Desert Exile

Author of several children books, novels, and memoirs, Yoshiko Uchida was born in 1921, and grew up in Berkeley, California. She graduated early from high school and was attending University of California when she and her family were imprisoned in World War II Japanese-American concentration camps. Released in May 1943 on a fellowship to Smith College, Uchida went on to publish more than thirty books, both fiction for children and adult non-fiction introducing Japanese culture, and often exploring questions of cross-cultural identity. Influenced by her mother’s poetry, as well as Japanese folktales, Christian upbringing, and trips to Japan, Uchida devotes her life in the camps and outside to teaching and spreading the knowledge of her cultural upbringing. 

Yoshiko’s father, Dwight Takashi Uchida arrived in California on a small cargo ship in 1906 after teaching Japanese for three years in Hawaii. He manages a store in Portland and by the time his daughters are born, he is manager of the major Japanese San Francisco import-export company Mitsui and Company. The son of a samurai and a first-generation Japanese immigrant, his mother had worked for Christian missionaries who taught at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where he worked his way through school with small jobs like morning milk delivery.