The Moved-Outers

This is one of the earliest if not the earliest fiction book about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It's also a very comprehensive book about what happened. The story centers on two families where there is a sort of Romeo and Juliet thing going, with the fathers of the two families do not get along.

Sue Ohara is the main female character, 18 years old. Their family live in California and end up being moved out, first to the Santa Anita Assembly Center and later to the Amache Internment Camp.

The story covers Pearl Harbor, how the FBI arrested people and held them without charge, how the attitude of some of the people who knew the family changed after Pearl Harbor, the process of moving out and all that entailed, the journey to Santa Anita and the horse stalls that awaited them as a new 'home,' the development of that center and then the moving out to Amache and how that went.

It also covers the varying attitudes of people in the camps, the Zoot Suiters and how some of the younger ones in the camps got into trouble. It even covers a shooting of one of the camp people who was out on a work detail. All of these things covered in the book are real things that happened to real people.

One interesting thing it does is go into the origin of people, such as those born in Scotland and Germany who settled here, and how they were known simply as Americans, vs. the people of Japanese descent who, even if born here, were still known as Japanese-Americans rather than just Americans.

The book also talks briefly about the development of anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast long before the war ever began. It even includes some of the more outrageous newspaper claims about the camps, such as the claim that the Japanese Americans were getting better food than other Americans.

On top of all this, the book is very readable and very well done as a book on that level.



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