Yoshiko Uchida
| Yoshiko Uchida | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 24, 1921 Alameda, California United States |
| Died | June 21, 1992 (aged 70) Berkeley, California United States |
| Occupation | short story writer, editor, novelist, children's book author, teacher |
| Genre | fiction, folktales, nonfiction, autobiography |
| Literary movement | Folk Art Movement |
| Relatives | Keiko Uchida(sister)Iku Uchida(mother)Dwight Uchida(father) |
Yoshiko Uchida (November 24, 1921 – June 21, 1992) was a Japanese American writer.
Yoshiko Uchida graduated early from high school in the 1940s and enrolled at University of California, Berkeley at sixteen. The Uchidas were living in Berkeley, California and Yoshiko was in her senior year at U.C. Berkeley when the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Soon after, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans on the west coast to be rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps. Thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans, regardless of their U.S. citizenship, lost their homes, property, jobs, civil liberties and human dignity.
The Uchidas were not spared. Takashi was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and he and his family, including Yoshiko, were interned for three years, first at Tanforan Racetrack in California and then in Topaz, Utah. In the camps, Yoshiko taught school and had the chance to view not only the injustices which the Americans were perpetrating, but the varying reactions of Japanese Americans towards their ill-treatment.
In 1943 Uchida was accepted to graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts and allowed to leave the camp, but her years there left a deep impression. Her 1971 novel Journey to Topaz is fiction but closely follows her own experiences, and many of her other books deal with issues of ethnicity, citizenship, identity, and cross-cultural relationships.
Over the course of her career Uchida published more than thirty books, including non-fiction for adults and fiction for children and teenagers. She died in 1992.
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