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A Fence Away From Freedom
A series of interviews with Japanese Americans, who were placed in internment camps during World War II merely because they had Japanese ancestry, reveals how they lost businesses, homes, and personal possessions.
260 pages, Hardcover
First published October 17, 1995
About the author
Ellen Levine
87 books51 followersEllen Levine's books have won many awards and honors, including the Jane Addams Peace Award. Although she enjoys writing both fiction and nonfiction, most of Ellen's books for young readers have been nonfiction. "Writing nonfiction lets me in behind the scenes of the story. I enjoy learning new things and meeting new people, even if they lived 200 years ago."
Ellen Levine was born in New York City. She received her B.A. degree in Politics from Brandeis University, graduating Magna cum laude. She has a Master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago and a Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law. She has worked in film and television, taught adults and immigrant teenagers in special education and ESL programs, and served a law clerkship with Chief Judge Joseph Lord, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. A former staff attorney with a public interest law group, Levine now devotes her time to writing, lecturing, and teaching. She is on the faculty of Vermont College's MFA program in writing for Children and Young Adults.
Ellen Levine divides her time between New York City and Salem, New York.
Ellen Levine was born in New York City. She received her B.A. degree in Politics from Brandeis University, graduating Magna cum laude. She has a Master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago and a Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law. She has worked in film and television, taught adults and immigrant teenagers in special education and ESL programs, and served a law clerkship with Chief Judge Joseph Lord, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. A former staff attorney with a public interest law group, Levine now devotes her time to writing, lecturing, and teaching. She is on the faculty of Vermont College's MFA program in writing for Children and Young Adults.
Ellen Levine divides her time between New York City and Salem, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 24, 2016
Ellen Levine, 1995
This book is written in a manner where the author interviewed numerous people who had been interned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. She also states out front that the book is more a book of remembrance and not one that deals extensively with historical information and details.
Chapter 1 deals with the times before Pearl Harbor and the type of anti-Japanese hate that was present in California. The personal memories are important, especially in that they verify things written about in other books; how the Japanese-Americans were called Japs, made fun of, prohibited from going certain places, etc,, even before Pearl Harbor. The people were subjected to a lot of prejudice, very similar to that suffered by blacks at the time (and in places still today.)
Chapter 2 deals with the time centered around Pearl Harbor. She talks about the FBI raids and the Hearst press which carried on some of the most vicious anti-Japanese rhetoric of all. A lot of these memories center around how people who were students at the time were treated in school right after Pearl Harbor. Another story is about how one house was shot at.
She also writes about roundups on Hawaii, especially aimed at anyone who was a leader of any Japanese American organization.
Chapter 3 deals with preparations for evacuation. One of the main things is how people would offer extremely low amounts of money for the family furniture and possessions, acting like economic vultures.
Chapter 4 deals with life in the camps. The memories make even more real things from other, more "academic" oriented books. One of the memories even revolves around the gradual breakdown of the families as kids ate with their friends rather than their parents. Basically, what this book is doing is putting a personal face on all the more cold facts and figures from other books.
The memories then deal with how people passed their time in the camps including the various arts and crafts and a sort of community pond-building project that happened.
A lot of the people say they had a lot fun, actually, in the camp when they were kids, but at the same time they felt sort of dirty being in the camp. The older kids and the parents had the hardest time adjusting, in general.
There's also personal accounts of various problems in the camp, including the Manzanar riot and the one old guy who was shot and killed while trying to catch his dog.
Chapter 5: The littlest enemies: homeless children. The author notes that anyone who was 1/8th Japanese blood or more was subject to evacuation and relocation. Orphanages had to close down since the orphanage staff were evacuated. There were three orphanages for Japanese children and the children from these three were taken out and shipped to Manzanar. It's also interesting to here what the government did with the orphans when the camps were closed.
Chapter 6: Japanese Peruvians in U.S. prison camps: They were imprisoned not in the internment camps but in camps run by the Justice Department such as at Crystal City, Texas. The Peruvian government made it clear that they didn't want them back, either. Many were deported to Japan; some moved to New Jersey rather than be deported to Japan.
Chapter 7: Nisei Soldiers and the Fight for Democracy Overseas: This discusses the 100th battalion and the 442nd. It also points out that the Nisei helped liberate Dachau, but the fact they did was kept secret by the government and the 522nd FAB (Field Artillery Battalion), which was part of the 442nd, were the ones who liberated the camp.
Chapter 8: Resisters, No-Nos, and Renunciants: A lot of this relates to the infamous loyalty questionnaire that ended up having people classified as "no-no's" and send to Tule Lake Detention Center for what the government considered troublemakers. Over 300 men were tried as draft resisters from the camps for their refusal to report for duty when the government started drafting the people it had put behind barbed wire.
Chapter 9: Life Outside Camp: Most of this chapter deals with what people did after the camps were closed. It was not an easy time for them at all, and the racial hatred at not stopped with the defeat of Japan in the war.
Chapter 10: Setting Things to Rest: One incredibly interesting thing in this chapter is the information on the person called "Tokyo Rose," and that, actually, there was no such person. One woman was arrested, though, the authorities equating her with the "Tokyo Rose" person and she ended up serving prison time in the U.S. The woman who was accused, Iva Toguri, was a dj for a Tokyo radio station. She was an American citizen of Japanese descent who had been trapped in Japan when the war began and had to earn money to survive. The Japanese authorities wanted her to renounce her U.S. citizenship but she refused.
The program in question, Zero Hour, was a propaganda program with Western music added. English-speaking women read scripts written for them. It was directed by three POWs, an Australian male, an American captain, and a Filipino male. After the war reporters bribed witnesses to identify one woman as Tokyo Rose, and Toguri was the one they chose. In 1976 information came out that the two witnesses who testified her had been coached by the government on exactly what to say and threatened that, if they did not cooperate, they would be charged with treason themselves. Toguri eventually got her U.S. citizenship back.
The rest of the chapter talks about court cases and other activities in the redress movement.
The book also includes some more historical information in the ending part.
This is the type of book that can make you made reading it. Reading a straight "just-the-facts-m'am" type of book is bad enough, but when you read the personal accounts of what these people went through it makes it all the more real and all the more upsetting. It was a total denial of Constitutional rights, a total denial of all civil rights, a totally illogical program (for example, the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii would have been closer to Japan physically and should have represented a greater threat, yet they weren't gathered up for economic reasons, and if the Japanese Americans were a threat on the West Coast then, logically, they were a threat anywhere in the U.S. so why didn't the government round up all the Japanese-Americans in the whole country if they were so dangerous?), and a totally unnecessary program. Supposedly some things have changed so such a program could never again be done in the U.S.
Supposedly.
This book is written in a manner where the author interviewed numerous people who had been interned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. She also states out front that the book is more a book of remembrance and not one that deals extensively with historical information and details.
Chapter 1 deals with the times before Pearl Harbor and the type of anti-Japanese hate that was present in California. The personal memories are important, especially in that they verify things written about in other books; how the Japanese-Americans were called Japs, made fun of, prohibited from going certain places, etc,, even before Pearl Harbor. The people were subjected to a lot of prejudice, very similar to that suffered by blacks at the time (and in places still today.)
Chapter 2 deals with the time centered around Pearl Harbor. She talks about the FBI raids and the Hearst press which carried on some of the most vicious anti-Japanese rhetoric of all. A lot of these memories center around how people who were students at the time were treated in school right after Pearl Harbor. Another story is about how one house was shot at.
She also writes about roundups on Hawaii, especially aimed at anyone who was a leader of any Japanese American organization.
Chapter 3 deals with preparations for evacuation. One of the main things is how people would offer extremely low amounts of money for the family furniture and possessions, acting like economic vultures.
Chapter 4 deals with life in the camps. The memories make even more real things from other, more "academic" oriented books. One of the memories even revolves around the gradual breakdown of the families as kids ate with their friends rather than their parents. Basically, what this book is doing is putting a personal face on all the more cold facts and figures from other books.
The memories then deal with how people passed their time in the camps including the various arts and crafts and a sort of community pond-building project that happened.
A lot of the people say they had a lot fun, actually, in the camp when they were kids, but at the same time they felt sort of dirty being in the camp. The older kids and the parents had the hardest time adjusting, in general.
There's also personal accounts of various problems in the camp, including the Manzanar riot and the one old guy who was shot and killed while trying to catch his dog.
Chapter 5: The littlest enemies: homeless children. The author notes that anyone who was 1/8th Japanese blood or more was subject to evacuation and relocation. Orphanages had to close down since the orphanage staff were evacuated. There were three orphanages for Japanese children and the children from these three were taken out and shipped to Manzanar. It's also interesting to here what the government did with the orphans when the camps were closed.
Chapter 6: Japanese Peruvians in U.S. prison camps: They were imprisoned not in the internment camps but in camps run by the Justice Department such as at Crystal City, Texas. The Peruvian government made it clear that they didn't want them back, either. Many were deported to Japan; some moved to New Jersey rather than be deported to Japan.
Chapter 7: Nisei Soldiers and the Fight for Democracy Overseas: This discusses the 100th battalion and the 442nd. It also points out that the Nisei helped liberate Dachau, but the fact they did was kept secret by the government and the 522nd FAB (Field Artillery Battalion), which was part of the 442nd, were the ones who liberated the camp.
Chapter 8: Resisters, No-Nos, and Renunciants: A lot of this relates to the infamous loyalty questionnaire that ended up having people classified as "no-no's" and send to Tule Lake Detention Center for what the government considered troublemakers. Over 300 men were tried as draft resisters from the camps for their refusal to report for duty when the government started drafting the people it had put behind barbed wire.
Chapter 9: Life Outside Camp: Most of this chapter deals with what people did after the camps were closed. It was not an easy time for them at all, and the racial hatred at not stopped with the defeat of Japan in the war.
Chapter 10: Setting Things to Rest: One incredibly interesting thing in this chapter is the information on the person called "Tokyo Rose," and that, actually, there was no such person. One woman was arrested, though, the authorities equating her with the "Tokyo Rose" person and she ended up serving prison time in the U.S. The woman who was accused, Iva Toguri, was a dj for a Tokyo radio station. She was an American citizen of Japanese descent who had been trapped in Japan when the war began and had to earn money to survive. The Japanese authorities wanted her to renounce her U.S. citizenship but she refused.
The program in question, Zero Hour, was a propaganda program with Western music added. English-speaking women read scripts written for them. It was directed by three POWs, an Australian male, an American captain, and a Filipino male. After the war reporters bribed witnesses to identify one woman as Tokyo Rose, and Toguri was the one they chose. In 1976 information came out that the two witnesses who testified her had been coached by the government on exactly what to say and threatened that, if they did not cooperate, they would be charged with treason themselves. Toguri eventually got her U.S. citizenship back.
The rest of the chapter talks about court cases and other activities in the redress movement.
The book also includes some more historical information in the ending part.
This is the type of book that can make you made reading it. Reading a straight "just-the-facts-m'am" type of book is bad enough, but when you read the personal accounts of what these people went through it makes it all the more real and all the more upsetting. It was a total denial of Constitutional rights, a total denial of all civil rights, a totally illogical program (for example, the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii would have been closer to Japan physically and should have represented a greater threat, yet they weren't gathered up for economic reasons, and if the Japanese Americans were a threat on the West Coast then, logically, they were a threat anywhere in the U.S. so why didn't the government round up all the Japanese-Americans in the whole country if they were so dangerous?), and a totally unnecessary program. Supposedly some things have changed so such a program could never again be done in the U.S.
Supposedly.
July 18, 2016
We are proud of our country and love our Constitution, but we have not always honored it as a nation.
During WWII, due to war hysteria and no small measure of racism, our nation that prides itself on freedom and justice denied that freedom to over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, 62% of whom were US citizens. Without due process or even any charges being filed, families were imprisoned and kept in concentration camps, their assets frozen or seized, their loyalty questioned, and on top of all that, young men were drafted into the army from these prison camps to defend the freedom of others.
This is a beautiful and terrible book. It gives us the words of individual people who went through this ordeal as children or young adults, in their own words, with the appropriate amount of additional information to give context. I am amazed by the strength of the people who survived this and fought to get some recognition and reparations, however small and however late.
This book was written in 1992, at a time when I didn't recall my high school textbooks even mentioned that we had imprisoned our own citizens based on ethnicity. I first heard of this as an aside, a small detail mentioned by a teacher one day in the classroom, that there had once been an internment camp for Japanese Americans in southern Utah called Topaz. That was about the extent of what I was taught about this horrible abuse of power by the majority against a small minority who had been deemed by the government to be no real threat.
We are shocked by this now, or I hope others are, but we currently hold prisoners detained without due process and no end in sight. Some are US citizens, others are foreign nationals, but our Constitution says they should have the right to due process under the law either way, and it is being denied them.
Now we have a politician who has become mainstream who has said that the Japanese American internment camps may have been justified and that he would consider a similar option now for Muslims, although he later backtracked. Backpedaling or no, he continues to talk about deportation and immigration and entry bans based on religion.
Out country has not really moved on, we've just changed targets. It really made me cry, reading this book, reading these stories about young people discriminated against for their ethnicity and abused by the government they trusted to protect them. It makes me sadder still to know you can replace the word Japanese with Muslim and see the same thing happening today, with almost identical arguments, and these are sometimes coming from people who are otherwise thoughtful and fairly idealistic.
I picked this book up from the library on a whim, but it is a very important story. I strongly recommend this book, but if you don't read this, please look up "Japanese American internment" in Wikipedia or elsewhere and please consider what we are doing right now. We must not repeat the sins of previous generations.
During WWII, due to war hysteria and no small measure of racism, our nation that prides itself on freedom and justice denied that freedom to over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, 62% of whom were US citizens. Without due process or even any charges being filed, families were imprisoned and kept in concentration camps, their assets frozen or seized, their loyalty questioned, and on top of all that, young men were drafted into the army from these prison camps to defend the freedom of others.
This is a beautiful and terrible book. It gives us the words of individual people who went through this ordeal as children or young adults, in their own words, with the appropriate amount of additional information to give context. I am amazed by the strength of the people who survived this and fought to get some recognition and reparations, however small and however late.
This book was written in 1992, at a time when I didn't recall my high school textbooks even mentioned that we had imprisoned our own citizens based on ethnicity. I first heard of this as an aside, a small detail mentioned by a teacher one day in the classroom, that there had once been an internment camp for Japanese Americans in southern Utah called Topaz. That was about the extent of what I was taught about this horrible abuse of power by the majority against a small minority who had been deemed by the government to be no real threat.
We are shocked by this now, or I hope others are, but we currently hold prisoners detained without due process and no end in sight. Some are US citizens, others are foreign nationals, but our Constitution says they should have the right to due process under the law either way, and it is being denied them.
Now we have a politician who has become mainstream who has said that the Japanese American internment camps may have been justified and that he would consider a similar option now for Muslims, although he later backtracked. Backpedaling or no, he continues to talk about deportation and immigration and entry bans based on religion.
Out country has not really moved on, we've just changed targets. It really made me cry, reading this book, reading these stories about young people discriminated against for their ethnicity and abused by the government they trusted to protect them. It makes me sadder still to know you can replace the word Japanese with Muslim and see the same thing happening today, with almost identical arguments, and these are sometimes coming from people who are otherwise thoughtful and fairly idealistic.
I picked this book up from the library on a whim, but it is a very important story. I strongly recommend this book, but if you don't read this, please look up "Japanese American internment" in Wikipedia or elsewhere and please consider what we are doing right now. We must not repeat the sins of previous generations.
December 17, 2016
“I always walked to school. All the merchants and everybody knew me. Hi, how are you? Monday, the day of Pearl Harbor, they turned their backs on me. There goes that little Jap, they would say. I'm looking around, Who's a Jap? Who's a Jap? Then it dawned on me, I'm the Jap.”A Fence Away From Freedom was a very insightful and humbling book. The book is by Ellen Levine, is 260 pages, and is a Nonfiction book. It is all about the Japanese-Americans and how they were affected in World War II. They were given a certain number of steps allowed in a day, a certain amount of miles(if you had to drive), and their homes were searched regularly. It's about how even though they are citizens of the US, what happened to them and all of the many trials that they had to face. Some of the Japanese-Americans were even put in camps. “The most unpleasant thing at camp was the dust. We had a tin cup and a bowl with milk. A dust storm would blow sometimes for hours, and dust would seep into everything. I would see the dust forming on the milk and I'd try to scoop it away. It got to the point where I said, Aah, just close your mind and say Dust is good for you, and drink it.” I really liked this book, it really describes as helps to visualize how the Japanese-Americans were treated in our Nation. It was not just one person's point of view, but a whole collection of many different people's stories. At some parts in the book, I felt like it just went on and on. But other parts couldn't be long enough. Overall I would give this book a 4 out of 5. I would recommend it to anyone who likes history, or reading real stories about people.
October 19, 2015
Although other books have chronicled the story of Japanese Americans who were rounded up and sent to internment camps, Ms. Levine goes a step further and writes the smallest details about the internees and their experiences from the interviews they granted her.
I appreciated seeing the names of the internees and reading a short biography of each one, and then learning briefly what their lives were like during the war. Of particular interest was the interview with Ben Tagami who served with Sadao Munemori, a postumous Medal of Honor recipient who died in Italy.
The format of the book was excellent. Each chapter had a short overview, then brief details about the interviewee, and short details from the interview.
I appreciated seeing the names of the internees and reading a short biography of each one, and then learning briefly what their lives were like during the war. Of particular interest was the interview with Ben Tagami who served with Sadao Munemori, a postumous Medal of Honor recipient who died in Italy.
The format of the book was excellent. Each chapter had a short overview, then brief details about the interviewee, and short details from the interview.
November 19, 2014
Very compelling account of people who were interred at various "relocation" camps during the racial hysteria during World War II. It is horrifying to realize that these people, just because of their Japanese heritage, even though they were American citizens, were taken from their homes and forced to live behind barbed wire in "camps" far away from their homes.
March 15, 2016
this book was inspiring also this showed the reader the worst mistakes that America made to there own people during world war 2, Also shared the pain they went though because of it, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about what happened to the Japanese Americans in America also to anyone that has to do a report on this time period.
April 17, 2011
The most inspiring story about the greatest american mistake.
October 22, 2013
Our government has perpetrated some weird shit.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews