by Foreword by Daniel K. Inouye (1974)
Memoir of a young Issei Methodist clergyman based in Washington state during the trying years of World War II. Published in the fall of 1967, Daisuke Kitagawa's account was among the first book-length first-person accounts of the Japanese American incarceration. Kitagawa's account begins by describing the state of the Japanese American community in Washington prior to the war before following his community into the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno, California, then to Tule Lake. At Tule Lake, he ministers to the population while also assisting camp administrators. After segregation, he turns his attention to assisting with resettlement before going on to work at the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota. The memoir ends with the end of the war and does not discuss his postwar life. Though written in the first person and focused on Kitagawa's experiences, it is meant to tell a larger story; as Kitagawa writes: "The book is autobiographical, but it is not my autobiography. If anything, it is a collective autobiography of the Japanese-American community as a whole, in which I am simultaneously an observer, an actor, and the narrator."
Cynthia Kadohata
After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop.
Rinjiro Sodei
In August 1945, the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is hardly known is that 4,000 Nisei (Japanese Americans), the sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants who had been sent back to Japan to be educated before World War II erupted, were caught in the Hiroshima bombing. This extraordinary book commemorates the 3,000 Nisei who died from the atomic blast in Hiroshima and documents the plight of another 1,000 hibakusha (survivors of the bomb) who returned to the West Coast after the war. Branded as "foreigners" in wartime Japan and as "enemies" in postwar United States, their existence as victims of the atomic blast has not been recognized by either the Japanese or the U.S. government, both of which have refused to alleviate the medical and political problems of the survivors. Drawing on primary sources and rich interview data, Rinjiro Sodei has contributed an original scholarly work to the literature on World War II and the Asian-American experience.
Julie Otsuka
(From Wikipedia) "When the Emperor was Divine is a historical fiction novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about a Japanese American family sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert during World War II. The novel, loosely based on the wartime experiences of Otsuka's mother's family, is written through the perspective of four family members, detailing their eviction from California and their time in camp. It is Otsuka's debut novel, and was published in the United States in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf." I came to read this book because it was assigned to every freshman at the University of Delaware in 2016.
John Keegan
A chronological history of each theater of the war, analyzing five battles for their distinctive kind of warfare of the period.