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Tule Lake

by Edward T. Miyakawa

328 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0657; ISBN 1-55369-844-4; US$27.50, C$32.00, EUR22.50, £16.00

First Japanese-American novel to portray the passionate, desperate struggle for justice and freedom from within the confines of America's concentration camps by those who refused to cooperate with the internment of 120,000 of their fellow Americans.

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About the Book Chosen by Literary Oregon as one of the top 100 books from 1800-2000 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Oregon State Library TULE LAKE describes the anguish and pain of those men who stood up to Executive order 9066 in order to PRESERVE the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution. TULE LAKE speaks for the Japanese Americans, but its lessons are universal. They are lessons in FREEDOM and JUSTICE. They are lessons of how our democracy failed to protect the rights of all its people. TULE LAKE answers the questions: of the ten camps, why did Tule Lake become the most violent; why did Tule Lake have a stockade; who were the resistors; why did thousands of young Japanese Americans renounce their American citizenship; what was the Denationalization Bill passed in Congress; what special interests were served by the removal of Japanese American from the West Coast? TULE LAKE is the first Japanese American novel to portray the passionate and at times desperate struggle for justice and freedom from within the confines of America's concentration camps, by those who refused to cooperate with the internment of 120,000 of their fellow Americans of Japanese ancestry. "TULE LAKE should be read in every American history class...The endless days of camp life are detailed: the pittance -- 50 cents a day -- received for work; the conflicts which develop as different factions -- from the fanatical pro-Japanese to the willing Nisei soldiers who offer their lives for America -- come to the fore. We see families split as loyalty to the U.S. government is determined on the basis of two key answers in an oath-questionnaire form." Barbara Fryer LOS ANGELES HERALD EXAMINER, Sept. 7, 1980. "TULE LAKE out to be required reading for those who do not remember this shameful episode in American history. But more important, it ought to be required reading for those who believe that the needs of 'national security' sometimes justify the infringement of individual liberties. The story of the relocation camps cannot be told often enough, and TULE LAKE is a good way to do it." Masayo Duus, University of California -- Berkley Alumni Magazine CALIFORNIA MONTHLY June-July, 1980

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About the Author     Edward Miyakawa was born in Sacramento in 1934. He was raised in the Sacramento area near his mother's parents who farmed in Florin after immigrating from Japan as young adults. The entire family was interned at Tule Lake together, but after a year, Edward's father found a sponsor in Boulder, Colorado where they lived for the duration of the war. After his father attempted to establish the family in Colorado, they decided to move back to Sacramento.     In the mid-fifties, Edward lived in Japan for two years as an enlistee of the U.S. Navy. He graduated from the University of California with a Bachelor of Architecture of Architecture degree in 1962. He has practiced architecture on the coast of Oregon for over 30 years, raising an adopted family of six children with his wife, Mary. They adopted Kimiko form Korea, Huong and Mahn from Viet Nam, Keith and Isaac, African-American sons, and Kanka from India. They have four grandchildren.     Through the lives of his children and grandchildren he has extended a 700 year history of a samarai family to the dream so well expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. that there would come a day when children of all races will experience equality and justice and freedom in a world that respects the intgrity and talents of all peoples. To find out more about Tule Lake and the author, please visit www.tulelakenovel.com

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Excerpts

Prologue

    On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Subsequently, the United States military evacuated 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast into ten relocation centers in isolated regions of the United States. They were Manzanar and Tule Lake in California; Poston and Gila River in Arizona; Minidoka in Idaho; Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. My family and our friends and relatives were sent to Tule Lake in Northern California, where many of us lived from mid 1942 until 1946.
    For Father it was a period of turmoil and change as drastic as the years when he first came to America in 1908 as a young man of twenty-two. Had he been born a few hundred years ago, he would have been a samurai. But he bridges the span of three contemporary generations. He was a teacher turned farmer turned merchant. He is my father and I know him, but I do not. For the first ten years of my life he and mother were names only, existing as emigrants in a distant America.
    To whom I owe myself, I am not sure, but I do know I am the last extension tieing me back several hundred years. I am the first born in America, a country that my ancestors, dead and decayed, never knew existed. I am an American citizen by birth, a privilege Father and Mother can never experience: the Oriental Exclusion Act prevented all Asians from becoming naturalized citizens.
Mother and Father returned to Japan with me when I was a year old to be adopted by my maternal grandparents. In Japan when there is no male offspring, families often adopt a boy to carry on their name. I was destined to live out a transition of my own. I lived in Japan for nine years. Therefore, I have not shared Father's hardships in changing from one country to another, moving from one time in history to another time into another history. Although I never saw the blur of his legs on pedals, I know the wheels of Father's bicycle have tracked thousands of miles of the San Joaquin Valley, delivering medical supplies to farm laborers for four or five years, summer and winter, in freezing cold and withering heat. Only depleted supplies or sickness or occasional exhaustion were reasons for turning homeward.
    During the years in Japan, I learned who I was, what I was supposed to be and how I would uphold what I was taught to be truth and honor. There was love and order. When I become fragmented, I retreat to these early memories. Around the table, I see the faces of my adopted family, feet inserted in a square hole in the floor where there is a hibachi for warmth. Always it is the same -- my exercise in faith. I close my eyes, again and again. I see the peaceful furrows of my grandfather's face; my grandmother, an aura of serenity surrounding her; two half sisters or aunts; two half sisters or aunts; and my great grandmother. My grandfather is at the head of the table; I am seated opposite him. My grandmother and her mother are on the side toward the kitchen with my aunts opposite them.
It has been fifteen years since I last seated myself at that table. Since that day, change has become as much a part of my life as was the permanence during my first ten years. I had to leave the only family I had ever known to live with strangers in a new country with different customs and dress and language. In the house the wind was a gentle one, wafting across the garden, flowing though the pink of spring through needles of pines, along the corridors, through opened sliding doors. For a while I did not see my parents' faces, for I moved downwards, my eyes staring at the earth as I touched my forehead to my hands, palms outstretched upon the mat. I moved slowly up, their head perpendicular to my vision. I bowed and righted myself over and over.
    Never have I seen such sadness, hidden behind deceptive smiles, as on that day. Beneath the roof, between walls, in the house where I have lived, we sat forever. I was told that I would depart the home of my grandparents and return to America with my mother and father.
I was immune to their words. All I could see were the squares in the shoji door cast by an angle of afternoon sun into flattened shapes half on the wall and half on the tatami. The filtered light through rice paper was translucent and soft white, so the lamella shadows of the thin wood frames were not in a single plane but in many.
    My last day of school in Japan was set aside to bestow upon me honor and love. I arose to give the speech expected of me by my classmates and instructors. I felt no weight, no movement, as my legs carried me across he stage. I stood voiceless -- one minute -- two minutes -- then my teacher whispered, "Seichi, everyone is waiting. You must give your speech."
I concentrated on transforming thoughts into words, but my mind refused to function, to perform as it has been trained. I wanted them to understand what I wished I could understand. Beneath the shadow of the roof shade, there was silence.

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Catalogue Information

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