Rusty Nails and Ration Books : Memories of the Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 Book

This is one of the best novels I have read about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Miyakawa chooses a very challenging setting -- the camp at Tule Lake, in the bleakest corner of northern California (where a new arrival remembers only one tree growing out of the pale red lava rock landscape) where the "disloyals, dissidents, and troublemakers" -- and their families --were sent. They were surrounded by barbed wire and 28 guard towers. Miyakawa captures the tension simmering beneath the surface at first within the community, even within families. He follows two brothers, one who expresses his patriotism by organizing for the JACL and then joining the 442nd in the most perilous sorties in Europe, the other who shows his belief in the U.S. Constitution by resisting unjust orders, being beaten and arrested (a jail within the jail), going on hunger strike, and watching his loving family fall apart in this hostile terrain.