Desert Exile

Chapter 1 introduces us to life in the Uchida family home on Stuart Street in Berkley, California, and spans the formative years of Yoshiko’s childhood before World War II. Few Japanese-American families lived in this nicer area above Grove Street, and Chapter 1 presents a first-generation, Christian, Japanese-American family laying deep community roots. Uchida presents Dwight Takashi Uchida, her father, as a hardworking man, and Iku Uchida, her mother, as equally hardworking.

Uchida recounts growing up among “sweetpeas that grew higher than my head, and the enormous chrysanthemums that measured seventeen inches around,” and remembers her father “raking the yard and filling the dusky evening air with the wonderful smell of burning leaves” (3).

Uchida recounts courageous sacrifices her parents and other Issei made for their children. Dwight Uchida worked his way up to assistant manager at Mitsui and Company, having arrived in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Iku Uchida, like her husband, studied at Doshisha, one of Japan’s foremost Christian universities, then sailed by herself from Kyoto in 1916 to marry. The Issei women “came to an alien land, created homes for their men, worked beside them in the fields, small shops and businesses, and at the same time bore most of the responsibility for raising their children” (6).