Uprooted: The Japanese American Experience During World War II - Hardcover

Marrin, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553509365 ISBN 13: 9780553509366

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2016

Synopsis

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Editor's Choice

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor comes a harrowing and enlightening look at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II— from National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin
 
Just seventy-five years ago, the American government did something that most would consider unthinkable today: it rounded up over 100,000 of its own citizens based on nothing more than their ancestry and, suspicious of their loyalty, kept them in concentration camps for the better part of four years.
 
How could this have happened? Uprooted takes a close look at the history of racism in America and carefully follows the treacherous path that led one of our nation’s most beloved presidents to make this decision. Meanwhile, it also illuminates the history of Japan and its own struggles with racism and xenophobia, which led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ultimately tying the two countries together.
 
Today, America is still filled with racial tension, and personal liberty in wartime is as relevant a topic as ever. Moving and impactful, National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin’s sobering exploration of this monumental injustice shines as bright a light on current events as it does on the past.

About this title

About the Author:

Albert Marrin is the author of numerous nonfiction books for young readers, including the National Book Award finalist Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy, A Volcano Beneath the Snow: John Brown’s War Against Slavery, Thomas Paine: Crusader for Liberty, Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives, and FDR and the American Crisis. His many honors include the Washington Children’s Book Guild and Washington Post Nonfiction Award for an “outstanding lifetime contribution that has enriched the field of children’s literature,” the James Madison Book Award for lifetime achievement, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal, awarded by President George W. Bush. Visit him online at AlbertMarrin.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue
DAY OF INFAMY
 
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy— the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
—President Franklin D. Roosevelt (December 8, 1941)
 
 
On this bright Sunday morning, deck crews scurried about, hurrying to make final preparations. A huge flag bearing the red rays of the Rising Sun fluttered from the tall radio mast of each ship. These ships had graceful, poetic names: Misty Island, Shimmering Mist, Haze, Daybreak Cloud, and Wind on the Beach. Such names, however, belied the terrific firepower of the thirteen battleships, cruisers, and destroyers of the task force. At its heart were the six aircraft carriers they protected. The flagship, the 36,500-ton carrier Red Castle, steamed ahead, followed by the Flying Dragon, Green Dragon, Increased Joy, Crane Flying in Heaven, and Lucky Crane. Their objective was a shallow harbor on the western coast of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, the U.S. Navy’s chief Pacific Ocean base. Native people called it Wai Momi (Pearl Waters) for the pearl-bearing oysters that once were plentiful there—Pearl Harbor.
 
 
The coming attack was part of a grand scheme to make Japan the ruler of Asia. To that end, the country’s forces had invaded China four years earlier, in 1937. However, to succeed, Japan’s military rulers decided they had to destroy the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. They knew their action would ignite global war—a Second World War— for the armies of German tyrant Adolf Hitler were already rampaging across Europe. What they could not know was that the conflict would be the greatest war of all time, claiming the lives of over seventy million, mostly civilians. This number, however, is far from the war’s total cost, which can never be known. Because for each person killed, we must add countless others wounded and crippled, widowed and orphaned.
 
 
At 6:00 a.m., the carriers turned into the wind to launch their planes from a position 270 miles north of Pearl Harbor. At a signal from the Red Castle, pilots raced their motors. As the planes sped forward, deckhands shouted “Banzai!,” meaning “Long life!,” “Hurrah!,” and “Forward!” Hours earlier, on the other side of the globe, in Washington, D.C., Operation Magic, a top-secret program for decoding Japanese radio signals, had told President Franklin D. Roosevelt that an attack was coming, but not where. So the War Department sent an alert to bases throughout the Pacific. Yet communication foul-ups prevented the message from reaching Pearl Harbor until after the attack.
 
 
It was a normal peacetime Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor. The navy ships were at anchor and tied up at their docks. No bugle calls woke their crews. Sunday was a day of rest, and captains ordered “late hammocks,” so the sailors could get up whenever they liked. That was good, since many nursed hangovers from Saturday night in Honolulu’s saloons, dance halls, and “social clubs.”
 
 
At 7:55 a.m., early risers heard the drone of motors overhead. Moments later, 360 Japanese raiders—fighters, dive-bombers, torpedo planes—swooped down, each heading for its assigned target. Meeting little organized resistance, within a half hour they sank, ran aground, or severely damaged 18 warships. Three battleships became total wrecks, and 177 planes that had been parked on airfield runways were blown to bits, with a loss of only 29 Japanese planes and pilots. The enemy killed 2,403 Americans and injured 1,178 others. The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
 
 
Americans often idealize the “good war.” It surely was a just war, and, in that sense, good. The United States did not fire the first shots; it fought in self-defense, but also to rid the world of Asian and European tyrannies. Americans fought, said President Roosevelt, for every person’s right to enjoy the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
 
 
But as Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman famously said: “War is all hell.” A man I knew, a former infantryman, recently joined his long-gone friends from the Pacific campaigns. “We were always at the spear-point,” he would say, always risking their lives at the front. Glib talk of the “good war” infuriated him. Those who experienced it at the sharp end often called it the “dirty war,” a crusher of minds and bodies. “Combat is torture,” wrote one who knew, “and it will reduce you, sooner or later, to a quivering wreck.”
 
 
The war brought out the worst in people who in peacetime would never have dreamed of harming another live being. Marine corporal Eugene B. Sledge—“Sledgehammer” to his friends—described how combat in the Pacific changed him from a gentle eighteen-year-old who loved birds into a killer. “To me the war was insanity,” Sledge recalled bitterly. “We had all become hardened. We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting each other like animals.” It was a living nightmare. “The war I knew was totally savage,” Sledge continued. “It was savage. We were savages.” Some Japanese soldiers used the same words to describe what the war made of them. Nobody had a monopoly on virtue, and each side committed atrocities. Whether they did so to the same degree is still a matter of debate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0553509365
• ISBN 13: 9780553509366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256