The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese American Internment Camp

The book talks about various rumors relating to Japanese Americans and how they were spying for Japan, but it also notes that there was never one single confirmed case of spying or sabotage by Japanese Americans. The book also goes into the various prejudices against them by white people on the West Coast.

Japanese who had settled in the U.S. but were not citizens were to be "evacuated." Likewise, anyone born in the U.S. (who would be a legal citizen of the U.S.) was to be evacuated. Even couples where one spouse was Japanese American and the other was white were to be evacuated. This also included those with Japanese ancestry but who did not appear to be Japanese physically.

People went to an "assembly center" first where they were processed, and then moved on to internment camps. The camps were in California, Arkansas, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, Granada, Colorado and Utah (the Topaz camp of the book).

Much of the book is based on a diary kept by a third-grade class at one of the camps. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers every 1/4 mile equipped with searchlights for night use. This included about 150 armed soldiers at the camp to keep watch over the internees.

Living conditions were not good. Each "apartment" had one wire and one bulb in the center and no running water. New arrivals were issued two blankets. The construction of the buildings was so shoddy that major gaps existed in the walls and internees had to find whatever they could to try and fill the gaps and block the wind and dust and cold from getting inside.

On April 11, 1943, a 63 year old man was out walking and was killed by a shot from one the guards who claimed the man was trying to escape, although he was found several feet inside the camp away from the fence.

The book talks some about the questionnaire that Japanese Americans had to fill out and, if they answered in a way the government didn't like, they were declared disloyal and shipped to a camp at Tule Lake, Califorina, surrounded by an 8 foot high barbed wire fence, one thousand soldiers and six tanks.

1,447 of the camp internees were sent to Tule due to the survey answers, and this included 95 high school students and 37 elementary school students.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page