As a fan of family sagas and historical fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was so well-documented, yet read like a novel with such rich prose and poignant detail. Pam Rotner Sakamoto is a gifted writer, and her love for the characters shines through every passage. Her depiction of a painful chapter in American and Japanese history allows us to reach the other side, together with Harry and his family, with a sense of reconciliation and a deeper understanding of war's tragic toll on humanity.

i read this because i'm researching internment camps for a body of artwork i'm creating.

i found it very well researched, and once i got past the first few chapters [it was slow in the beginning for me], i was very interested in the events and people described.

i do think sakamoto wobbled between being an objective observer and a writer wanting to really tell a compelling story in a way that isn't super great for plot development. but other than that critique, the situation that fukuhara's found themselves in seemed so very complicated, sad, poetic, compelling, etc. the personal insight and stories that all the family members disclosed made a historic time much more individualistic and comprehensible.

Fantastic story telling. And fascinating story.

This was an excellent book about a Japanese American family. Some of the children born in the United States, moved to Hiroshima in the 1930's during the Great Depression. The two oldest, a boy and a girl returned alone to the United States as teenagers during the late 1930's. Their younger siblings were raised in Japan. In alternating chapters, the book describes the lives of the children as they faced discrimination in 1940's Washington State, and were transported to interment camps shortly after Pearl Harbor; while their siblings grew up in an increasingly militarized Japan. One of the most touching scenes involved the inmates celebration of the 4th of July after their property and liberty were lost. The boy volunteered to join the U.S. Army as a translator. He was eventually shipped to the East, discovered a childhood bully as a captured soldier in the Imperial army, and eventually reunited with his mother and long lost siblings after the atomic bomb. I have been getting up at 5:00 a.m. just to finish it. Magnificent, and timely given our current discussions about immigration.

A fascinating look at a family divided by war and what was going on in both America and Japan at the time. You see the war from brother Harry's viewpoint from the west coast of the US, an internment camp, and later the Pacific as he worked as a linguist for the US Army, and from the viewpoint of his American born brothers living in Japan at the start of the war and eventually caught in that war machine. This book puts a human face on both sides and gives a new perspective to the war in the Pacific.

One of those books that you can hardly believe is true.