Desert Exile

“Your story of your family is important and valuable because it brings out and explains the strong human ties and relationships between the Japan born and educated Issei parents and their American born Nisei children. The values, learning, understanding and respect which can only come by living together.” 

In the Prologue, Traise Yamamoto, a writer and professor, introduces us to the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Yamamoto sets the tone of Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile through the words of Mine Okubo, another Japanese-American artist interned at Tanforan and then at Topaz. The arc of Desert Exile traces the Uchida family’s experience from living a well-adjusted, American lifeto life in Army-run concentration camps. As Desert Exile evolves, the courage Issei demonstrate and the friendships that cross racial barriers become central themes. 

“Absence of victimized complaint should not be taken for compliance.”

Yamamoto wants us to know the story of Japanese-American incarceration is not a compliant one. Rather, as explained on the same page a few lines above, the Issei attitude “has deeper resonances as a way of enduring what seems unbearable with dignity, patience, and quiet strength” (xv).

“I remember the sunny yard in back with the peach and apricot and fig trees. I remember the sweetpeas that grew higher than my head, and the enormous chrysanthemums that measured seventeen inches around. There was a blackberry bush that rambled wild along the back fence, and there was rhubarb that sprang up near the fenced closure where we kept a succession of three dogs.”

In the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1, Uchida introduces us to the vibrant Uchida home on Stuart Street in Berkeley, California, as it existed before Pearl Harbor. This quote characterizes the strong sense of home and identity that becomes erased and uprooted as Desert Exile evolves. It also presents the first instance of the motif of flowers, which appears throughout the book in different varieties and symbolizing hope.