The Little Exile

by Jeanette Arakawa

Overview

After Pearl Harbor, little Marie Mitsui’s typical life of school and playing with friends in San Francisco is upended. Her family and thousands of others of Japanese heritage are under suspicion and forcibly relocated to internment camps far from home. Living conditions in the camps are harsh, but in the end Marie finds freedom and hope for the future. Told from a child’s perspective, The Little Exile deftly conveys Marie’s innocence, wonder, fear, and outrage. This work of autobiographical fiction is based on the author’s own experience as a wartime internee.

Jeanette Arakawa was born in San Francisco in 1932 and was interned in the 1940s at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611720365
Publisher:	Stone Bridge Press
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	12 - 16 Years

About the Author

Jeanette Arakawa was born in San Francisco, California to Japanese immigrants. Between 1942 and 1945, during World War II, she was part of a diaspora that took her to Stockton, California, Rohwer, Arkansas, and Denver, Colorado. She returned to San Francisco in 1946.

Jeanette and her husband, Kiyoto, have two sons and a grown granddaughter. Over the years Jeanette's devotion to educational issues has permitted her to share her experiences in the classroom as well as other forums. She continues to be an active member of her temple. Writing, line dancing, taiko (Japanese drumming), and singing occupy the spaces available in her busy life. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

"Jeanette Arakawa has done a masterful job in bringing this tragic story to life. It should be required reading in our schools. We have to make sure that what happened to my parents, and tens of thousands of other Japanese-Americans, never happens again. The Little Exile belongs on everyone's shelf.”
—Prof. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics, author of Physics of the Impossible


"Arakawa revisits the fear, confusion and injustice her family experienced during World War II... Describes years of displacement and privation as she comes to understand the meaning of discrimination in the land of the free. "
—The Mercury News


"Deeply moving and poignant"
—Gayle Noguchi, Wheel of Dharma

"A literary-cultural-historical gift"
—Asian American Literature Fans


"Through the sharp and observant eyes of a preteen child, Jeanette Arakawa offers a readable, matter-of-fact account of wartime upheaval and the imprisonment of her family and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans. . . . The Little Exile should be required reading for every schoolchild and every U.S. government official.”
— Sharon Noguchi, journalist

"An illuminating glimpse inside a stolen life."
—101 Books About Japan


"Moving, beautiful, and important."
—Doug Dorst, New York Times Best-selling author of S (with JJ Abrams) and Alive in Necropolis

"A delightful read for all ages — a young heroine who prevails through the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Marie Mitsui is as tenacious as a Hayao Miyazaki heroine, so perhaps, rather than a 1940s movie that rarely had Asian faces, you might discover an inspiring animation as you read The Little Exile.
—Nichi Bei


"With the deftness and colorful detail of a gifted artist, Arakawa captures the WWII confinement experience of Japanese Americans as seen through the eyes of a young child. Little Marie’s innocent wisdom and spritely audacity frame the enormity of the trauma along with the minutiae of everyday life confined by barbed wire. Her story tugs at the conscience and inspires human kindness.”
—Satsuki Ina, Ph.D., Producer, PBS documentary, Children of the Camps

"Arakawa’s detailed child’s eye view of that story is by turns funny, angry, and sad, like most children are. It is a worthwhile addition to the camp memoir club."
—Densho

5/5 "Arakawa tells her remarkable story with neither bitterness nor anguish but spares no details of the disturbing experience."
— San Francisco Book Review


"Set amidst the tumult and trauma of displacement and incarceration, Arakawa offers us the moving and poignant story of a young girl whose American identity is constantly challenged. The Little Exile dramatically captures not only the broad historical injustices, but also the small acts of kindness and cruelty that leave such an indelible impression on our lives."
—Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley

"These are experiences that need to be remembered"
—Kirkus Reviews


"Few books about Japanese American incarceration capture so vividly the feel of community before the war, during the incarceration, and in the postwar relocation years. Arakawa has written an epic story in small, exquisitely remembered vignettes that glow with humor, warmth, and her own and her family's wisdom."
—Gil Asakawa, author, Being Japanese American

"An evocative excursion into a young person’s life being drastically inverted."
—The International Examiner

"The Little Exile is a memoir worth reading. One piece of advice though: be prepared to read it in multiple sittings. My heart needed time between chapters or it would’ve broken."
—Hippocampus Magazine

"The Little Exile has a renewed and special relevance for today's national discussion related to immigration issues and the unhappy willingness of a great many Americans to repeat the errors of our past."
—The Midwest Book Review

"[The Little Exile] gives us a peak into the racism and the hate Japanese Americans had to endure during those years—but also the small acts of kindness that they also experienced too. These kinds of stories are important."
—8Asians

"Arakawa takes readers on a journey through the brutal challenges that many Japanese Americans faced."
—JQ Magazine

From the Publisher

2017-03-29
A child of Japanese immigrants looks back on her World War II-era experiences in internment camps and afterward.Changing names and inventing details to fill in the gaps between memories, Arakawa, in character as Shizuye, begins with her 1932 birth on a Murphy bed in San Francisco, takes her narrative through multiple moves that become forced ones in the wake of Pearl Harbor, then concludes with a temporary postwar settlement in Denver and final journey back to the West Coast. Despite the fictive fill, her account is spotty and episodic, more hindered than helped in its course by such details as painstaking descriptions of the route between one home and the local playground or tedious tallies of the comings and goings of briefly known schoolmates. As much a personal story as testament to a historical outrage, her recollections mingle references to domestic strife, pre-adolescent bed-wetting, and suicidal impulses following the internment with incidents of being jeered as a "Jap" on the way home from school, encounters with neighborhood "racial covenants," and other manifestations of prejudice—not to mention repeated forcible removals to hastily constructed camps in California and, later, Arkansas. Occasional mentions of "Caucasian" visitors or a friend's "dark skin" serve as reminders that most of the figures here are Asian or Asian-American. These are experiences that need to be remembered, though Arakawa's are not as compellingly related as other novels or personal accounts of the travesty. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews