In this graphic novel, Kiku is transported back in time to1940's San Francisco - where her grandmother was a teenager. At the time, Japanese Americans faced a lot of racial discrimination in the United States. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, forced them to leave their homes, businesses and communities and moved them into camps in rural areas of the western United States. It felt these legal immigrants and American citizens represented a potential threat to the U.S. because of their ancestral ties to Japan. Kiku's grandmother and her family are sent to one of these camps and Kiku ends up in the same camp. While there, Kiku experiences first hand what life was like for her grandmother and others who tried to make a life for themselves in a hostile environment.
Reading this historical fiction novel gives you insight into what life was like for the first and second generation Japanese Americans (check out the glossary at the back of the book for translations of the Japanese terms used in the story). Now 80 years later, Japanese Americans are still impacted by the camps. Many of those in the internment camps rarely spoke of their time there and as a result, even their families did not know about their wartime experiences. Through reading stories like Displacement, we build empathy and make progress towards understanding the full effect of these forgotten periods on our collective history. This knowledge in turn helps us to identify injustice, helps us to prevent violations of civil liberties and empowers us to stand up with those who are unfairly targeted. What makes this book powerful is the connections drawn between the experiences of the Japanese Americans during World War II and the headlines of today.
For more information, I also highly recommend checking out Densho - a website which is dedicated to preserving the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
This book is available in the Nashua South Media Center.
