The Invisible Thread, “introduced Zen Buddhist thought into my consciousness. . . . I was growing and reaching, and that felt good.” This experience, she continued, was part of what “I admired and loved about Japan” (131). Although considering herself a Christian, Uchida was drawn to Buddhism as another way to attain spiritual peace. But she also saw the belief system as part of a longer ancestral history that a diverse and democratic Japan could still nurture.

Thus, even as The Full Circle traces Umeko’s moral development when she accepts her social obligations, the work also urges the Japanese to adopt the best of what their nation and the United States offered, while rejecting each of their ills. The character Miss Tanaka, Umeko’s music teacher, voices what Uchida herself told the Japanese newspapers: “You young people want to make everything black and white, but everything Japanese isn’t necessarily bad and everything Western isn’t always good.” As Miss Tanaka elaborates: “You’ve got to be discriminating and choose the good from both” (122). Uchida in this way positioned herself as a cosmopolitan writer who refused to accept the unilateral enacting of American ideals and practices onto Japan. As a Japanese/American writer, she legitimized her opinions on the basis of having lived in both nations and seeing the opportunities and limitations of each. Readers acknowledged her position as a cultural broker. In one letter to Uchida, a close friend pinpointed the author’s intent after finishing The Full Circle: “Now what country do you belong to? Both, of course, and to the whole world.”⁴⁷

Balancing different cultures, however, tests Umeko’s maturity and willingness to serve others when her friend Kazu starts dating an American GI during the occupation. For Kazu, the relationship offers the hope of a more independent life from her traditional parents. But Kazu’s family denounces the affair and arranges a marriage for her to an impoverished Japanese merchant. Umeko learns after the wedding that her friend lives in a poverty-stricken area in town. Kazu’s submission to her family’s more traditional ways curbs her sense of self-determination, one awakened by fraternizing with the American soldier. This development offers a counterargument to the warnings that the music teacher Miss Tanaka and Uchida herself imparted about Japan embracing all things Western. That is, tradition itself can be burdensome. Both Umeko and Kazu denounce the unfairness of elders who can decide the direction of their young lives. Yet Kazu’s arranged marriage and ensuing hardships are the key moments that cement Umeko’s commitment to helping her friend and others like her. Thus Umeko comes “full circle” when rejecting her idealized sense of independence that borders on selfishness and instead follows in her father’s footsteps of performing socially conscious work for the less fortunate.

The Full Circle’s significance is also apparent in ways that may have affected Uchida’s later writings. Reading this text in light of her works from the 1970s and beyond, when her books on the wartime confinement appeared, reveals similarities in how, leading up to the Pacific War, the United States and Japan confined or terrorized populations that maintained overseas connections. In The Full Circle, Uchida details the effects of a militarized society on families and their extended relations. The wartime experiences of the Kagawas from this perspective correspond with Uchida’s dramatizing some of her own family’s hardships in Journey to Topaz and Journey Home. In The Full Circle, Dr. Kagawa draws the notice of the military police because of his Christian pacifism. At one point, they even take him into custody for interrogation. This incident recalls Uchida’s chronicling of the FBI detaining her father after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Journey to Topaz begins with the roundup of Japanese men, which frightens the main character, Yuki Sakane, a preteen girl like Umeko Kagawa, when Yuki’s father is arrested. Also disruptive to family life in imperial Japan and in the United States is how both nations forced their minority populaces to take self-protective measures against impending suspicions and seizures. In The Full Circle, the music teacher Miss Tanaka burns her notes and papers, fearing that they might implicate her in the crime of appreciating Western classical compositions. Other friends of the Kagawas who are Japanese Christians are questioned about their relationships with the West and its missionaries. Likewise, when hearing reports from Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans destroyed artifacts, documents, and other material objects that linked them by association to Japan before their removal and confinement. For Umeko Kagawa and Yuki Sakane, then, the wartime and postwar eras provide corresponding backdrops for their moral development and coming of age in challenging times.

Evident as well in The Full Circle and in Uchida’s later texts on the confinement are the costs of military service on young men in imperial Japan and the United States. Toshio, the adopted elder brother of Umeko, joins the Imperial Army in a fit of patriotism. Afterward, he becomes disillusioned by his combat experiences in the Pacific and suffers from feelings of dishonor for surviving the war as a prisoner of the Americans. Once returned home, he ignores his bewildered family and joins the communists and black marketeers to vent his frustrations against the uncertainties of the new world order. Umeko and Dr. Kagawa can only hope that Toshio will return to the family’s Christian fold. But Toshio is representative of the larger unease that both Japanese Christians and Americans had about the discontent and chaos brewing in Japan, which bore the imprint of communist agitation. Likewise, Uchida creates in Journey to Topaz and Journey Home the character Ken Sakane, Yuki’s elder brother. Joining other Nisei soldiers of the 442nd Regiment, Ken returns in a frazzled state of mind, suffering a survivor’s guilt since his best friend is killed in action. Like Toshio in The Full Circle, Ken is terse and uptight: both veterans display damaged psyches from the war. For Umeko, “something was wrong” when she sees Toshio “thin and unshaven” (86), with “the rims of his eyes . . . strangely red against the paleness of his cheeks” (88). For Yuki, “something was different” with Ken. “There were creases fanning out from the corners of his eyes now, and he was so thin she could see his pale skin stretched taut over the bones of his cheeks and his jaw.”⁴⁸ Here, Uchida reprocessed the language of wartime trauma when describing how returning soldiers adapted to the changes in postwar Japan and in the United States. In such parallel scenes, the parents of these Japanese and Japanese American veterans can only urge patience and understanding from Umeko and Yuki, respectively, when living among young men with tortured souls.

Uchida’s comparison of the actions of imperial Japan and the United States during the war does not suggest that she saw them in the same way. She did not believe that a militarist regime with an emperor was on par with a democratic government. Especially during the postwar occupation, the reconstruction of Japan presented many challenges, both for its populace and for its occupiers, as the United States became a dominant world power. In The Full Circle, Toshio never recovers from his postwar disenchantment, despite Umeko’s pleadings for him to return to school. The Kagawa family can do nothing to stop him from joining the communists, and he eventually disappears from their lives. In Journey Home, Ken never questions the rationale for the United States going to war, or his decision to volunteer from the camps to prove his patriotism. Similar to the model behavior of other Nisei soldiers, he demonstrates his loyalty to the cause. His only problem is that he cannot forgive himself for his inability to prevent his friend’s death. But Ken’s mental state improves when he resolves to continue his education to become a physician. Despite these differences, Uchida’s larger intention was to delineate the common bonds that linked families across the Pacific in their desires for peace. She also charted the adjustments that civilians and former soldiers had to make in postwar societies. Uchida thus presented to her predominantly white American readers how World War II affected the humanity of both Japanese and Japanese Americans. Uchida’s young adult texts on this level emphasized the need to create more compassion and understanding between the two nations in light of their sacrifices and sufferings during that time.

On another front, not until years afterward did the language in The Full Circle become more apparent in Uchida’s thinking as applied to her own experiences regarding Japanese American confinement. Like Umeko Kagawa, Uchida revealed her own coming “full circle” in her life when she realized the importance of Japanese culture to her identity during and after World War II. In the epilogue to her memoir, Desert Exile, Uchida documented how her travels throughout Japan in the 1950s were “as positive and restorative as the evacuation had been negative and depleting” (152). In this assertion, the sentiments stirred from remembering her wartime experiences in the United States required addressing. Visiting postwar Japan was for her a significant source of healing, from which she could assuage and confront the traumas of her confinement as an American citizen. Uchida also gained a new appreciation for a family ancestry that she never fully acknowledged when growing up. By early adulthood, however, “the circle was complete” (152). Likewise, when concluding The Invisible Thread, the author admitted, “In my eagerness to be accepted as an American during my youth, I had been pushing my Japaneseness aside. Now at last, I appreciated it and was proud of it. I had finally come full circle” (131).

Uchida’s travels in postwar Japan, her visits with folk arts craftsmen, and her work on Umeko Kagawa’s life story arose from a revitalized interest in the exchanges between American and Japanese cultures. In Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, she delineated the need to balance modern and traditional ways of thinking in Japan after the U.S. occupation. The Full Circle shared this theme, as both works provided American readers a sympathetic glimpse into the experiences of a former enemy population. But Uchida’s embrace of cosmopolitan ideals had a larger thematic and chronological reach. As developed in her later work on the Japanese American confinement, she applied an earlier postwar vocabulary of realization and acceptance to express her maturation, assessing in more nuanced fashion a cultural heritage that she had once rejected as alien and threatening.

Creating a Multiethnic America

Uchida’s strategy to enhance American understanding of other nations and cultures is also evident in her books that showcased multiethnic relationships within the United States. While working on the Japanese folktales and on stories about postwar Japan, she also published books for young readers that depicted friendships among white American, Japanese American, and Japanese characters. New Friends for Susan (1951), The Promised Year (1959), and Mik and the Prowler (1960) offered models of behavior for getting along with others, with Japanese and Japanese American protagonists often at the center of attention. In these novels, Uchida crafted utopian worlds that transcended the complicated geopolitical forces exerted on children’s lives, such as those described in The Full Circle. Indeed, she was well aware of the three books’ propaganda value for advertising the American way of life to international readers, especially in Japan. Yet, when presenting examples of cosmopolitan friendships, Uchida avoided addressing the wartime imprisonment in these texts, even though they featured Japanese Americans as main characters. As in her folktales, Uchida instead emphasized the more saleable theme of enhancing cultural understanding at home and abroad to diminish racial discrimination and future conflicts.

At first glance, New Friends for Susan would gain little notice nowadays. Uchida based the work on her own childhood memories of growing up in the Bay Area during the 1930s. The plot is fairly conventional, revolving around nine-year-old girls who befriend one another, host and attend parties, participate in after-school activities, and enjoy the love and support of their parents. Yet what is striking about the text, given its release during the early Cold War years, is that it presents children of different ethnic backgrounds developing close relationships with one another. Susan, the Nisei protagonist, brings together her newfound friends, one from white middle-class America and the other from Japan. The value of New Friends for Susan, then, is in its demonstration of a Japanese American household as a negotiated space, wherein mainstream American aspirations and the less familiar world of Japanese culture meet and influence one another.

Susan becomes an intermediary between these two worlds. When Susan and her white friends participate in a festival celebrating different cultures across the globe, she dresses in a kimono to emphasize her ancestry. She also invites her classmates to her home to show them her Japanese doll collection to coincide with Japan’s Doll Festival. In these instances, readers see how children from diverse upbringings appreciate and learn from one another’s cultural differences. Susan also receives a visit from a Japanese girl, Sumiko. The visual and aural proximity of Susan’s name with Sumiko’s suggests an ancestral kinship between the two characters. Their names thus reconnect a world separated by the Japanese diaspora. Yet, unlike what happened in World War II, when Japanese Americans were suspected of sympathizing with the enemy solely on the basis of ethnicity, New Friends for Susan embraces, rather than hides or denies, this cultural link. Sumiko becomes a popular student at Susan’s school, sitting as a model for an art class, in which the curious and welcoming students want to paint the visitor’s portrait. As the book concludes, Susan looks forward to future interactions with Sumiko as she sees her new friend off at the San Francisco pier. Susan imagines herself in Sumiko’s place as the young Japanese girl sails for home, creating a transpacific sensibility connected by personal ties between the United States and Japan. The text closes on a hopeful note, emphasizing again Uchida’s internationalist approach to writing children’s literature. “The whole world felt so good just then,” the author writes, “so friendly and complete and full of promise.”⁴⁹ In Susan’s mind, her ability to make friends not only in other neighborhoods but also across the ocean encourages her self-confidence and her broadening views of the outside world.

Although New Friends for Susan never mentions the wartime confinement, its promotional material did emphasize the incarceration as part of the author’s background. In a form letter to potential reviewers, Alice Dalgliesh, the editor of “Books for Younger Readers” at Charles Scribner’s Sons, remarked on the normality of the main character’s experiences. New Friends for Susan, she wrote, is “the first picture of a Japanese-American child growing up normally and happily in this country, and having the home and school experiences of any child.” Susan, that is, was like other children in the United States, despite her potential to disrupt notions of what constituted an “American” through her racial Otherness. Dalgliesh wanted reviewers to know, however, that “Miss Uchida was one of the ‘Moved-Outers’—Japanese Americans sent to camps during the war.” The editor also mentioned that Henry Sugimoto (analyzed in Chapter 3) was the illustrator for the book and had spent time in the prison camps as well. The text’s dust jacket included a short biography of Uchida, noting that she received her college diploma while imprisoned at Tanforan. Although the book publicity brought attention to Uchida’s confinement, it also highlighted how she and other Japanese Americans triumphed over this past adversity. Dalgliesh even categorized New Friends for Susan as “quiet and unassuming,” terms used by the mainstream press to portray Japanese Americans as model citizens. In these accounts, Uchida became associated with the forgiving ethnic minority who achieved success despite the disadvantages of her once maligned ancestry.⁵⁰

This information only underscores the lack of discussion of the confinement in New Friends for Susan. No mention of it appears in the text, since the plot occurs in the 1930s, before Japanese Americans were uprooted and imprisoned. But the children’s literature critic for the New York Times, Gladys Grofoot Castor, noticed upon the book’s release the incongruity between the book’s cheerful storyline and its missing references to the mass imprisonment. “The wartime experiences of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast,” she remarked, “are not touched upon, nor is there the faintest plea for racial tolerance.”⁵¹ Although Castor did not develop her critique beyond this statement, the point was clear. She was looking for something in New Friends for Susan that would indicate the author’s willingness to teach American children about racial and ethnic differences and about the tolerance required for a diverse society to function in the postwar era. Despite this caveat, Castor praised the novel, finding it an enjoyable read. Reviews of New Friends for Susan in Japanese American newspapers, such as Rafu Shimpo, Nichi Bei Times, and Hokubei Shimpo, quoted Castor’s fleeting yet significant remark about the absence of addressing racial tolerance and the tragedy of confinement. At the same time, these critics avoided developing or commenting on her statement. None offered more pointed assessments, suggestions, or options of approach.⁵² Perhaps like Castor, they too realized the limits of what Uchida could accomplish in a book designed for young children. Yet Japanese American reviewers took pride in Uchida’s achievements, which had garnered national attention, and may have wanted to evade criticism of a Nisei who wrote about multiethnic friendships among children.

What also must be considered is Uchida’s early writing experiences and prior career as an elementary school teacher in the camps and afterward. At Topaz, she was in charge of the first- through third-grade students. In June 1943, Uchida had the opportunity to leave Topaz, having been accepted into the graduate program in education at Smith College. During this time, she also taught at a public school in western Massachusetts. She then graduated in 1944 and accepted a teaching position for first and second graders at the Frankford Friends School, a Quaker institution in Philadelphia.⁵³ Given her experiences with these early elementary schoolchildren, Uchida may have found it too difficult to convey the experiences and thought processes of characters in confinement in fictional form. She also may have felt that the topic was not appropriate for a novel that Charles Scribner’s Sons marketed to seven-to-nine-year-old readers.⁵⁴

Earlier children’s works from other authors did emerge about the wartime confinement. Florence Crannell Means’s The Moved-Outers (1945), a Newbery Honor award winner, presents one example of young adult fiction that incorporated the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans as a major theme. This novel, however, was intended for higher grade–level readers, with its teenage main protagonists, Kim and Sue Ohara, a brother and a sister, respectively. Means took care to research her topic, interviewing Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated at Amache, the prison camp in Colorado. In this story, the Ohara family tries to make the best of their difficult situation. Kim over time begins to question his place in the United States, while Sue sustains her faith in the American Dream. Means privileges the protagonists’ model status as a clean-cut, middle-class family to heighten her point about the injustice of imprisoning such law-abiding citizens. The high-school-age central characters also speak with the optimism and innocence of their youth. But Means refused to shy away from the complexities of camp life, depicting the Japanese Americans at Amache as diverse and divided in opinion about their present and future circumstances.

As discussed earlier, Uchida was often upfront when talking about racial prejudice in the Bay Area and about her confinement experiences when promoting her Japanese folktales. Yet her evasion of the incarceration in New Friends for Susan was consistent with her other public statements about her broader purpose in writing children’s books. As she noted for the Nichi Bei Times in 1951, “What I want most from this book is to have children who read it somehow realize that all children are basically alike no matter what their racial backgrounds may be.”⁵⁵ Both domestic and international relationships, she emphasized, required a level of mutual understanding to avoid the pitfalls of prejudice, oppression, and violence. To suggest that the book contained little in the way of pleading for racial tolerance, then, misses the intentions and actions of Susan and her friends. Uchida urged children to be more accepting, based on the model of her protagonists’ behaviors toward one another. Playing on the ideals of Cold War cosmopolitanism while eyeing potential sales, the author wanted to focus on the similarities and shared interests among children of different backgrounds. Her aim in New Friends for Susan was to create a utopian vision of a multiethnic American childhood that reflected her hopes for peace and understanding in the early 1950s.

The appeal of New Friends for Susan contributed to the advancement of American priorities in the Cold War. The U.S. Army found the text useful, incorporating it into its reorientation program in occupied Japan. To acclimate the Japanese to democratic ideals, the Army established libraries with films, books, and magazines that encouraged American liberal values and the possibilities they could offer Japan. This goal had larger geopolitical aims and consequences. By “bringing the peoples of occupied areas into the mainstream of democratic life,” as the program’s 1950 annual report noted, the United States will “make friends who will uphold democracy against totalitarian ideologies and similar forms of government.”⁵⁶ As its title suggests, New Friends for Susan suited this purpose. As one officer wrote to an assistant editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in October 1951, “The book is a delightful picture of little girls—Japanese, American, and Japanese-American—and will be highly suitable for the Reorientation Program that the Army is carrying out in its Information Centers in Japan.”⁵⁷ The novel’s multiethnic characters and the lessons of getting along matched the objectives of the United States to show the workings of a diverse and tolerant democracy to Japanese audiences that, in turn, could help contain communism.

That Uchida avoided the theme of wartime confinement in New Friends for Susan increased its attraction for the reorientation program since the U.S. Army wanted to promote democracy’s benefits, as opposed to its failings, to young readers in Japan. Her work thus accommodated U.S. overseas objectives within a Cold War liberal framing to contain communism and to integrate regions into market and military alliances. But Uchida’s efforts require further consideration within a wider chronological context. In 1965, more than a decade after New Friends for Susan’s release, one reporter for the Saturday Review of Literature noted how the majority of children’s books still included only white protagonists. This lack of ethnic diversity had global implications. “There seems little chance of developing the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as our children are brought up on gentle doses of racism through their books,” she declared.⁵⁸ What Uchida accomplished in her children’s tales through multicultural themes and characters cannot be undervalued, given the restrictive circumstances of the Cold War. Yet even as her works enlarged possibilities for global understanding, they also presented boundaries on addressing past tragedies.

However limiting Uchida’s strategy to avoid the wartime incarceration as a topic was, this evasion proved successful for her early career. The central grouping of white American, Japanese American, and Japanese characters in New Friends for Susan found its way into her later children’s novels. The Promised Year (1959) and Mik and the Prowler (1960) offer similar structures in which three different types of characters befriend one another. Yet the plots occur explicitly in the postwar world, as opposed to the earlier context of New Friends for Susan. In The Promised Year, a young Japanese girl travels to the United States to stay with her aunt and uncle in the Bay Area and befriends a white American boy. Mik and the Prowler focuses on a Sansei youth who, with the help of his white friend and a visiting Japanese girl, solves the mystery of a neighborhood burglary. Both texts, like New Friends for Susan, avoid mentioning the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Instead, Uchida offers a romanticized version of a multiethnic postwar nation that could move beyond prior hurts and grievances.

The Promised Year presents young audiences with a version of the United States from the perspective of a Japanese girl. Readers see the world through ten-year-old Keiko’s eyes, and all sorts of mysteries and adult concerns appear to lie beyond the child’s comprehension. But the text provides a more complicated vision than New Friends for Susan, accentuating the transnational connections retained by Japanese families after the war. The story focuses on Keiko’s visit with her Aunt Emi and Uncle Henry in California. Aunt Emi knows the hardships her extended family in Japan face and writes Keiko’s mother to invite one of the children to visit family in the United States for a year. Aunt Emi’s letter vaguely references past wartime sufferings in Japan and the postwar abundance in the United States. “Your family is now without a father and you have many mouths to feed,” she writes to Keiko’s mother. “We have no children, and milk and butter are plentiful in California.”⁵⁹ Keiko’s father is dead, presumably a casualty of the Asia-Pacific War. The other unmentioned background story concerns Aunt Emi and Uncle Henry, who were part of the imprisoned Japanese American population from California and who returned to a level of normalcy after the war. Uchida gives neither the wartime plight of the Japanese nor the Japanese Americans much depth here. But these omissions are not surprising, given the author’s evasions of still-controversial topics in her children’s books at this time. Instead, Uchida focuses on the postwar reunion of once-separated family members: Keiko can at least enjoy the good life with her relatives in the United States.

If the postwar hardships in Japan establish the reason for Keiko’s traveling to the United States, another reference explains the relationship between Keiko and her elders. Aunt Emi and Uncle Henry are Issei, she originally from Kyoto and he from Osaka. When Uncle Henry returns from working at his Bay Area flower business, the three sit together in the kitchen drinking tea and eating cookies. Keiko favors these moments when her uncle is more reflective, even nostalgic, about his earlier years in Japan and the United States. As Uchida writes, “The tired lines of worry would ease away from his face, he would lean back and smoke his pipe, and a softness would come into his voice. Then he would ask Keiko about Tokyo and remember about his home in Osaka and tell how different things had been before the war” (132). This brief but notable reference to World War II and its destructive consequences frames Uncle Henry’s sense of nostalgia and loss. Although immigrants to the United States, he and Aunt Emi maintain familial ties to Japan that conjure more pleasant memories of their own youthful times. Aunt Emi recounts when she and Keiko’s mother were adolescents and how they would explore the forests around Kyoto to enjoy the “springtime when the rice fields were green and the blossoms of the . . . plants looked like scattered gold” (133). Nature evokes the elder characters’ sense of promise and rejuvenation. That these figures retain such thoughts of Japan links them to Keiko in a deeper sense. They value their ancestral homeland for its comforting memories, just as the United States offers Keiko a chance at a more comfortable future life.

Mik and the Prowler aligns more with the structure and expectations of New Friends for Susan, in that the main protagonist befriends both white American and Japanese children. A Sansei boy, Mikitaro Watanabe (or simply Mik), desires to prove to his parents that he is ready and responsible for adult tasks. An elderly neighbor, Mrs. Whipple, hires Mik to look after her home when she leaves town. Yet all sorts of troubles and obstacles arise that compound the boy’s obligations. An intruder breaks into another neighbor’s house. A Japanese girl, Tamiko, comes to visit, which at first disappoints Mik because he hoped Tamiko would be a boy. Uchida once again offers synonymous sounding and looking names for her protagonists, suggesting, as in New Friends for Susan, a cultural connection between Japanese and Japanese Americans. As in Uchida’s other previous works, such as Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, the text also traces Mik’s maturation. He adjusts to changes in his life, allowing him to appreciate tasks and situations that were initially not to his liking.

Uchida’s creation of young Japanese American characters corresponds with Beverly Cleary’s volumes of children’s literature that also began appearing in the 1950s. Cleary framed her books around the everyday adventures and concerns of her well-known protagonists Henry Huggins and the sisters Beezus and Ramona Quimby. Like Mik Watanabe, these characters live in a postwar consumer society with understanding parents and single-family suburban homes. The characters own or desire pets and engage, sometimes testily and sometimes warmly, with children and adults in their neighborhoods. Cleary had a better ear for the rhythms of children’s banter than Uchida did. In Henry Huggins (1950) and Beezus and Ramona (1955), Cleary includes the teasing, faultfinding, and evasions that children display toward one another. Uchida, however, depicts her child protagonists, especially the Japanese American ones, as rarely getting into arguments with one another. Although not without faults, her characters are pleasant, hardly revealing the insecurities and latent concerns of children, as she builds on the ideal of a model minority. But even though Uchida never acquired the same level of popularity as Cleary did, she offered a more varied world with her ethnic minority characters. This point speaks to both the radical and moderate temperament of Uchida’s works for children in the postwar era. While the author gives voice to Japanese and Japanese American characters, she also avoids having their lives associated with racial prejudice or with memories of the wartime confinement.

Reviews of Mik and the Prowler were mixed but revealed critics’ expectations of Uchida’s stories. The children’s book reviewer for the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle noted that Uchida “builds a very comic suspense story laced with affectionate understanding of life in big families, whether they be of Japanese ancestry or any other.”⁶⁰ Here the critic acknowledged Uchida’s desire to create family portraits that defied national borders and expectations. But the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review admitted that she “missed the special charm of [Uchida’s] previous books,” referring to The Promised Year and Takao and Grandfather’s Sword. “Mik is so Americanized,” the critic continued, “that there is no place for the expressive oriental flavor which Miss Uchida can impart so skillfully.”⁶¹ The reviewer’s phrasing of “oriental flavor” marks how U.S. mass consumption highlights the exoticism of Japanese culture. But it also points to the perils of wanting to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Indeed, what makes Mik or Uchida’s other characters noteworthy is their Asian ancestry. That Mik is “too Americanized” translates into him being “too white.” He cannot belong in the United States without the badge of Otherness, since audiences expect that his racial features come with other ethnic trappings. This observation highlights what Ellen Wu and others have argued about the problematic positioning of Asian Americans as “assimilating Others” when attaining model minority status.⁶² Mik cannot fully integrate into the white mainstream because he is not white, even though he lacks any hint of being Asian, aside from his physical appearance. Yet, if he embraces Japanese cultural traits, then this action would serve only to emphasize his Otherness. Making him appear like any other child in the United States thus presented limitations on what critics and readers alike expected from Japanese American authors and their work.

When beginning the project, Uchida explained her intention to Margaret McElderry, the editor of children’s books at Harcourt, Brace and Company, that Mik should represent “any American child.” Uchida further wrote, “There are no peculiarly Japanese touches within the family because these no longer exist in most nisei [sic] homes.”⁶³ The author wanted to remark in her book on the assimilation of the Nisei and Sansei generations by the early 1960s. She did not intend to submerge or deny any cultural traits of Japanese Americans so much as she wanted to record what was happening to their families in the postwar United States. Yet McElderry, like the New York Times book reviewer, sensed that something was missing. Mik and the Prowler, she responded to Uchida, “does not in some ways have the body of TAKAO AND GRANDFATHER’S SWORD or of THE PROMISED YEAR.”⁶⁴ The editor still hoped that, despite Mik and the Prowler’s lack of emphasis on Japanese cultural traits, the work would attract an audience that identified with the assimilation of Japanese Americans.

As in New Friends for Susan, The Promised Year and Mik and the Prowler disclose Uchida’s concern for creating increased global understanding amid U.S. material abundance in middle-class suburbia. That these three novels offer a distinct set of characters that embody variations of American and Japanese identities reveals Uchida’s skill at recognizing the importance of intercultural contacts. The works coincide with her Japanese folktales, in which she strove to appeal to audiences through the stories’ embracing of universal characteristics and cultural differences. In her telling, a postwar future that stressed the shared qualities among societies trumped a more complicated history of war and confinement that offered an unclear path on how to redress grievances. Uchida desired a future inhabited by more peaceful-minded generations exposed to, and tolerant of, peoples from other lands and cultures. She hoped to contribute to this realization, not by recounting past wrongs, but by envisioning a utopian society filled with the possibilities of cultural exchange.

Remembering the Wartime Confinement

In September 1944, Uchida was ready to start a new chapter in her life. She graduated from Smith College and began teaching at the Frankford Friends School. In that same month, her father and mother joined her in Philadelphia after their release from Topaz, so that most of the family was together again. Educating first and second graders was enjoyable for Uchida, but the long hours of preparation and its physical demands took a toll on her already fragile health. More significantly, time engaged in the classroom prevented her from writing as a professional author, which became her most desired goal. After a year in Philadelphia, Uchida and her parents relocated to New York City, where her elder sister Kay was working, also as a schoolteacher. While in New York, Uchida worked as an office administrator for several Christian and charity organizations. By 1947, she had more time to focus on her writing and began composing her collection of Japanese folktales. It was also when she started giving voice to her imprisonment experiences.⁶⁵

Despite the success of her first children’s books, Uchida felt the need to hone her writing skills for adult readers, the target audience for her wartime tales. In 1952, shortly before traveling to Japan as a Ford Foundation fellow, she enrolled in a creative writing class at Columbia University. One of her assignments was a ten-page autobiography, from which some material later appeared in her memoirs, Desert Exile and The Invisible Thread. Readers see in this early sketch and in other writings Uchida’s attempts to place the personal and historical events of her life into focus, albeit in very brief and undeveloped form. The creative work based on her confinement experiences she then sent to major periodicals. As Uchida admitted, however, “I can’t quite seem to get over the hump” of getting them published.⁶⁶ Although periodicals rejected these fictional pieces, she constantly returned to them in the late 1960s to early 1970s and beyond, revising earlier themes, plots, characters, and vocabularies formed in the postwar years, to ensure that future generations of readers would appreciate the importance of this tragedy. Her children’s works that appeared in the late 1940s to early 1960s provided a way to think through the issues and strategies to write about the mass incarceration. Uchida already had been recounting her wartime experiences in her diary when teaching children at Tanforan and Topaz, in postwar publicity material for the Japanese folktales, and even in The Full Circle, however indirectly. We can then consider these works in part as literary experiments that provided the means by which to convey her memories about the removal and confinement.

The main premise that connects many of Uchida’s short stories is that, because of the suffering, endurance, and alienation of the Issei, the Nisei owe a debt to this older generation. Uchida’s obligation to her parents originated when she left Topaz in 1943 to continue her education at Smith College. “My parents had been caring and compassionate people before they were uprooted,” she wrote in The Invisible Thread, “and they still were.” Her sadness and guilt at leaving them behind clarified her appreciation for what they accomplished and how they comported themselves under extreme duress. But this sentiment developed in hindsight. “I understood all this only many years after the war was over,” she continued. “On that warm, dusty day” when she and her sister were released from Topaz, “my thoughts were still too muddled for me to be properly grateful” (121). This postwar expression of gratitude suggests that her emerging cosmopolitan ideals applied to embracing not only other cultures but also other generations that embodied those different cultures. As previously mentioned, Uchida tried to distance herself from the practices, beliefs, and language of her parents to assert her own sense of being an American. Supportive as they were, Dwight and Iku Uchida were still a disruptive presence in their daughter’s childhood. She feared that their status as Japanese nationals and their cultural differences would wrench her from what she considered “normal” when attempting to fit into the white mainstream. But Uchida’s growing awareness of Japanese culture and her travels to Japan widened her knowledge and acceptance of what was both familiar and foreign, as embodied in her parents. She not only wanted mainstream Americans to indulge their curiosity about other cultures but also urged the Nisei to appreciate the ancestral traits and treasures offered by their Issei parents. This was the dual basis on which she grounded her initial wartime memories and stories.

One of Uchida’s first publications on this topic, “Courage of the Issei,” appeared in the New York–based Hokubei Shimpo in 1949, the same year that The Dancing Kettle was released. She also intended the essay for the U.S. Army’s reorientation program in Japan. In this piece, Uchida paid homage to the sacrifices of her parents’ generation, describing the Issei in terms similar to those used by mainstream publications to portray the Nisei as model citizens after the war. This message served several purposes. Since Uchida wrote the article partly for overseas Japanese readers, she only briefly mentioned the confinement period and avoided discussing other instances of racial prejudice that Japanese Americans encountered in the United States. The Army employed the essay to show the promising aspects of democratic life in America, assuring the Japanese that the Issei persisted and succeeded as immigrants “despite the handicaps of racial discrimination.” Uchida’s other audience was the Nisei, who “could learn from their [parents’] perseverance, their capacity for hard work, and their courage and determination to create fine homes and families in a country once strange and foreign to them.”⁶⁷ In this sense, “Courage of the Issei” was a tribute to Uchida’s own mother and father, whom she came to cherish and respect as she matured. Last, the article reassured white Americans, including the Army editors, that Japanese Americans would forgive and recover from their wartime incarceration. That Uchida neither blamed the federal government at this time nor delved into the structural reasons for confinement reveals her awareness of how she had to negotiate around diverse audiences’ expectations.

Among the fictional tales that Uchida composed in the early 1950s that address the confinement or its aftereffects, two of the most significant include “Saturday Visit” and “Crepe Paper Flowers.” “Saturday Visit” was Uchida’s only short story to appear in print in the 1950s. Published by Woman’s Day for its October 1952 issue, the tale focuses on a young Nisei female narrator who visits an elderly Issei couple at their New York City apartment. The story indicates that the aged husband and wife had been incarcerated during the war and that they relocated afterward to the East Coast rather than return to the West, having lost their California farm. The tale’s power stems not from portrayals of camp life but from the Issei couple’s nostalgic remembrances of times before the war and the reality of their subsequent living conditions. The main character finds only the elderly wife at home, the husband having not yet returned from work. The two women pass the time poring over old photographs and reminiscing about life in California. In their recollections of earlier days, Uchida conjures the American pastoral ideal, in which farming the western lands presents a utopian portrait of self-sustaining livelihood. The Nisei narrator also recalls her own childhood innocence when she had visited the couple’s farm, enjoying daytime picnics and nighttime stargazing. But these events were no longer possible once the war began.

Significant in this story, as in Uchida’s other pieces, is the absent indictment of liberal state power or of the racial prejudice that influenced the process of mass confinement. Given its publication venue, the lack of outrage is unsurprising. Uchida instead develops a prevailing tone of nostalgia and loss. When evening descends and the Nisei narrator feels obliged to leave for another social engagement, she regrets not having more time to spend with the elder woman, especially since the husband’s return is imminent. As the narrator leaves the apartment, she spots the Issei gentleman on the crowded sidewalk, going to his home. But she does not approach him, feeling that his tired and defeated posture hints at his desire to be left alone. No amount of memories from a more heartening prewar period in California can revive what has already been lost. Such were the consequences of the wartime dislocation and postwar alienation.⁶⁸

The most noteworthy of the unpublished fictional tales from this period is “Crepe Paper Flowers,” likely written around 1952.⁶⁹ The story’s title refers to a real-life incident, in which the women at Topaz created the funeral decorations for a sixty-three-year-old Issei bachelor, James Hatsuki Wakasa, who was killed by a watchtower guard. Wakasa apparently had strolled too close to the barbed-wire fence and did not hear the guard’s warning, which then prompted the deadly response. No one, aside from the shooter, witnessed the event. Yet troubling inconsistencies arose from the investigation by camp officials. The guard maintained that Wakasa was trying to crawl underneath the fence to escape. Wakasa’s body, however, was found three feet inside the perimeter. Forensics also suggested that he was shot while facing the guard. The Topaz inmates responded with shock, distress, and anger.⁷⁰ As Uchida noted in her wartime diary on April 12, 1943, the day after the shooting, “It could easily be one of our friends or family next if this sort of thing continues. . . . [There’s] more fuss now, as everyone’s all stirred up about it.”⁷¹

The incident created such controversy that it was referenced in various art forms by those incarcerated at Topaz. Miné Okubo devoted attention to it in her illustrated book Citizen 13660 (1946). Rather than depicting Wakasa’s death, she focuses instead on the effects it had on the wider Japanese American community. In the two text-and-drawing panels that commemorate the Issei bachelor, Okubo includes herself as participant and spectator. The first illustration shows a large gathering of mourners, with the casket displayed on a stage in the far background. Many of the people in the foreground, including Okubo, reveal faces that are saddened by, and resentful of, Wakasa’s manner of dying. The text briefly notes how three different responses emerge. The camp administrators, she recounts, never provided an adequate explanation as to what actually happened. Among the inmates, the reactions are varied. On one side, the “pro-Japanese” leaders call for increased protests against their overall treatment. On the other, calls for “protection against soldiers with guns” arise, and the guards are eventually removed to a farther distance from the populace. These points of view not only undermine the government’s stance of holding Japanese Americans in protective custody but also disclose the fractures and tensions within the inmate community, created from their confinement. The second panel is composed of a few women, Okubo again included, who quietly fashion the paper floral wreaths that will decorate Wakasa’s grave. In this rendering, the women make up part of the extended camp family of Wakasa, who will carry on his memory.⁷²

The painter Chiura Obata’s Asian-inspired black-and-white watercolor offers another perspective. Hatsuki Wakasa Shot by M.P. (1943) centers on the moment of Wakasa’s death as the Issei falls to the ground from the tower guard’s deadly aim. The figure is bent toward a dog he was about to pet, which was Obata’s explanation of what had occurred, when the soldier perhaps mistook this kindly deed as part of an attempt to escape the prison camp. But the bullet, having already entered Wakasa’s body, makes him lurch forward in agony, his angled back and hips forming the apex of a triangle. His head and limbs make up the sides, and his hands and feet the points of the base. The dog, startled by the sound of the shot and Wakasa’s moment of death, appears as part of the triangular extension of the dropping body as its arms reach toward the animal. The geometric shapes in the painting lend an ironic stability to this violent act. In the background, the horizontal lines created from the Utah mountains, the thin clouds overhead, and the barbed-wire fence suggest an eerie sense of permanence in the desert, against which we see the falling figure of Wakasa. The composition achieves a simple yet powerful tone that conveys how an Issei’s affectionate gesture to overcome his alienation results in tragedy.

In Uchida’s “Crepe Paper Flowers,” the plot involves not a bachelor but an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Takata, who are in the midst of removal to a camp in Utah. Unlike their friends, they initially have other options. Their estranged daughter, Mary, lives with her white husband in Nevada, outside of the restricted areas of the West Coast. To avoid the hardships of camp life, the aged parents move in with her. But Mr. and Mrs. Takata face all sorts of difficulties. As immigrants, they speak English poorly. Mary’s husband’s business suffers because of his known harboring of his Japanese in-laws. Mrs. Takata also tells her husband of enduring the severe glances and mutterings of the local townspeople as she goes shopping. Always awkward around their daughter anyway, the couple resolves to be with their friends and to move to the camp at Topaz.

Uchida frames the story through the eyes of Mrs. Takata, allowing the author to provide a sense of depth to the shooting victim—that is, her husband—that few in the camps knew about the real-life James Wakasa. This strategy offers both a personal and a social background for Wakasa and his fictional counterpart, Mr. Takata. The decisions Mr. and Mrs. Takata make, and the difficulties they suffer, were similar to those encountered by many Japanese Americans. Uchida in this way wanted to dramatize the collective inner torments faced during the mass imprisonment. The tale opens at the camp hospital, where Mrs. Takata is in a shocked state of mind. Having just viewed the body of her husband, she notices that “he appeared to be made of soft, crinkled tissue paper.”⁷³ This description of his countenance parallels the story’s conclusion, in which paper floral wreaths, made by the camp women from that same “soft, crinkled tissue paper,” will decorate his grave.

Chiura Obata, Hatsuki Wakasa Shot by M.P. (1943). Armed Forces History Division, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Attempting to remember the events that had brought them to this end, Mrs. Takata blames herself for her husband’s death. He had wanted to stay with their daughter. Mrs. Takata desired to be with their friends in camp. Readers see how the old couple occupies a difficult position of choosing between two unappealing options, even as Uchida again avoids critiquing the federal government that placed them in this situation. Once at Topaz, a desert with its swirling, choking dust storms, Mr. Takata becomes morose. But he soon adapts and begins collecting Indian arrowheads he finds on the ground. This is the explanation Uchida provided to explain the shooting: Mr. Takata discovered a piece for his collection near the fence, bent down to gather it, and was shot by the guard. The day after the funeral, Mrs. Takata looks out beyond the fence to where her husband’s grave is located, fretting that she cannot leave him in this horrific place. Yet the paper flowers by this time are gone, like Mr. Takata’s spirit, the winds having carried them over the seemingly endless desert.

Uchida’s literary agent, Harriet Wolf, recognized the value of “Crepe Paper Flowers,” calling it “a beautiful story.”⁷⁴ This tale, however, like nearly all of Uchida’s other short fiction during this early period, faced an endless stream of rejection letters. Although most editors did not specify the reasons for their decisions, one actually did. Similar to Harriet Wolf’s reaction, the editor at Charm magazine called “Crepe Paper Flowers” beautiful. But, he insisted, the tale was “so tragic that I’m afraid we can’t use it.”⁷⁵ The public, he felt, was simply not ready for it. This may have been the reason for the other rebuffs that Uchida received for her other writings on the confinement. They were all too despairing for general consumption in the 1950s.

The story, of course, does not end here. The Wakasa incident, as it became known, reappeared in other versions throughout Uchida’s later writings. She included the scene in her two memoirs of Japanese American confinement, Desert Exile and The Invisible Thread. But the disparities in how Uchida approaches and contextualizes the consequences of the Issei’s death in these works are noteworthy. Designed for adult audiences, Desert Exile gives the Wakasa incident only brief mention. As Miné Okubo had done in Citizen 13660, Uchida links the turmoil caused by the shooting to the eruption of “pro-Japan agitators” who “became increasingly threatening” (140). Uchida’s portrayal, however, carries more personal ramifications. In their anger, members of the pro-Japan faction target Japanese Americans, whom they see as collaborators with the camp authorities. The accused group included Dwight Uchida, leading to his and Iku’s release in 1944 because of fears for their safety. Yet this version of events simplifies the class and cultural divisions among Japanese Americans in the camps and why some of them protested in the first place.⁷⁶ The Invisible Thread, a book for young adults published almost ten years after Desert Exile, reveals a more poignant experience for the author that avoids the internal dissensions within the inmate community. As Uchida writes, “It seemed a cruel irony that [Wakasa] could finally get beyond the barbed-wire fence only because he had died” (109). The Invisible Thread conveys a pointed personal tone directed more at the condition of the inmates’ lives at Topaz than at anything else. Perhaps by the 1990s Uchida was more willing to forgive Japanese Americans for the conflicts that had jeopardized her parents and to censure the federal government for placing them all in such a trying position. Instead of tracing the social consequences of Wakasa’s death, Uchida writes about her decision to leave the confines of imprisonment in the desert. “The bleakness of Topaz was now seeping deep inside me,” she wrote. “I felt as though I couldn’t bear being locked up one more day. I wanted to go out into the world and live a real life” (110).

Uchida also felt the continual need to fictionalize Wakasa’s killing, as if it kept haunting her to replay it for different generations of readers. She adapted elements of “Crepe Paper Flowers” in Journey to Topaz and then again in Picture Bride. To heighten the emotional impact of the shooting, Uchida resurrects the Issei victim as a family man, with a wife, children, grandchildren, and friends and admirers. Journey to Topaz devotes a whole chapter to develop the tragedy. It starts with the foreboding attempts to plant trees in the desert. Mr. Kurihara, the fictional stand-in for James Wakasa, frowns on such efforts, thinking that the trees will soon perish because of the soil’s lack of nourishment. This point parallels Uchida’s own desire “to go out into the world and live a real life.” Only death lingered in the desert, literally for Wakasa and the trees, metaphorically for Uchida and the Japanese American community. Later, no one, including the main protagonist, Yuki Sakane, believes the news of Mr. Kurihara’s death by the barbed-wire fence. The event strikes her all the more, since her closest friend, Emi, is Mr. Kurihara’s granddaughter. But Yuki is the source of more optimistic thoughts. She rationalizes to herself that Mr. Kurihara would not have minded his burial beyond the camp fences, since he “had grown quite fond of the desert.” Indeed, “its vastness had fascinated him even as the ocean did.”⁷⁷ Yet, upon seeing Mrs. Kurihara’s grief, Yuki is at a loss for words to comfort any of the suffering family.

Picture Bride concludes with the slaying, one that follows the closest to “Crepe Paper Flowers.” The novel depicts the trials and tribulations of an Issei woman, from her immigration to the United States at the turn of the century to her wartime incarceration. Hana Takeda, like the similarly named Mrs. Takata in the short story, endures the trauma of her husband’s death while at Topaz. Yet, unlike Journey to Topaz and Desert Exile, writings that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Picture Bride recaptures the forlorn finales of Uchida’s early short stories. Although hope and endurance are themes that still resonate in her Issei characters, the harsh environment at Topaz always threatens to engulf and endanger them. The novel’s last line reveals as much when Hana and her friends leave her husband’s funeral: “They did not know that by the time they walked to Hana’s barrack at the opposite end of camp, another dust storm would be coursing over the desert sands, enveloping all of Topaz in its white fury.”⁷⁸ The intense and unresolved quality of the conclusion, in which the “white fury” of nature evokes the power of white racism enacted against Japanese Americans, is akin to Uchida’s feelings expressed in The Invisible Thread. In both of these later works, she discloses a more pronounced frustration and sadness when remembering her encounters with racial prejudice and the wartime incarceration than she had done in Journey to Topaz and Desert Exile. In this sense, Uchida came “full circle” when conveying the despondency from her first unpublished works in the 1950s in her last books on the mass confinement appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Uchida’s reverence for the Issei, her embrace of Japanese culture, and the stories she told about Tanforan and Topaz had deep roots in the postwar period. These emerged from an appreciation of her parents, who initially entertained her with Japanese folktales, established models of behavior in the face of life’s challenges, and provided material for her works on Japanese immigrants and the wartime confinement. The early Cold War era, then, was not so much a blurry transition from the more clearly defined epochs of the mass incarceration to the later activist movements for redress that began in the late 1960s. Instead, the late 1940s to early 1960s were a crucial moment during which Uchida combined her interests in Japanese culture and in rendering scenes from World War II that would make her name in popular literature. Ironically, Uchida continued to write about Japan and its folktales until her death in 1992. But these works remained in the shadows of those that focused on Japanese American imprisonment once she began publishing them in the 1970s. What gets lost here is the complex postwar environment that initially framed her dual interests. Thus, if we are to appreciate the depths and concerns of such an author, we must acknowledge the intimate and historical connections each topic had in her ever-creative mind.

Conclusion

Notes

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Teach Your Children Well

A Family Uprooted

Japanese Folktales and Cold War Cosmopolitanism

Reorienting Postwar Japan

Creating a Multiethnic America

Remembering the Wartime Confinement

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