Under One Flag: A Year At Rohwer

Based on a true story, Jeff, the son of an administrator at the War Relocation Center in Rohwer, Arkansas, befriends George, a young Japanese American who is forced to live in the camp with his family after his father is accused of being a spy.

Grade 2-4–Based on historical events, this story is told by the son of an administrator of a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas. Jeff and his friend, a detainee named George Kobayashi, find a dog they name Dizzy Dean, play baseball, enjoy Boy Scouting, and share Grandma's Thanksgiving dinner. George is very excited when his father, who was being held in a detention center in New Mexico because he was suspected of being a spy, is finally allowed to join them. The man soon gets a job teaching Japanese at a Navy school in Colorado, and Jeff is sad when the Kobayashi family leaves. Years pass, and he goes to college and then inherits his grandparents' farm. It is there, 60 years later, that the friends finally meet again. This book is written in a choppy style that neither flows like a story nor is as personal as a journal, and readers are never fully drawn into the events. The bold block-print illustrations are colorful, but too harsh, making the characters seem distant. The total effect is jagged, disjointed, and too wordy for the volume's picture-book format, but there's not enough content to make it a chapter book of substance.–Nancy A. Gifford, Schenectady County Public Library, NY
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Gr. 3-5. Like Ken Mochizuki's Baseball Saved Us (1993) and other books about Japanese American internment, this picture-book story relates the history from a child's viewpoint. Here the setting is the War Relocation Center in Rohwer, Arkansas, and the narrator is a white local kid, Jeff, whose dad is a camp administrator. Jeff makes friends with George, a Japanese American boy forcibly held in the camp with his mother and sister while his father is imprisoned as a suspected spy. The lengthy text describes the mischievous bond between the boys, and expressive, full-page colored woodcuts show the fun they have with baseball, Boy Scouts, school, and their families on Thanksgiving. The pictures are full of smiling faces, but the darkness is always there: the barbed wire, the watchtower, the separation. An afterword cites research on social injustice during World War II and raises continuing questions about citizens who are viewed as enemies. Hazel Rochman
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