AUTHOR’S NOTE

In February 1942, just two months after America went to war with Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066. It allowed the government to force more than 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children living on the West Coast to leave their homes and relocate to camps in the interior of the United States. Many of these people had been born in America and were U.S. citizens. Some couldn’t speak Japanese and had never even been outside the U.S. Nonetheless, the government feared they would aid the enemy in Japan and should be moved away from the Pacific Ocean. Although the U.S. was also at war with Germany and Italy, it did not round up Germans and Italians and send them inland.

The camps were not prisons. They were relocation camps. The idea was the Japanese would live there only until they found employment. They were expected to work for the war effort or to replace men who had been drafted into the U.S. Army. Many did indeed find jobs and leave. Some, however, spent the duration of the war in the camps.

The government built ten relocation camps, all of them located in remote, inhospitable areas from California to Arkansas. One of those camps was Amache, near Granada in southeast Colorado. Some 10,000 Japanese spent part or all of the war at Amache.

I renamed Amache Tallgrass, and Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky is the second novel I’ve set in that camp. The first, an adult novel titled Tallgrass, is about a farm family living adjacent to the camp, and it’s told from the standpoint of a young Caucasian girl. Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky is from the opposite viewpoint. It is a fictional story of twelve-year-old Tomi Itano, a Japanese girl from California. It tells of one girl’s struggle to understand discrimination and help her family cope with the effects of the uprooting of their lives.

Incidentally, not one single Japanese person in America was ever found guilty of World War II espionage. And the 442nd Infantry, made up of Japanese soldiers, was the most decorated army unit in U.S. history.

I learned about the relocation camps in the early 1960s, about fifteen years after Amache was closed. I’d gone pheasant hunting in southeastern Colorado with a rancher friend, who took me to see the Amache site. All that was left were dirt roads and cement slabs where buildings once stood. Since I’d never heard of World War II relocation camps, I went to the library to find out about them. In researching Amache, I discovered that after the camp was abandoned, some of its barracks were sold to the University of Denver for use as classrooms. My journalism classes at DU in the 1950s were held in one of them.

In my early years as a reporter for Business Week magazine in Denver, I met a number of Japanese journalists who had been interned at Amache and at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, another relocation camp. They had come to Denver at the war’s end. Among them was Carl Iwasaki, a freelance photographer for Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and Business Week. Carl, a lifelong friend, is the subject of an acclaimed book, Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943–1945. I’ve fictionalized one of his poignant stories in Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky.

My interest in Amache was rekindled many years after I visited the site when I read Robert Harvey’s outstanding book Amache: The Story of Japanese Internment in Colorado During World War II. That book inspired me to write Tallgrass and eventually Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky.