Eleven-year-old Joseph Hanada is playing basketball with his best friend on December 7, 1941, when his world begins to unravel as news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocks the United States. By the end of the day, Joe’s dad, a leader in the Japanese American community in their Washington State city, has been arrested by the FBI. It will be three years before Joe sees him again. The occasional haiku that punctuate Joe’s first-person narrative are believable as the work of a practiced child and reveal the essence of Joe’s hurt, anger, and confusion as his family endures painful and shocking changes. Joe and his family are confronted with the suddenly suspicious, even hateful attitudes of many of their neighbors and the increasingly oppressive actions of the U.S. government, which eventually lead to their imprisonment along with thousands of others of Japanese descent. A marble player, Joseph thinks of President Roosevelt signing Executive Order #9066 and writes: “Hate whispers in his / Ear. Puries here, cat’s eyes there.” Eventually, Joe ends up at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in California with his mother, grandmother, and older brother, Mike. Joe’s keen observations of his own feelings, as well as of people and places, reveal many aspects of life for Japanese Americans before and during World War II, from laws that prevented Isei from owning land before the war, to the ongoing struggle among Japanese Americans to join the war effort, to the differing viewpoints among Japanese Americans, who were by no means a homogenous group socially or politically. Words and ideas locked up Joseph and his family. But it is words and ideas that help Joseph maintain his sense of self and dignity throughout their ordeal. (Ages 10–13)

Eleven-year-old Joe Hanada likes playing basketball with his best friend, Ray, writing plays and stories, and thinking about the upcoming Christmas holiday. But his world falls apart when Japanese planes bomb Pearl Harbor. His country goes to war. The FBI takes his father away. And neighbors and friends in his hometown near Seattle begin to suspect Joe, his family, and all Japanese Americans of spying for the enemy. When the government orders people of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast to move to internment camps, including Joe and his family, Joe turns to the journal his father gave him to record his thoughts and feelings.